DeepL Translator
Multilingual neural machine translation service
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
DeepL is a German AI research company known for its language AI platform, which includes DeepL Translator and DeepL Voice, and for DeepL Agent, an AI agent capable of planning workflows and using office systems and tools autonomously, in response to natural language instructions. Its algorithm uses the transformer architecture.[1] It offers a paid subscription for additional features and access to its translation application programming interface.[2] DeepL was founded in 2017 by Jaroslaw Kutylowski and is a unicorn, valued at $2 billion after a Series C funding round raised $300 million in May 2024.[3] Its more than 200,000 business customers include a large proportion of the Fortune 500.
 | |
Type of site | Neural machine translation |
|---|---|
| Available in | 120 languages |
| Headquarters | Cologne, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany |
| Owner | DeepL SE |
| Key people | Jarosław Kutyłowski |
| URL | deepl |
| Commercial | Yes |
| Registration | Optional |
| Launched | 28 August 2017 |
| Current status | Active |
History
The translating system was first developed within Linguee by a team led by Chief Technology Officer Jarosław Kutyłowski in 2016. It was launched as DeepL Translator on 28 August 2017 and offered translations between English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Polish and Dutch.[4][5][6][7] At its launch, it claimed to have surpassed its competitors in blind tests and BLEU scores, including Google Translate, Amazon Translate, Microsoft Translator and Facebook's translation feature.[8][9][10][11][12][13] With the release of DeepL in 2017, Linguee's company name was changed to DeepL GmbH,[14] and it is also financed by advertising on its sister site, linguee.com.[15] Support for Portuguese and Russian was added on December 5th, 2018.[16] In July 2019, Jarosław Kutyłowski became the CEO of DeepL GmbH and restructured the company into a Societas Europaea in 2021.[17] Translation software for Microsoft Windows and macOS was released in September 2019.[18] Support for Chinese (simplified) and Japanese was added on 19 March 2020, which the company claimed to have surpassed the aforementioned competitors as well as Baidu and Youdao.[19][20] Then, 13 more European languages were added in March 2021: Bulgarian, Czech, Danish, Estonian, Finnish, Greek, Hungarian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Romanian, Slovak, Slovenian, and Swedish, bringing the total number of supported languages to 24.[21] On 25 May 2022, support for Indonesian and Turkish was added,[22] and support for Ukrainian was added on 14 September 2022.[23] In January 2023, the company reached a valuation of 1 billion euro and became the most valued startup company in Cologne.[24] At the end of the month, support for Korean and Norwegian (Bokmål) was also added.[25] In May 2024, the company announced an investment of US$300 million at AI.[26] In January 2026, more languages were supported, including Luxembourgish and Irish.[27][citation needed]
Services
Translation method
The service uses a proprietary algorithm with convolutional neural networks (CNNs)[28] that have been trained with the Linguee database.[29][30] According to the developers, the service uses a newer improved architecture of neural networks, resulting in a more natural sound of translations than by competing services.[30] The translation is generated using a supercomputer that reaches 5.1 petaflops and is operated in Iceland with hydropower.[31][7] DeepL's data centers are located at the EcoDataCenter in Falun, Sweden, which is a data center for sustainability.[32] In general, CNNs are slightly more suitable for long coherent word sequences, but they have so far not been used by the competition because of their weaknesses compared to recurrent neural networks. The weaknesses of DeepL are compensated for by supplemental techniques, some of which are publicly known.[28][33][34]
Translator and subscription
The translator can be used for free with a maximum limit of 1,500 characters per translation. Microsoft Word and PowerPoint files in Office Open XML file formats (.docx and .pptx) and PDF files up to 5MB in size can also be translated.[35] It offers paid subscription DeepL Pro, which has been available since March 2018 and includes application programming interface access and a software plug-in for computer-assisted translation tools, including SDL Trados Studio.[36] Unlike the free version, translated texts are stated to not be saved on the server; also, the character limit is removed.[18] The monthly pricing model includes a set amount of text, with texts beyond that being calculated according to the number of characters.[37]
Supported languages
As of July 2026[update], the translation service supports the following languages:[38][39][40]
- Acehnese
- Afrikaans
- Albanian
- Arabic
- Aragonese
- Armenian
- Assamese
- Aymara
- Azerbaijani
- Bashkir
- Basque
- Belarusian
- Bengali
- Bhojpuri
- Bosnian
- Breton
- Bulgarian
- Burmese
- Cantonese
- Catalan
- Cebuano
- Chinese (simplified and traditional)
- Croatian
- Czech
- Danish
- Dari
- Dutch
- English (American and British)
- Esperanto
- Estonian
- Finnish
- French (Canadian and France)
- Galician
- Georgian
- German (Germany and Swiss)
- Greek
- Guarani
- Gujarati
- Haitian Creole
- Hausa
- Hebrew
- Hindi
- Hungarian
- Icelandic
- Igbo
- Indonesian[22]
- Irish
- Italian
- Japanese
- Javanese
- Kapampangan
- Kazakh
- Konkani
- Korean
- Kurdish (Kurmanji)
- Kurdish (Sorani)
- Kyrgyz
- Latin
- Latvian
- Lingala
- Lithuanian
- Lombard
- Luxembourgish
- Macedonian
- Maithili
- Malagasy
- Malay
- Malayalam
- Maltese
- Maori
- Marathi
- Mongolian
- Nepali
- Norwegian Bokmål
- Occitan
- Oromo
- Pangasinan
- Pashto
- Persian
- Polish
- Portuguese (Brazilian and European)
- Punjabi
- Quechua
- Romanian
- Russian
- Sanskrit
- Serbian
- Sesotho
- Sicilian
- Slovak
- Slovenian
- Spanish (Latin American and European)
- Sundanese
- Swahili
- Swedish
- Tagalog
- Tajik
- Tamil
- Tatar
- Telugu
- Thai[a]
- Tsonga
- Tswana
- Turkish[22]
- Turkmen
- Ukrainian[23]
- Urdu
- Uzbek
- Vietnamese
- Welsh
- Wolof
- Xhosa
- Yiddish
- Zulu
DeepL Write
In November 2022, DeepL launched a tool to improve monolingual texts in English and German, called DeepL Write.[citation needed] The public beta version was then released on January 17, 2023.[41] In the summer of 2024, DeepL announced the availability of two more languages in DeepL Write: French and Spanish. By January 2024, DeepL had added an additional two: Portuguese (European and Brazilian) and Italian.[42]
DeepL Voice
DeepL Voice, a real-time speech translation product, launched in November 2024. It includes DeepL Voice for Meetings, offered as add-ons for Microsoft Teams and Zoom that render translated speech as on-screen captions, and DeepL Voice for Conversations, a mobile tool for in-person live discussions. In April 2026, DeepL introduced voice-to-voice translation in more than 40 languages, extending the product to spoken output; the system uses a speech-to-text-to-speech pipeline.[43][44]
DeepL Agent
In November 2025, DeepL launched an AI agent called DeepL Agent which is capable of operating business applications in a human-like manner.[45]
Reception
The reception of DeepL has been generally positive.
- TechCrunch appreciates it for the accuracy of its translations and stating that it was more accurate and nuanced than Google Translate.[28]
- Le Monde thanks its developers for translating French text into more "French-sounding" expressions.[46]
- RTL Z stated that DeepL Translator "offers better translations […] when it comes to Dutch to English and vice versa".[47]
- La Repubblica,[48] and a Latin American website, "WWWhat's new?", showed praise as well.[49]
- A 2018 paper by the University of Bologna evaluated the Italian-to-German translation capabilities and found the preliminary results to be similar in quality to Google Translate.[50]
- In September 2021, Slator remarked that the language industry response was more measured than the press and noted that DeepL is still highly regarded by users.[51]
A reviewer noted in 2018 that DeepL had far fewer languages available for translation than competing products.[16]
A 2025 research paper introducing the WMT24++ benchmark, which expanded evaluation to 55 languages and dialects, found that frontier large language models, including OpenAI's o1, Anthropic's Claude and Google's Gemini, ranked above traditional machine-translation systems such as DeepL, Google Translate and Microsoft Translator across the languages tested. The authors noted the rankings were based on automatic metrics and that human evaluation remained future work.[52]
Awards and honors
DeepL won the 2020 Webby Award for Best Practices and the 2020 Webby Award for Technical Achievement (Apps, Mobile, and Features), both in the category Apps, Mobile & Voice.[53] In April 2025, DeepL was featured in the Forbes AI 50 list.[54]