DeepL Translator – AI Assistance for Language

Also worth pointing out that this is poetic language from Goethe, not "normal" speech. We would say 'Ruhe' these days, not 'Ruh'.

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...

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!

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.

Both Google and Facebook have released pre-trained models in a few languages [0, 1].

[0] https://github.com/facebookresearch/fairseq

[1] https://google.github.io/seq2seq/nmt/