Is it also the superior product? It depends on your use-case. I always prefer it over Google Translate since it is much more accurate and keeps the overall accuracy and tone for longer texts, which Translate does not.
🌟 Precision & Natural Flow
DeepL’s AI excels in delivering translations that sound like they were written by a human. It captures idioms, tone, and context beautifully, especially in languages like German, French, or Spanish. Google often translates word-for-word, leading to clunky or literal results.
📚 Context Matters
DeepL allows you to highlight specific words for alternative translations, making it perfect for refining technical, creative, or formal texts. Google’s one-size-fits-all approach struggles with subtle differences in meaning.
🔒 Privacy Focus
DeepL prioritizes user privacy by anonymizing data and avoiding ad-targeting practices. Since the company behind it, DeepL SE, is based in Germany, it also profits from higher privacy from an ideology perspective (we germans love keeping our data safe & private). Google, while improving, still ties translations to user accounts for broader data collection.
💡 Extra Features
From customizable formality levels (e.g., formal vs. informal English) to seamless document translation, DeepL offers tools that cater to professionals and casual users alike.
✍️ DeepL Write Aren‘t the best writer? DeepL Write can help you paraphrase your own sentences and make them more structured, friendly or professional. Try it for your next work Email!
TL;DR: Google is faster and offers more languages. But for quality, nuance, and privacy, DeepL is unmatched. By using it, you also help an european company train their models instead of Googles. Give it a try, you will not be disappointed!
As much as I’d like this to be true, I have to disagree. Perhaps the quality of the translation depends on the language you translate from / to, but the results I got for my native language ranged from not very good to absolute rubbish.
What’s even more frustrating is that there’s no (easy) way for me to report such bad results so the developers could fix them. :/
Out of curiosity may I ask what language? It’s been incredible for such a small language as Finnish.
Hungarian. I’ve just tested it again, but I’m still not happy with the results.
Also, it always seems to suggest the word you’re translating in the “Alternatives” section for some reason. So, for instance, if I translate “moron” or “baffling”, DeepL thinks “moron” and “baffling” are valid alternatives. They’re not, these are neither Hungarian words nor English ones that a Hungarian would use.
It is really bad for single words - for single words a dictionary is way better (I use https://www.dict.cc/). DeepL’s amazingness comes from it understanding context better and that’s what sets it really apart from Google (which has like no understanding of context sometimes and doesn’t even offer proper alternatives)
I tried it out and wrote a longer sentence and it didn’t seem to have the same problem with the word “moron”. But! I don’t know Hungarian so I can’t really say and I believe when you say it is not good… I’m sorry to hear it isn’t a feasible alternative for Hungarian… Hope a better one pops out or DeepL enhances Hungarian :/
Thanks for your suggestion regarding single words. I’ve tried dict.cc it with “baffling”, “egregious” but no translations were found… :)
I’ve also just tried translating sentences with DeepL and the results were OK, so it looks like you’re right, it’s more for translating text instead of just words.
Now, what’s even more interesting is that when translating “moron” on the webpage using a mobile browser, it shows “moron” as an alternative, but when using a desktop browser it doesn’t. If I translate “confused”, I get different suggestions for alternatives… 🤨
Screenshots: Mobile - https://postimg.cc/rRpMgzZf and Desktop - https://postimg.cc/CzXSHhG4
Ah that’s a bummer… I hope you find a better dictionary! I use it often for German myself and haven’t tried many other languages :(
I’m glad to hear the text translation works! We don’t really have many EU alternatives to proper translations, so anything is helpful!
Seems like DeepL is itself confused ;) No idea why that is so… Also you had a good question earlier: where to go to give feedback? I became curious and went to look and you are right, there doesn’t seem to be an obvious way to give feedback. Guess I should contact them about this. I use DeepL a lot myself and this would be a useful feature to have in case I need it.