DeepL Translator

DeepL
Website type
Neural machine translation
Available in120 languages
HeadquartersCologne, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany
OwnerDeepL SE [wikidata]
Key peopleJarosław Kutyłowski
Websitedeepl.com
CommercialYes
RegistrationOptional
Launched28 August 2017; 9 years ago (2017-08-28)
Current statusActive

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. It offers a paid subscription for additional features and access to its translation application programming interface. 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. Its more than 200,000 business customers include a large proportion of the Fortune 500.

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. 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. With the release of DeepL in 2017, Linguee's company name was changed to DeepL GmbH, and it is also financed by advertising on its sister site, linguee.com. Support for Portuguese and Russian was added on December 5, 2018. In July 2019, Jarosław Kutyłowski became the CEO of DeepL GmbH and restructured the company into a Societas Europaea in 2021. Translation software for Microsoft Windows and macOS was released in September 2019. 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. 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. On 25 May 2022, support for Indonesian and Turkish was added, and support for Ukrainian was added on 14 September 2022. In January 2023, the company reached a valuation of 1 billion euro and became the most valued startup company in Cologne. At the end of the month, support for Korean and Norwegian (Bokmål) was also added. In May 2024, the company announced an investment of US$300 million at AI. In January 2026, more languages were supported, including Luxembourgish and Irish.[citation needed]

Services

Translation method

DeepL uses proprietary neural machine translation models. The original system launched in 2017 used convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and was trained using multilingual translation data accumulated through Linguee.

In 2021, DeepL stated that its neural networks incorporated elements of the Transformer architecture, including attention mechanisms, while differing from standard Transformer models in their network topology. In July 2024, the company introduced a new large language model for its translation service, trained on proprietary translation data and optimized for translation tasks.

At the time of its launch, DeepL deployed a 5.1-petaflop supercomputer at Verne Global's data centre in Iceland for training its neural networks. The facility was powered by hydroelectric and geothermal energy. DeepL subsequently expanded its computing infrastructure in Falun, Sweden; in 2025 it deployed an Nvidia DGX SuperPOD using GB200 systems at EcoDataCenter's facility there for model training.

DeepL for Windows translating from Polish to French
DeepL Translate Web translating an English Wikipedia article to Spanish

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. 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. Unlike the free version, translated texts are stated to not be saved on the server; also, the character limit is removed. The monthly pricing model includes a set amount of text, with texts beyond that being calculated according to the number of characters.

Supported languages

Target languages available in DeepL 23.10.1.11125

As of July 2026, the translation service supports the following languages:

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. 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.

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.

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.

Reception

The reception of DeepL has been generally positive.

A reviewer noted in 2018 that DeepL had far fewer languages available for translation than competing products.

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.

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. In April 2025, DeepL was featured in the Forbes AI 50 list.

See also

References

  1. ↑ API only.
  1. ↑ "How does DeepL work?". November 2021.
  2. ↑ van Miltenburg, Olaf (29 August 2017). "Duits bedrijf DeepL claimt betere vertaaldienst dan Google te bieden" [German company DeepL claims to offer better translation service than Google]. Tweakers (in Dutch). Archived from the original on 11 June 2020. Retrieved 10 August 2020.
  3. ↑ Lunden, Ingrid (22 May 2024). "AI language translation startup DeepL nabs $300M on a $2B valuation to focus on B2B growth". TechCrunch. Retrieved 5 March 2026.
  4. ↑ Schneider, Richard (30 August 2017). "DeepL, der maschinelle Übersetzungsdienst der Macher von Linguee: Ein Quantensprung?". UEPO.de (in German).
  5. ↑ Mingels, Guido (6 May 2018). "Wie es einem deutschen Unternehmen gelang, besser als Google zu sein" [How a German company managed to be better than Google]. Der Spiegel (in German).
  6. ↑ Neuhaus, Elisabeth (25 March 2020). "Spekuliert Deepl auf den Google-Exit, Jaroslaw Kutylowski?" [Is Deepl speculating on the Google exit, Jaroslaw Kutylowski?] (in German). Gründerszene. Archived from the original on 1 April 2020. Retrieved 21 April 2020.
  7. ↑ Schwan, Ben (31 August 2017). "Maschinenintelligenz: Der Besserübersetzer" [Machine Intelligence: The Better Translator]. heise online (in German). Heinz Heise. Technology Review. Archived from the original on 28 January 2018. Retrieved 27 January 2018.
  8. ↑ "New online translator "more powerful than Google"". Connexion France. 5 September 2017. Retrieved 26 April 2019.{{cite news}}: CS1 maint: deprecated archival service (link)
  9. ↑ Giret, Laurent (30 August 2017). "Microsoft Translator is world class fast, but supercomputer DeepL Translator wins out". OnMSFT.com. Archived from the original on 3 June 2020. Retrieved 10 August 2020.
  10. ↑ Börteçin, Ege (22 January 2018). "Interview A Conversation on AI and Data Science: Semantics to Machine Learning". bortecin.com. Archived from the original on 5 August 2020. Retrieved 10 August 2020.
  11. ↑ Merkert, Pina (29 August 2017). "Maschinelle Übersetzer: DeepL macht Google Translate Konkurrenz" [Machine translators: DeepL competes with Google Translate]. heise online (in German). Heinz Heise. Archived from the original on 30 August 2017. Retrieved 30 August 2017.
  12. ↑ Gröhn, Anna (17 September 2017). "DeepL: Was taugt der Online-Übersetzer im Vergleich zu Bing und Google Translate" [DeepL: What does the online translator do compared to Bing and Google Translate]. Der Spiegel (Spiegel Online) (in German). Der Spiegel. Archived from the original on 24 January 2018. Retrieved 27 January 2018.
  13. ↑ Faes, Florian (30 August 2017). "Linguee's Founder Launches DeepL in Attempt to Challenge Google Translate". Slator. Archived from the original on 6 May 2018. Retrieved 10 August 2020.
  14. ↑ "Why DeepL Got into Machine Translation and How It Plans to Make Money". Slator. 19 October 2017. Retrieved 19 May 2021.
  15. ↑ Schwan, Ben (2 October 2017). "Maschinelles Übersetzen: Deutsches Start-up DeepL will 230 Sprachkombinationen unterstützen" [Machine translation: German start-up DeepL wants to support 230 language combinations]. heise online (in German). Heinz Heise. Archived from the original on 18 January 2018. Retrieved 17 January 2018.
  16. 1 2 Smolentceva, Natalia (5 December 2018). "DeepL: Cologne-based startup outperforms Google Translate". dw.com. Deutsche Welle. Archived from the original on 5 December 2018. Retrieved 6 December 2018.
  17. ↑ "Unternehmensregister" [Business register] (in German). Bundesanzeiger. Archived from the original on 7 September 2017. Retrieved 7 September 2018.
  18. 1 2 Tarui, Hideto (23 March 2020). "Odoroki no hinshitsu o mushō de ~ AI hon'yaku sābisu "DeepL hon'yaku" ga nihongo to chūgokugo ni taiō - madonoto" 驚きの品質を無償で ～AI翻訳サービス"DeepL翻訳"が日本語と中国語に対応 - 窓の杜 [Amazing quality free of charge - AI translation service "DeepL Translation" is available in Japanese and Chinese]. forest.watch.impress.co.jp (in Japanese). Mado no Mori. Archived from the original on 23 March 2020. Retrieved 24 March 2020.
  19. ↑ Berger, Daniel (19 March 2020). "KI-Übersetzer DeepL unterstützt Japanisch und Chinesisch" [AI translator DeepL supports Japanese and Chinese]. heise online (in German). Heinz Heise. Archived from the original on 24 March 2020. Retrieved 24 March 2020.
  20. ↑ "'DeepL hon'yaku' ga nihongo taiō,'shizen'na yakubun' to wadai ni Doku benchā ga kaihatsu" 「DeepL翻訳」が日本語対応、「自然な訳文」と話題に 独ベンチャーが開発 ["DeepL Translator" is now available in Japanese, and the German venture has developed a "natural translation"]. ITmedia (in Japanese). ITmedia NEWS. 23 March 2020. Archived from the original on 24 March 2020. Retrieved 24 March 2020.
  21. ↑ Brinkmann, Martin (24 March 2021). "DeepL Translator adds support for 13 European languages - gHacks Tech News". gHacks Technology News. Retrieved 11 April 2025.
  22. 1 2 3 "DeepL welcomes Turkish and Indonesian". www.deepl.com. 25 May 2022. Retrieved 14 September 2022.
  23. 1 2 "DeepL learns Ukrainian". www.deepl.com. 14 September 2022. Archived from the original on 14 September 2022. Retrieved 14 September 2022.
  24. ↑ "Übersetzungsdienst DeepL: Kölner Unternehmen bestätigt Einstieg von Silicon-Valley-Investor". Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger (in German). 11 January 2023. Retrieved 23 January 2023.
  25. ↑ "DeepL Welcome Korean and Norwegian (bokmål)!". www.deepl.com. 31 January 2023. Archived from the original on 17 July 2024. Retrieved 5 August 2023.
  26. ↑ "DeepL Announces $300 Million Investment at $2 Billion Valuation Fueled by Global Demand for AI Language Solutions" (Press release). 22 May 2024.
  27. ↑ "Luxembourgish now available on DeepL translation tool". Luxembourg Times. 7 January 2026. Retrieved 18 January 2026.
  28. ↑ Merkert, Pina (29 August 2017). "Maschinelle Übersetzer: DeepL macht Google Translate Konkurrenz". Heise online (in German). Retrieved 18 September 2026.
  29. ↑ Coldewey, Devin; Lardinois, Frederic (29 August 2017). "DeepL schools other online translators with clever machine learning". TechCrunch. Retrieved 18 September 2026.
  30. ↑ DeepL Team (31 October 2021). "How does DeepL work?". DeepL. Retrieved 18 September 2026.
  31. ↑ Koch, Marie-Claire (18 July 2024). "DeepL expands its offering and uses large language model for translations". Heise online. Retrieved 18 September 2026.
  32. ↑ Moss, Sebastian (21 September 2017). "DeepL deploys 5.1 petaflop supercomputer on Verne Global campus". Data Center Dynamics. Retrieved 18 September 2026.
  33. ↑ Butler, Georgia (14 June 2025). "DeepL deploys Nvidia DGX SuperPOD at EcoDataCenter in Falun, Sweden". Data Center Dynamics. Retrieved 18 September 2026.
  34. ↑ "One-click Document Translation with DeepL". DeepL.com. 18 July 2018. Archived from the original on 30 March 2019. Retrieved 18 July 2018.
  35. ↑ "DeepL Pro". Deepl.com. Archived from the original on 7 June 2020. Retrieved 26 April 2019.
  36. ↑ Berger, Daniel (20 March 2018). "DeepL Pro: Neuer Aboservice für Profi-Übersetzer, Firmen und Entwickler" [DeepL Pro: New subscription service for professional translators, companies and developers]. heise online (in German). Heinz Heise. Archived from the original on 20 March 2018. Retrieved 20 March 2018.
  37. ↑ Wagner, Janet (20 March 2018). "DeepL Language Translator Expands with Pro Edition and RESTful API". ProgrammableWeb. Archived from the original on 27 March 2019. Retrieved 10 August 2020.
  38. ↑ "Languages included in DeepL Pro". www.deepl.com. Archived from the original on 6 May 2022. Retrieved 25 January 2024.
  39. ↑ "Vietnamese Thai Hebrew Launch". www.deepl.com. 25 June 2025.
  40. ↑ Ziegener, Daniel (17 January 2023). "DeepL Write: Brauchen wir jetzt noch eine menschliche Lektorin?". Golem.de.
  41. ↑ DeepL. "DeepL launches new French and Spanish AI writing assistant to improve business communications". www.prnewswire.com (Press release). Retrieved 20 April 2026.
  42. ↑ "DeepL, known for text translation, now wants to translate your voice". TechCrunch. 16 April 2026.
  43. ↑ "DeepL launches real-time voice-to-voice translation in 40+ languages". The Next Web. April 2026.
  44. ↑ "Start-up DeepL startet autonomen KI-Agenten". Handelsblatt. 5 November 2025. Retrieved 21 December 2025.
  45. ↑ Coldewey, Devin; Lardinois, Frederic (29 August 2017). "DeepL schools other online translators with clever machine learning". TechCrunch. Archived from the original on 20 February 2018. Retrieved 1 September 2019.
  46. ↑ Larousserie, David; Leloup, Damien (29 August 2017). "Quel est le meilleur service de traduction en ligne ?" [What is the best online translation service?]. Le Monde (in French). Archived from the original on 31 May 2019. Retrieved 1 September 2019.
  47. ↑ Verlaan, Daniël (29 August 2017). "Duits bedrijf belooft betere vertalingen dan Google Translate" [German company promises better translations than Google Translate]. rtlZ.nl (in Dutch). RTL Group. Archived from the original on 8 October 2020. Retrieved 1 September 2017.
  48. ↑ "Arriva DeepL, il traduttore automatico che sfida Google" [Here comes DeepL, the automatic translator that challenges Google]. la Repubblica (in Italian). 29 August 2017. Archived from the original on 1 September 2019. Retrieved 1 September 2019.
  49. ↑ Polo, Juan Diego (29 August 2017). "DeepL, un traductor online que supera al de Google, Microsoft y Facebook" [DeepL, an online translator that outperforms Google, Microsoft and Facebook]. WWWhat's new? (in Spanish). Archived from the original on 1 September 2019. Retrieved 1 September 2019.
  50. ↑ Heiss, Christine; Soffritti, Marcello (2018). "DeepL Traduttore e didattica della traduzione dall'italiano in tedesco" [DeepL Translator and didactics of translation from Italian into German. Some preliminary assessments]. InTRAlinea.org (in Italian). University of Bologna, Italy. Retrieved 28 January 2019.
  51. ↑ Wyndham, Anna (15 September 2021). "Inside DeepL: The World's Fastest-Growing, Most Secretive Machine Translation Company". Slator.
  52. ↑ Deutsch, Daniel; Briakou, Eleftheria; Caswell, Isaac; Finkelstein, Mara; Galor, Rebecca; Juraska, Juraj; Kovacs, Geza; Lui, Alison; Rei, Ricardo; Riesa, Jason; Rijhwani, Shruti; Riley, Parker; Salesky, Elizabeth; Trabelsi, Firas; Winkler, Stephanie; Zhang, Biao; Freitag, Markus (2025). "WMT24++: Expanding the Language Coverage of WMT24 to 55 Languages & Dialects". arXiv:2502.12404 [cs.CL].
  53. ↑ Kastrenakes, Jacob; Peters, Jay (20 May 2020). "Webby Awards 2020: the complete winners list". The Verge. Archived from the original on 21 May 2020. Retrieved 22 May 2020.
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Bibliography