Tech giants Google, Microsoft and Facebook are all applying the lessons of machine learning to translation, but a small company called DeepL has outdone them all and raised the bar for the field.
Its translation tool is just as quick as the outsized competition, but more accurate and nuanced than any we’ve tried.

DeepL has also outperformed other services, thanks to more "French-sounding" expressions.

Even though the translations from English by Google and Microsoft are quite good, DeepL still surpasses them. We have translated a report from a French daily newspaper - the DeepL result was perfect.

A quick test carried out for the combination English-Italian and vice versa, even without any statistical pretensions, allowed us to confirm that the quality of the translation is really good. Especially from Italian into English.

The system recognizes the language quickly and automatically, converting the words into the language you want and trying to add the particular linguistic nuances and expressions.

Indeed, a few tests show that DeepL Translator offers better translations than Google Translate when it comes to Dutch to English and vice versa.

In the first test - from English into Italian - it proved to be very accurate, especially good at grasping the meaning of the sentence, rather than being derailed by a literal translation.

Personally, I'm very impressed by what DeepL is able to do and yes, I think it's really great that this new stage in the evolution of machine translation was not achieved with software from Facebook, Microsoft, Apple or Google, but by a German company. We like to make ourselves a little bit small and pretend that there is no one in this country who can stand up to the big players. DeepL is a good example that it is possible.

DeepL from Germany could surpass Google Translate
WIRED's quick test shows that DeepL's results are indeed in no way inferior to those of the high-ranking competitors and, in many cases, even surpass them. The translated texts often read much more fluently; where Google Translate forms completely meaningless word chains, DeepL can at least guess a connection.

DeepL, an online translator that outperforms Google, Microsoft and Facebook