Cologne-based translation startup DeepL is worth a billion dollars (German)

https://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/web/deepl-koelner-uebersetzungs-start-up-ist-eine-milliarde-dollar-wert-einhorn-status-a-6c4a6e52-6fb0-4cfb-b8c3-c4058ab2f5ca

by doener • 4 years ago

49 34 4 years ago

spiegel.de

doener• 4 years ago

Automatic translation of the article with DeepL:

"Unicorn" status

Cologne-based translation start-up DeepL is worth a billion dollars

A German platform has been competing with Google Translate for some time. Now the young company has closed a new round of financing and is considered the first "unicorn" from Cologne.

The Cologne-based online translation service DeepL is valued at one billion dollars (960 million euros) after a new round of financing. This was reported on Thursday by the "Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger", citing information from the company environment. DeepL is thus considered the first "unicorn" from the cathedral city.

The backers of the financing round include U.S. investors IVP and Bessemer, as well as the European venture capitalist Atomico, as "Business Insider" had initially reported. It initially remained unclear how many shares the firms would take. DeepL did not respond to an inquiry by Thursday afternoon. A "unicorn" is the term used to describe startups with a market valuation of more than one billion US dollars.

DeepL launched in Cologne in 2017 and now employs around 400 people. The website deepl.com with its translation service is one of the hundred most frequently accessed sites worldwide. DeepL says it has achieved exceptional machine translation quality with improvements in neural network mathematics and methodology, and is up to six times more accurate than other providers.

In independent tests, DeepL also outperformed established providers such as Google Translate. However, Google supports 133 languages, DeepL only 29. DeepL translates up to 5,000 characters and up to three documents per month free of charge - a subscription is required for unlimited and additional features.

DoingIsLearning3• 4 years ago

German platform has been competing with Google Translate for some time.

Competing is an understatement, for all the (European) languages I have used, Deepl is the closest to native I have ever seen. Been using them since the pandemic and pretty happy with it.

Not sure what they are doing under the hood but they are not competing they are eating google's lunch in the translation domain.

wartijn_• 4 years ago

Automatic translation of the article with Google Translate:

"Unicorn" status

Cologne-based translation start-up DeepL is worth a billion dollars

A German platform has been competing with Google Translate for some time. The young company has now completed a new round of financing and is regarded as the first "unicorn" from Cologne.

The online translation service DeepL from Cologne is valued at one billion dollars (960 million euros) after a new round of financing. This was reported on Thursday by the “Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger”, citing information from the company environment. DeepL is thus the first "unicorn" from the cathedral city.

The financiers of the financing round include the US investors IVP and Bessemer and the European venture capitalist Atomico, as "Business Insider" initially reported. It was initially unclear how many shares the companies would take over. DeepL did not respond to a request as of Thursday afternoon. A »unicorn« is a term used to describe start-ups with a market valuation of more than one billion US dollars.

DeepL started in Cologne in 2017 and now employs around 400 people. The website deepl.com with the translation service is one of the hundred most visited sites worldwide. DeepL says it has achieved exceptional machine translation quality with improvements in neural network mathematics and methodology, and is up to six times more accurate than other providers.

Even in independent tests, DeepL overshadowed established providers such as Google Translate. However, Google supports 133 languages, DeepL only 29. DeepL translates up to 5,000 characters and up to three documents per month for free - unlimited and other features require a subscription.

Sakos• 4 years ago

My god, I live in the same city and I'd love to work there. Unfortunately, they've only been hiring senior engineers for years now and I'm not at that level yet. Maybe someday.

ChuckNorris89• 4 years ago

I guess they're not flush with cash. From what I noticed most small German/EU companies developing complex SW projects like this, that aren't backed by well funded VC funds, don't bother with hiring dozens of juniors like other unicorns usually do since they don't have the money. They prefer to wait and only hire the "perfect candidate", usually experienced seniors withe the right skills willing to work for the salaries they can offer, which usually aren't much.

I also have a DeepL competitor in my EU country and their hiring practices are similar, rarely hiring, and mostly senior devs and ML PHD grads from the local university. And they're not paying insane salaries either, which probably explains why they hire so rarely. It doesn't help that up until recently Meta and Google were sucking away all the local ML talent to their offices in US/London/Zurich for n times the local ML wages.

DepL is probably in a business that's difficult to monetize successfully because:

1) it's just difficult to successfully polish and scale up products of big-tech complexity when you don't have big-tech money.

2) many situations still require translations be done by a certified professional (educational, legal, immigration, documents, contracts, medical records, etc)

3) for the casual use case of tourist/travels, Google's point the camera at things and get the translation, is something DeepL is missing, and those consumers are unlikely to pay any subscription fees when Google does it for "free" anyway

4) human certified translators are still relatively cheap in the EU due to the oversupply of grads in this domain (their wages are trash most of the times) so there's no economic market pressure to automate humans out of this job

5) It's rare, but sometimes DeepL still makes pretty big mistakes, making it unusable for professional scenarios without humans proofing the final result (once, it translated the German word "Post" from a sentence to "the German post office" in English, even though the text was about the Austrian post office lol. I guess it's because their models were trained on texts from Germany mostly so "Post" in German texts must always be "the German post office" to them even though German is officially used in ~5 countries. Or sometimes DeepL emits several words from a sentence changing the meaning completely, etc.)

The company I work for has the webpage UI in nearly a dozen languages, and all translations are done by professional humans, because despite DeepL being the best, it's not always perfect, and no company will risk its reputation by having translation mistakes on its home page.

indigo9452• 4 years ago

Software engineering salaries are just very low in Europe in general, when compared to the US. A junior in a major city in the US with a Bachelor's degree and no relevant job experience will make more than a senior with 10+ years of experience in Germany.

I'm not exaggerating: Kununu.com has €86,000 p.a. as the top-end for a "realistic" software engineering wage in Germany, glassdoor.com lists $84,000 p.a. as the low end for their "most likely" range.

rurban• 4 years ago

Not only seniors. Just python and go experts. https://jobs.deepl.com/

nix23• 4 years ago

Good! It's the only good (really good...) translation engine, and hey google don't even think about to buy it, everything good get's bad over time in your hands.

tomschwiha2• 4 years ago

GPT-3 is from my experience better. I use both regulary however.

conaclos• 4 years ago

I replaced Google Translate with DeepL a year ago in my goal of de-googling my life. I am very happy with the quality of the provided translation.

DoingIsLearning3• 4 years ago

Same, the only feature I really miss is to be able to take a picture of text and translate that, specially when traveling..

Youden2• 4 years ago

It has a basic text recognition feature on iOS but I think it uses the iOS APIs so I'm not sure if they have a similar feature on Android.

ekidd• 4 years ago

Several years ago, I tried some side-by-side tests of DeepL and Google Translate. The challenge was to take idiomatic humor from French websites and translate it to English.

DeepL did a great job. It dealt with slang, informal grammar, and sudden shifts between formal and informal writing. It made some mistakes, but most of the jokes were still funny.

Google Translate produced near-incoherent gibberish for tougher passages.

DeepL was genuinely good for English/French. I can't speak to other language pairs.

mahathu• 4 years ago

I had very similar results with German<->English. DeepL was extremely good at translating subtleties between the languages and maintaining tone and context. Turkish<->German is a lot more difficult apparently, but the sentences often come out in a way you might theoretically say and understand, but you would never use in spoken language or in writing. Might be because the languages are very different and also culturally influenced, or maybe the training corpus is just way smaller.

Aachen2• 4 years ago

Similar in German. Not sure I tried side by side comparisons with Dutch but I didn't notice those being worse either.

What it (or rather, I) struggle with is single word translations. Instead of coming up with a number of options, it'll just give you one possible translation—the obvious one that you weren't looking for. On desktop you can then click on the word but those suggestions are.... let's say AI-like. Not necessarily wrong, but not like a proper enumeration of options like you'd get from a translation dictionary. I then try to give it context, but still it sometimes just insists on giving you the word you don't want and you need to look for a different translator. (For German–English there is dict.cc, but for Dutch or other languages I often end up doing a regular web search.)

bionade24• 4 years ago

Deepl does offer https://linguee.de for single-word translations, explanation & contexts. Not sure why the link to it on the Deepl page is gone now.

mc32• 4 years ago

Does it translate pop music lyrics well? Google comes out too literal in its translations.

Bayart• 4 years ago

I've used DeepL for Chinese recently, I used to use Systran, and it's really good, although it tends to bug out on gendering personal pronouns.

This being said Google Translation got much better recently.

Note that if you want to see DeepL in use with a variety of languages, you can check the /r/europe subreddit. It's commonly used to translate national language articles into English.

null_object• 4 years ago

DeepL was genuinely good for English/French. I can't speak to other language pairs.

I use it whenever I need to write any long-form English->Swedish - it simply cuts out the labor of thinking about grammar and spelling, and even handles idiomatic phrases perfectly. Also works perfectly in the other direction.

Also great with English->Spanish and the reverse.

I even used it to translate some official documents from Spanish into both English and Swedish for the tax authorities in both countries - no-one thought the translated documents seemed unprofessional, in any way, or questioned any of the complex legal terminology.

I barely try Google translate anymore. A couple of times when I've thought the DeepL translation was slightly 'off', I've tried Google and the result is usually comical garbage.

flashgordon• 4 years ago

Ah the real test here I am afraid to say is how beautifully it can translate Asterix comics!! I read the entire set time to time every couple of years and I never cease to be amazed! Asterix fans must be crazy!

mr_mitm• 4 years ago

DeepL might not (yet) be as good as a good professional human translator, but I'd say it's already better than the average professional human translator. We have a contractor who translates technical texts from German to English and DeepL makes less mistakes and even gets some industry-specific terms right, whereas the human translator with no domain knowledge may correctly translate the term, but chooses a different one that immediately sticks out like sore thumb to anyone who works in the field. I'd rather give a text to DeepL and fix a few things than give it to contractor and still have to fix a few things.

Aldipower• 4 years ago

I use DeepL on a daily base to translate German into English. I write longer German texts every second day. As I could write them probably myself in English too, DeepL just saves me a lot of time and eliminates double work!

nerdraven_• 4 years ago

We'll, Google built the playing though

tomschwiha2• 4 years ago

For my use GPT-3 beats Deepl in translation quality by miles.

spyremeown• 4 years ago

DeepL is insane. The "literature" department of the company that I work for uses it all the time to translate German to English and I can't barely tell that I'm reading a machine-translated text. It captures nuances and all, even on hardcore Mechanical Engineering texts.

Kudos to the DeepL guys, I'm near Cologne, would love to pay them a visit.

propogandist• 4 years ago

DeepL was great. They need to find their niche to compete with Google and others.

I hope they go after the enterprise translation market — too many websites rely on Google Translate, especially government websites.

sm4sh• 4 years ago

Have a few friends who work there. But they have no needs for a subpar php backend developer :(

Youden2• 4 years ago

As others have pointed out, the quality of the translations is fantastic but I also really appreciate some of the features it has.

For example as a paid feature it allows you to switch between formal and informal speech, which can be really important in some languages/cultures.

Another is that it can translate PDFs while preserving formatting. Not perfectly but pretty damn good.

Yet another is that you can click on specific words and get more specific definitions of them, like a dictionary entry. This can be really useful if the translation seems ambiguous and you're wondering which sense of the word is being used.

They also have another product, Linguee, which is a multilingual dictionary. It's really good and usefully, contains real-world examples with their (human) translations.

Cologne-based translation startup DeepL is worth a billion dollars (German)

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