DeepL Translator adds Japanese and Chinese

Cologne, Germany, March 19th, 2020

Germany’s top AI company, DeepL, is proud to now provide machine translation for two of the most highly-anticipated and in-demand languages: Japanese and Chinese.

In Europe and the Americas, DeepL is already known as the world’s best AI translation company. Now, following a long period of intensive research, the company has added two of Asia’s most-spoken languages, with quality exceeding other machine translation systems. “China and Japan are two of the most economically and culturally important countries, so this has been an important goal for us for a long time,” said DeepL CEO Jaroslaw Kutylowski. “Now that our systems produce Chinese and Japanese translations that live up to our standards, we have reached an important milestone in our quest to bring people around the world closer together.”

As always, to ensure the highest quality, DeepL blind-tested their new systems: Japanese and Chinese translators were presented with anonymized translations from DeepL and competitors such as Google, Microsoft, and Chinese giants Baidu and Youdao, and were asked to select the best results. DeepL once again came out on top in all language combinations.

Achieving high levels of accuracy and natural-sounding Chinese and Japanese translations proved to be an exciting challenge for DeepL’s researchers. On the back of early 2020’s advances in the company’s neural network architecture, the team of mathematicians and computer engineers trained new algorithms on millions of translated texts and sought the insights of DeepL’s Chinese and Japanese language experts to optimize performance.

The result is translation AI familiar with several thousand Chinese characters and Japanese kanji, hiragana, and katakana, and able to recognize the context in which words and phrases occur. DeepL’s systems capture linguistic nuances to produce natural-sounding translations using language relevant to a specific field, such as legal or medical terminology.

Translation to and from Japanese and Chinese is now available free of charge on DeepL.com. The addition of these two languages brings the total number of translation combinations available on DeepL Translator to 110, and expands DeepL’s language coverage to more than 1 billion potential new users.

About DeepL

DeepL is a German company that has set itself the goal of eliminating language barriers worldwide through the use of artificial intelligence. Since 2017, it has provided DeepL Translator, a machine translation system that, according to blind tests, achieves the world's best translation quality, on www.DeepL.com. It also provides professional products for companies, organizations, and translators. 

The exceptional quality of DeepL's machine translation services is based on proprietary improvements that the team has achieved in neural network mathematics and methodology.

The company is led by CEO and founder Jaroslaw Kutylowski and supported by world-renowned investors such as Benchmark and b2venture.