Well known to business travellers for the quality of its services, Linguee is entering a new era. On 29 August, its creators announced the launch of a new tool for machine translation DeepL Translator. An ambitious launch, if the press release is anything to go by. a service of unrivalled quality ", " a real breakthrough in machine translation ".
The German company intends to make all its competitors - especially Google Translate - look obsolete. " Despite the resources and financial resources invested in the development of neural networks, the major Internet companies are now outstripped by DeepL and its machine translation service. "it says. With figures to back it up, DeepL boasts results that are almost three times better than other online solutions, in this case Google TranslateMicrosoft Translator and Facebook. It should be noted that the translation from French to English is the least convincing example for the moment, but still outperforms the competition.
The secret DeepL: a 'supercomputer
To achieve this, DeepL will be using a "supercomputer" based in Iceland, whose performance will rank it as "the most powerful supercomputer in the world". 23rd place in the list of the 500 most powerful supercomputers in the world "says the press release. Specifically, the company is talking about " the computing power to translate 1 million words in less than a second" .
For the time being, DeepL assumes its European vocation with a catalogue of seven languages - French, English, German, Spanish, Italian, Polish and Dutch - offering 42 translation combinations. But the machine is already working on Mandarin, Japanese and Russianand its designers are thinking even further ahead: an application programming interface (API) should be launched in the coming months, with a view to improving other products such as digital assistants, dictionaries and language learning applications. Gereon Frahling, the company's founder and CEO, even warns: "DeepL does not intend to limit itself to translation. Our neural networks have developed a level of text comprehension that opens up a number of very interesting possibilities ". Sounds promising.
