Is it also the superior product? It depends on your use-case. I always prefer it over Google Translate since it is much more accurate and keeps the overall accuracy and tone for longer texts, which Translate does not.
🌟 Precision & Natural Flow
DeepL’s AI excels in delivering translations that sound like they were written by a human. It captures idioms, tone, and context beautifully, especially in languages like German, French, or Spanish. Google often translates word-for-word, leading to clunky or literal results.
📚 Context Matters
DeepL allows you to highlight specific words for alternative translations, making it perfect for refining technical, creative, or formal texts. Google’s one-size-fits-all approach struggles with subtle differences in meaning.
🔒 Privacy Focus
DeepL prioritizes user privacy by anonymizing data and avoiding ad-targeting practices. Since the company behind it, DeepL SE, is based in Germany, it also profits from higher privacy from an ideology perspective (we germans love keeping our data safe & private). Google, while improving, still ties translations to user accounts for broader data collection.
💡 Extra Features
From customizable formality levels (e.g., formal vs. informal English) to seamless document translation, DeepL offers tools that cater to professionals and casual users alike.
✍️ DeepL Write Aren‘t the best writer? DeepL Write can help you paraphrase your own sentences and make them more structured, friendly or professional. Try it for your next work Email!
TL;DR: Google is faster and offers more languages. But for quality, nuance, and privacy, DeepL is unmatched. By using it, you also help an european company train their models instead of Googles. Give it a try, you will not be disappointed!
without being picky about quality of translations vs Google Translator, this can't be used offline in the phone/android, right? maybe trying to setup the server side inside Termux could work, this doesn't solve the problem of translating text just by pointing the camera to some banner or traffic sign etc. which is useful while traveling in a foreign country etc.
I don't think so. Check out LibreTranslate, I think it can be selfhosted but not sure.
I know, but I don't want to self-host it, I want to use it completely offline as an app on the phone just as google translator app, also LibreTranslate can't translate in real time using the phone camera like Google Lens
I imagine that google translate stores that data localy then and just matches it like in a dictionary?
I obviously don't have a replacement for google lens, but I wonder if offline google translate is just literally like a crossreferebcing dictionary. Woulf be a bit annoying to set up oneself I imagine.
You download the "model" or whatever they use to translate for each language you want, it is like 100MB each IIRC, then you can fully use the language translator offline, by default only English can be used offline the others you manually click a download button besides the language entry in the language selector