On March 17, 2021, the world’s most popular non-Big Tech machine translation provider, DeepL, announced that it had added support for 13 European languages. The languages are Bulgarian, Czech, Danish, Estonian, Finnish, Greek, Hungarian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Romanian, Slovak, Slovenian, and Swedish.
The Germany-based machine translation provider estimated that this will increase their reach by some 105 million additional native speakers. The DeepL online translator now supports a total of 26 languages, including variants such as US and UK English, as well as Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese.
When Slator interviewed Jaroslaw Kutylowski, Co-founder and CEO, in July 2019, DeepL only supported nine European languages; neither any major Asian language nor Arabic.
“We’re a European company, so it’s not surprising that most of the media attention and our initial customer base have come from European countries,” Kutylowski said at the time, adding that their profile was nonetheless growing in other markets.
Truer words were never spoken. At the time of the interview, DeepL.com was ranked 1,147th globally on Alexa.com in terms of web traffic. Today, at press time, DeepL is the 206th most visited website globally, outranking any other machine translation platform.
Also remarkable, DeepL now ranks #43 in Japan, far outpacing web traffic from top EU market Germany (#108), albeit still behind Switzerland (#13).
Since selling a 13.6% stake to Silicon Valley VC Benchmark Capital in 2018, DeepL has not seen the need to raise more funding. According to LinkedIn data, the company has grown in headcount from about 50 in early 2019 to 120-plus today.
DeepL’s Pro plug-in (a paid SaaS subscription allowing limited customization and promising data security) has become one of the more popular options in post-editing machine translation workflows.
At press time, the plug-in officially supports SDL Trados Studio 2017 and 2019, memoQ 8.7.6 and higher, Déjà Vu X3 and higher, Wordfast Classic, Wordfast Anywhere, Wordfast Pro 5.7 and higher, Across Translator Edition, Across Language Server, and Memsource.