As we are all moving in a bigger global communication area, translation services are more essential to manage everything that your business needs for the daily tasks or personal communication with someone coming from another country. The two most useful tools and the biggest translation services on the internet are DeepL and Google Translate. This article is walking you through a complete overview of a comparison between these two translation giants, showing the level of their skills, with the main focus on the accuracy, easiness of use, supported languages provided, additional features and the price.
Accuracy
DeepL: A Leader in Accuracy
DeepL has also gained a reputation for its accuracy, especially on complicated sentences and for retaining the nuance of the original text. DeepL uses the latest neural network technology to make translations that are not only accurate but readable. After translation, the text no longer sounds like a computer draft – DeepL works especially well for European languages, including German, French and Spanish.
Google Translate: A Versatile Contender
Given its wide range of languages – not always as fine-grained as DeepL’s, but comparable on most of them – Google Translate is unlikely to mislead. The scale and sheer mass of Google’s data (plus the constant advance of machine learning), mean it handles more than 100 languages pretty competently. But it is not as accurate for imported idioms and more nuanced text as DeepL can be – though for anything that’s not particularly ‘literary’, Google often suffices.
Ease of Use
DeepL: Intuitive and User-Friendly
The DeepL interface is elegant, simple, and intuitive to use. Translations can be made of text, documents, and even complete webpages. The intuitive design, in conjunction with the quality of the translations it generates, supports why many professional translators and casual users alike rate DeepL so highly.
Google Translate: Feature-Rich and Accessible
The thing that makes Google Translate such a beautiful piece of software, though, is its feature scope and ease of use. As well as being available as a web service, a mobile app, and a browser extension, the service provides natural speech input via the mic, the ability to translate handwritten text, real-time camera translation, and an offline mode that makes the app useful while traveling.
Supported Languages
DeepL: Focused and Specialized
DeepL currently provides translations in 32 languages (including many of the European languages, not to mention a few other ones like Chinese and Japanese, though admittedly this is fewer than are supported by Google Translate). But while Google tries to do everything for everyone, DeepL is relatively focused, which means that what it does do is high quality.
Google Translate: A Language Powerhouse
Its language support is also the most comprehensive, including more than 100 languages. This magnitude of languages is a great benefit to those who need to translate across a wide variety of languages. This tool is the only one that can translate from and into a wide variety of language pairs.
Additional Features
DeepL: Premium Quality Enhancements
DeepL also provides a subscription service, DeepL Pro, which includes additional functionality, like increased security for commercial purposes, faster processing speeds, and larger documents, as well as integration with computer-assisted translation (CAT) tools, which are commonly used by translators.
Google Translate: Innovation and Integration
Its integration into other Google services – Gmail, Google Docs, etc – gives it added usefulness; and its conversation mode in the mobile app facilitates two-way real-time bilingual speech during travel and international business. Google’s ongoing investment in AI guarantees that the service will improve on an ongoing basis.
Pricing:
DeepL: Investment in Precision
It features a free and basic version and a Pro version for more features. The Pro version, based on a subscription model, has various price levels depending on the user’s level of needs in terms of translation accuracy and additional safeguard functions. This can be a good investment if one needs highly accurate translations and additional security functions.
Google Translate: Free and Accessible
Google Translate is still free for most users, and the freebie version has many features to get you started, particularly if cost is a factor or you need more than one language. This model is perfect for the casual linguist or the tourist who wants to read menus or street directions without resorting to expensive tactics, such as hand gestures.
Conclusion
The decision between which to use – DeepL or Google Translate – ultimately comes down to what your use-case is. If you’re in need of translating quotations from philosophers in your essay or article and care about the level of precision, or if you work with texts written mostly in European languages, then I’ve come to the conclusion that you should go with DeepL. It’s simply a better translation tool if you’re going to be using it professionally.
At the same time, if you are looking for a feature-rich, polyglot translation service, there is only one clear winner: Google Translate. Not only is it readily available on almost any device, and supports an enormous range of languages, it is also well-integrated with other Google services.
Perhaps the takeaway is that both DeepL and Google Translate provide great, reliable translation services, so choose the one that does what you need it to do best.