DeepL, a popular online translator and translation service, has added support for the languages Japanese and Chinese (simplified) in its latest update. The update raises the number of supported languages, those that users may translate content between, to 11.
While language support is not as extensive as that of other translation services, Google Translate or Bing Microsoft Translator, both of which support more than a hundred different languages, it is also quality of the translated content that plays a role when it comes to selecting a machine translation service.
DeepL launched in 2017 with the promise to provide more human-like translations. The service introduced document translation functionality, the desktop program DeepL Translator for Windows and Mac, and support for Russian and Portuguese languages.
DeepL notes that the improvements to the translation quality that it announced last month have paved the way for adding Chinese and Japanese languages to the supported languages.
Japanese Kanji, Hiragana and Katakana are supported as well as thousands of Chinese characters.
The result is an important expansion of DeepL Translator’s capabilities. The algorithms can now handle several thousand Chinese characters, as well as Japanese kanji, hiragana, and katakana. With this vast knowledge, DeepL Translator can now produce translations that use natural-sounding, context-appropriate language in two more of the world’s most-used languages.
The company ran blind tests once again to determine how often its translations were picked over translations by Google, Amazon and Microsoft translators (and for Chinese also Baidu and Youdao).
We asked Japanese and Chinese translators to evaluate a set of translated texts from various online translation providers, without knowing which site produced which translation.
DeepL was picked more often than the other translation services; while that needs independent verification, as several parameters, such as the translators picked by DeepL or the texts used, are unknown, it may convince some already to try DeepL to find out how good these translations really are.