
DeepL Translator – AI Assistance for Language - floqqi
https://www.deepl.com/translator
======
ekidd
I've read a few million words of French—nothing special, but enough that if a
text gives me trouble, then it's also likely to break Google Translate. Over
the years, I've collected a few example texts which give Google Translate an
especially hard time, and I use those for testing other machine learning
systems.

DeepL performs _significantly_ better on the most difficult texts I've given
it. It's substantially better with colloquial language, and—oddly—nautical
language. It also seems to be much better at tracking relationships between
words in longer sentences. Good work!

~~~
mattschmulen
It's amazing how much nautical language and references contribute to
colloquial phrases. It may be just the company I keep but I find it
consistently comes up in French.

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ashwin67
Impressive! David vs Goliath! Google thought Angela Merkel was a "He". And
DeepL not just translated correctly, it also gave a really concise text.
Following text from "Der Spiegel".

Original: Angela Merkel hat sich gegen Vorwürfe gewehrt, dass es dem
Bundestagswahlkampf an Spannung fehle.

Google translate: Angela Merkel has reproached himself against allegations
that the Bundestag election campaign is lacking in tension.

DeepL: Angela Merkel resisted accusations that the Bundestag election campaign
lacked tension.

~~~
yorwba
DeepL back to German: Angela Merkel widersetzte sich dem Vorwurf, der
Bundestagswahlkampf sei spannungsarm.

English again: Angela Merkel opposed the accusation that the election campaign
in the Bundestag was not tense.

German: Angela Merkel wandte sich gegen den Vorwurf, der Wahlkampf im
Bundestag sei nicht gespannt.

English: Angela Merkel objected to the accusation that the election campaign
in the Bundestag was not tense.

German: Angela Merkel wandte sich gegen den Vorwurf ein, der Wahlkampf im
Bundestag sei nicht angespannt.

This is a fixed point (the translations no longer change).

The quality and stability of the translations is impressive, but the final
German is a bit off, it seems to be confused between "objected to [something
objectionable]" and "objected that [some counterargument]", mixing both in the
same sentence.

EDIT: I tried going through all languages,
German->English->French->Spanish->Italian->Dutch->Polish->..., after a few
iterations, it settled on "Merkel wendet sich gegen die Vorwuerfe, der
Bundestagswahlkampf sei nicht gespannt." (Merkel is opposed to accusations
that the Bundestag election campaign is not tense.)

Things that got lost in translation: Merkel's first name and the past tense
(EDIT: and the subtle distinction between "not lacking tension" and "being
tense"). The pluralization of accusation(s) seems to change based on the
language. Really quite impressive to maintain the meaning over so many steps.

~~~
posterboy
In my mind, the translation is an improvement over the original. For one,
summaries are to be written using the present tense. Secondly, there is no
technical difference between Spannung and Anspunnung that maatered, and
Anspannung is the more technical term whereas Spannung suggests government
elections were some form of entertainment.

And by the way. It's impressive^W^W Its impressive handling of the abomination
that is "dass es" and similar constructions is pretty impressive (see what I
did there?). In that sense, I'm surprised the reflexive form was recovered in
the German.

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sarabande
Some background: DeepL is the new name of Linguee, a great online dictionary
by German founder Gereon Frahling, who was an ex-Google employee. Here's an
early interview with him that you can run through DeepL to translate:
[https://www.gruenderszene.de/allgemein/linguee-gereon-
frahli...](https://www.gruenderszene.de/allgemein/linguee-gereon-frahling-
startup-helden)

------
Grue3
"Fruit flies like an arrow"

Google: La fruta vuela como una flecha.

DeepL: La fruta vuela como una flecha.

"Fruit flies like bananas".

Google: La fruta vuela como plátanos.

DeepL: Las moscas de la fruta son como los plátanos.

~~~
mbroncano
It's remarkly better than Google's, and possibly the best out there I've tried
so far.

Even so, the correct translation for the second sentence would be one of
"Moscas de la fruta como plátanos" or most probably "A las moscas de la fruta
les gustan los platanos" instead, the ambiguity is due to like being either a
verb or adverb.

Way to go guys!

~~~
lottin
There's no ambiguity in the second sentence. The translation is simply wrong.

~~~
dibujante
No, there is ambiguity.

"I saw some weird fruit flies." "What were they like?" "They were like
bananas." "Fruit flies like bananas?" "Yeah, they were implausibly yellow and
banana-shaped."

~~~
posterboy
The tricky part is the _zero relative pronoun_ in your construction that could
be confused for a highly irregular-verb-like use of _like_. You wouldn't say
either of "he like(s) (a) banana" in standard english, unless taking Influence
from creole perhaps. Another source of confusion to me is the difference of
uncountability, generic nouns etc. The whole thing would work without the
interjection in "fruit fly bananas" or vice versa, from "banana-like fruit
fly".

~~~
dibujante
TIL about zero relative pronouns, despite using them all the time and
wondering about why we can elide them in English but not reliably in many
other languages, e.g. "The car ( _optional_ that) I bought" vs. "El coche (
_required_ que) compré".

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dpq
It probably does well when translating general human speech, but I was rather
interested in its performance on a paragraph of a scientific text (it being a
much more challenging task, obviously).

* "The impact of the solar wind protons on the surface of Mercury" became "Der Einfluss der solaren Windprotonen auf die Oberfläche von Quecksilber". Note that 'solar wind protons' should have been translated as 'Sonnenwindprotonen' instead, i.e. the word 'solar' was to be a part of the noun's modifier, but it was pushed out.

* The lack of domain-specific training is especially obvious with the case of the planet's name being translated as "Quecksilber" instead of "Merkur" (Quecksilber being the name of the metal).

* "pure northward interplanetary magnetic field (IMF)" became "reines interplanetares interplanetares Magnetfeld nach Norden (IWF)". Aside from this being a poor translation, it's worth noting that DeepL didn't properly process the introduction of an abbreviation (IWF being the abbrev. for the International Monetary Fund in German).

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ma2rten
I tried it and I was fully expecting DeepL to fare much worse than Google
Translate. I was wrong. It's great to see that a small company can go head to
head with Google.

By the way, most machine translation models are trained on news data. Try some
out of domain data like tweets or other social media comments, if you want to
put it to the test.

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visarga
Besides translation quality, I think the ability to change words in the target
language is neat - could be a useful way to do assisted translation. These
guys are interesting.

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justanotherme
According to German and Italian Tech News, the translations produced by the
neural network are better than Google Translate and Microsoft Translator:

[https://www.golem.de/news/deepl-im-hands-on-neues-tool-
ueber...](https://www.golem.de/news/deepl-im-hands-on-neues-tool-uebersetzt-
viel-besser-als-google-und-microsoft-1708-129715.html)

[http://www.lastampa.it/2017/08/29/tecnologia/news/deepl-
trad...](http://www.lastampa.it/2017/08/29/tecnologia/news/deepl-traduttore-
dalla-germania-unalternativa-a-google-translate-
uHXifbhlSKzsB5uN8LYknO/pagina.html)

~~~
gabeytani
Just tried with the golem.de article:

Google Translate:

> Better than Google and Microsoft - the German company DeepL is committed to
> translation services. DeepL uses a novel architecture of neural networks and
> uses a supercomputer with 5.1 petaflops. By the same company, the service
> comes Linguee who has already made with translations of individual words or
> phrases a name. Texts translated by humans are used for translations in
> order to provide better results.

DeepL:

> Better than Google and Microsoft - this is the goal that DeepL, a German
> company, has set itself, at least for translation services. DeepL uses a
> novel architecture of neural networks and relies on a supercomputer with 5.1
> petaflops. The Linguee service, which has already made a name for itself
> with translations of individual words or groups of words, comes from the
> same company. In doing so, human-translated texts are used for translations
> in order to deliver better results.

I think the DeepL version makes more sense here, but I am not a German reader
so I might be off.

~~~
supermdguy
Deepl is much better than Google translate. I could almost imagine reading its
translation, and not noticing anything.

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duwip
Incredibly impressive... Definitely better than Google Translate, and taking
the spot for my default machine translation engine. Great job!

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mk89
I tried it on a few paragraphs and it's absolutely impressive, much better
than Google Translate.

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wibr
I tried it with a German poem (Erlkönig) and it seems like Shakespeare is in
the training data... at least it's not regular English:

"And if thou wilt not, I shall need violence."

~~~
skykooler
That said, in some ways Goethe was the Shakespeare of German, so it's not
unreasonable for it to use a slightly archaic style.

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wodenokoto
Don't write "Translate from any language" if you only support 7 languages.

~~~
futhey
Their previous product supports 25 languages. I curiously expect this list
will expand.

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andrew3726
> Specific details of our network architecture will not be published at this
> time. DeepL Translator is based on a single, non-ensemble model.

Kinda sad to hear, but completely understandable. I'm curious whether the
difference in performance is due to their model specifics or just better
training data.

Does anyone have more information?

~~~
badestrand
They have the perfect training data as this is a Linguee venture
([https://www.linguee.com/](https://www.linguee.com/)). They have millions of
translations of paragraphs from one language to another.

I have no information on the model, unfortunately.

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emredjan
Impressive work. The quality of training data can make all the difference, and
it really shows here.

------
abecedarius
Surprisingly good on Jabberwocky, though my French is too weak to really
judge:

"Twas Brillig, et les fentes fendues tournoyaient et gimblaient dans l'épée.
Tous les mimsy étaient des borogoves, et les mome raths dépassaient les
ragots.

Méfie-toi du Jabberwock, mon fils! Les mâchoires qui mordent, les griffes qui
attrapent. Et'ware l'oiseau Jubjub, et fuyez le bandersnatch frumieux.

It's curious that it didn't understand "'twas" for the French translation, but
apparently did for the German one. (My German is almost nonexistent, though.)

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jsnathan
On a slight tangent, are there any fully-trained ready-to-work state-of-the-
art open source distributions of translation systems available?

I've never been able to find one, but maybe I just haven't looked hard enough.

~~~
ma2rten
Not that I know of, but the source code is available to train a Transformer
model in a single day.

[https://github.com/tensorflow/tensor2tensor#walkthrough](https://github.com/tensorflow/tensor2tensor#walkthrough)

~~~
visarga
I think Mozilla and Safari should be interested in having local translation
for better privacy and speed.

~~~
ma2rten
I should have mentioned, it's state-of-the-art on open datasets. It's not
comparable with DeepL or Google Translate which have their own proprietary
datasets. Also, Translation models are very big (gigabytes).

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homarp
"The translations are really accurate in context and sound very natural,
noticeably more than Google Translate or Microsoft translator..." gets the
"sound" wrongly translated to French (et son) but correct in Spanish (y suenan
...)

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KennyCason
I probably should have checked the drop down of supported languages before
typing Japanese. :) I was a bit shocked at first when it was classified as
German and then French.

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alexcaps
I tried a number of simple Italian words and I kept thinking it was German and
getting it wrong. I even tried "hola" and it couldn't get it.

~~~
rerx
The automatic language detection works much better if you give it a few words.

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federicodalmaso
English to Italian is impressive. But Google Translate is a little bit better.
I compare them using some CNN news.

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dchuk
Does this (or will this) have an API?

~~~
rerx
"DeepL also intends to release an API in the coming months, allowing its
superior translations to enhance other products such as digital assistants,
dictionaries, language learning apps, and professional translation programs."
from [https://www.deepl.com/press.html](https://www.deepl.com/press.html)

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dash2
Good, but not perfect:

Über allen Gipfeln

Ist Ruh,

\---

Above all summits

Is Roo,

~~~
yorwba
"Ruh" is the German name for Roo from the Winnie-the-Pooh stories (Kanga & Roo
→ Kängu & Ruh), so I guess someone gave the network some A. A. Milne to read.

I wonder if you could find more artifacts like this to find the training data
they used.

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ferdi_
impressive

