Germany-based AI translation unicorn DeepL seeks to expand in Middle East - The National - Translation

DeepL, the AI-fuelled language translation company based in Germany, is keen to strengthen its presence in the Middle East and is making efforts at improving its Arabic translation services while courting potential clients in the region, its chief executive has said.

The company's AI neural translation technology has set the pace for much of the language-translation sector in recent years, chief executive Jaroslaw “Jarek” Kutylowski, 41, told The National in an interview in Dubai.

The technology translation unicorn's efforts to increase its presence in the region come amid a global race from various companies like Google, Microsoft and Grammarly, who are vying for a slice of the lucrative language translation sector.

Mr Kutylowski said DeepL offers plenty of VC funding and hundreds of millions of users and is trying to stay ahead of the competition.

Its translation offering for business customers, DeepL Pro, is used by more than 20,000 businesses, according to DeepL.

“We are starting to talk to customers to see what their requirements are. We are looking in the UAE and we’ll see what develops in the future,” he said.

Mr Kutylowski said he’s speaking with various companies in the UAE, particularly in the real estate sector to better see how DeepL could potentially assist with their international clients.

DeepL, an AI-powered language translation service started providing Arabic language capabilities in December last year. Photo: Cody Combs

He’s also seeking to better understand the nuances of Arabic in the business world.

“One of the reasons I’m here [in Dubai], I’m intrigued by the language and I’m keen to learn more by my time spent here,” he said.

DeepL, headquartered in Cologne, currently has offices in London, Amsterdam, Berlin, Tokyo and the US, and while it doesn’t have immediate plans to open offices in the UAE, that could change.

“It depends on the success of the market and how the reception from the customers are and how much on the ground support our potential customers might need over here,” he said.

The company, founded in 2017, reached a $1 billion valuation last year and also launched its Arabic language translation capabilities in January of 2024.

Despite advancements in machine learning, because of its complexity and diversity in terms of dialects, Arabic has proven challenging for various online-based translation services.

Mr Kutylowski said Arabic was the first language translation implementation launched by DeepL that is written and read from right to left.

DeepL Write is one of several products offered by DeepL through several pricing tiers. Photo: DeepL

“The grammar is a bit different and a few things in the AI translation training need to be done in a slightly different way,” he said.

“The beauty of AI is that you don't have to teach it the grammar rules, it's able to pick it up already, but there are some preparation steps that require additional work to get it done,” he said, noting that Japanese also required more time to perfect.

Mr Kutylowski said introducing Arabic translations is also a matter of prioritisation and staffing, something he said DeepL has tried to put front and centre.

“It's work,” he said. “It's not so complicated when you look at it from an engineering perspective, but it just needs to get done.”

He said DeepL is fast approaching having about 1,000 employees.

“60 per cent of that is research and development because this is a complicated topic [translation] and we also have this large platform to engineer, we’re among the top 100 domains in the world in terms of traffic, and you want to keep that stable and running,” he said.

“There’s also the research that goes into the neural networks,” he said, noting that the DeepL has about 50 people working on the mathematical and technical aspects of such networks.

Mr Kutylowski also said the company employs editors and others providing input for the 32 languages supported by DeepL.

According to its website, the company has 100,000 business customers currently using DeepL to communicate both with customers and internally.

Japanese news agency, Nikkei, is among those mentioned by Mr Kutylowski as a DeepL client.

“They’re publishing some of their articles written in Japanese and translating them to English and Chinese,” he said.

DeepL’s translations are made possible through artificial neural networks, a vital component that makes artificial intelligence possible. In short, these networks, used by most modern translation apps and services, train in ways that are similar to the human brain.

According to Mr Kutylowski, DeepL was among the first to use this approach, and while other translation services have also used neural machine translation in recent years, DeepL has improved its approach through an increased focus on training data and methodology.

“When you’re able to design the best neural network architecture, when you’re able to train those networks properly and find the best training data, then you can achieve the best quality and that’s what we’ve been doing for six years,” he said.

Along with its free and basic translation offering, DeepL provides various iterations of its translation services, apps, services and APIs through tiered pricing.

The company also recently launched what it describes as an AI-powered writing companion called DeepL Write, which will go toe-to-toe with Grammarly, a similar product widely considered to be a dominant player in the writing assistance space.

Mr Kutylowski said most of DeepL’s clients are using desktop and laptop PCs and DeepL’s browser extensions, although a mobile app is available.

“In business and enterprise, this is still what it is,” he said, talking about users preferring to use DeepL’s services on PCs rather than mobile devices.

“If you’re working with sophisticated applications … most of what you’re doing during the day is at the desktop.”

Although he declined to give specifics over revenue, Mr Kutylowski described DeepL's business model and financial outlook as “good”, and said that the company's web traffic routinely puts it among the 100 biggest web domains in the world.

DeepL is certainly not alone in terms of offering online translation services, with competitors such as Google Translate or Microsoft Bing's translator service, which also have an Arabic translation offering, although not the personalised client model offered by DeepL.

Google and Microsoft also have the deep pockets to improve their searches over time, along with installed user bases that could potentially be a significant advantage.

The translation market also shows no sign of slowing down. According to Straits Research, it could reach a market size of $48 billion by 2031.

DeepL has continued to attract investors and clients, while also expanding its language portfolio.

“We're really good at focusing at what we're doing,” Mr Kutylowski said, referring to DeepL's research into neural networks as well as its emphasis on staffing language and engineering experts.

Jarek also made sure to point out that DeepL is his first company, and he doesn't have any plans to go anywhere else anytime soon.

“Keeping track of all this growth is challenging enough, so I'm not getting sidetracked,” he said.

Updated: May 09, 2024, 12:54 PM

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Reddit tests automatic, whole-site translation into French using LLM-based AI - TechCrunch - Translation

Reddit — now a publicly-traded company with more scrutiny on revenue growth — is putting a big focus on boosting its international audience, starting with francophones. In their first-ever earnings call, CEO Steve Huffman confirmed the company is now working on automatic translations of the site’s content, in real-time, into French, thanks to advances in large language models.

He also touched on ecosystem expansion by way of a couple of u-turns. It wants to court developers with new tools — a surprise given the company’s history on this front; and it is planning a reintroduction of Reddit Gold — another surprise considering the company canned its virtual currency efforts less than a year ago.

Moves like these are anticipating what the future, rather than the present, might look like for Reddit. Today, its news is relatively encouraging, with Reddit’s revenue in the last quarter jumping 48% year-over-year to $243 million, and unique users growing 37% to 82.7 million. (That figure includes both logged-in and logged-out users, similar to how Twitter — now called X — used to count its audience when it was public.)

User growth and translation

Huffman, speaking on the earnings call, said that half of Reddit’s audience is U.S.-based, which points to the company putting more focus on how to increase the international proportion.

“We’re still 50/50 U.S. versus non-U.S., but our peers are more than 80% to 90% non-U.S.,” he said. “I think there’s a huge opportunity there.” He went on to describe automatic, AI-powered translation as “one of the big unlocks for us in the near to medium term.”

“So we’re translating our entire corpus today that is mostly in English into the other languages and hope that will help accelerate international growth,” he said.

The site-wide translation effort is still a test, in his words, although there is a lot of resource being put into it. Huffman noted that this content is also being indexed on Google results for the French language, driving more traffic to the site, and the company next wants to tackle Spanish.

Reddit been offering post-based translation since last year with support for eight languages.

Developer tools

It was surreal to hear Huffman talk about developer tools on the call. It was only in July 2023 that the company found itself embroiled in a massive feud with third-party client developers over API changes — resulting in the blackout of hundreds of subreddits in protest of API changes.

Now the social network is in play-nice mode. Huffman said there are plans for tools that could “push the boundaries of what a subreddit can be.” He gave examples of some ongoing experiments like live scores on some sports subreddits and a live stock ticker on r/wallstreetbets, the subreddit known for the Gamestop stock saga.

A few hundred developers are already testing these new experiences, he said. Reddit aims to include more developers from the waitlist this summer and enable monetization features later in the year.

Other announcements

Earlier this year, Reddit signed a deal with Google to let the search engine company use the social network’s data. In answering a question from the Reddit community, Huffman said that the company plans to license data to other companies as well. This has been a big issue, and in many cases controversial in light of the fact that users may not want their data being used for, say, AI training or some of the other common purposes these days. For what it’s worth, Huffman, you might have guessed, insisted that the company is being “considerate and selective” in how it selects partners.

The name of the game for the company right now is building more infrastructure for revenue generation. So while Gold and another currency effort, blockchain-based community points, were both canned last year, virtual currency is going to getting another airing on the platform because it represents an opportunity for Reddit to diversify its business model. During the earnings call, the company noted that it plans to launch a “revamped” Gold product, with programs for users to spend and earn money on the platform.

Last month, Reddit CPO Pali Bhat mentioned some of these new initiatives in an interview with TechCrunch, and now the company is making moves to leverage those growth instruments.

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Rick Carlisle’s press conference ‘soiree’ line drew comment, including from the Merriam-Webster dictionary - Awful Announcing - Dictionary

It’s always interesting when a coach’s press conference sees the deployment of an infrequently-spoken word. That’s what happened with Indiana Pacers’ head coach Rick Carlisle and “soiree” Wednesday:

Rick Carlisle just dropped a “soirée” during his press conference, referencing Josh Hart’s “soirées to the rim.”

Has to be a first for a coach press conference

— Yaron Weitzman (@YaronWeitzman) May 8, 2024

That even got notice from the official Merriam-Webster account:

noun | party or reception held in the evening

— Merriam-Webster (@MerriamWebster) May 8, 2024

There are, of course, many other potential ways Hart’s appointments at the rim could be described, from cotillons to galas to shindigs to fêtes to carousals. But “soirées to the rim” is certainly amusing. And it’s a funny description of what Hart has pulled off in these playoffs so far.

This postseason, Hart is averaging 46.6 minutes per game, and has posted 17.9 points and 12.4 rebounds per game. Those are significant boosts over his regular-season numbers (33.4 MPG, 9.4 PPG, 8.3 RPG) this year, and over his regular-season career marks (29.2 MPG, 9.8 PPG, 6.6 RPG).

So Hart definitely has managed to make some notable appointments at the rim. Whether those rise to the level of “soirées” is a question, but it’s a funny way for Carlisle to describe that. And we’ll see how that works out for Hart in Wednesday’s Game 2 (the Knicks won Game 1 Monday) and beyond.

[Merriam-Webster on Twitter/X]

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I used to wonder why the dictionary had so many 's' words - Real Change News - Dictionary

My father wanted me to grow up to be a writer in some vague way he never could explain. I’d say he succeeded in precisely his vagueness.

There were nudges here and there. We almost never spoke to each other, but he managed to get me interested in various word games.

An early one I got hooked on was what I call a word mine problem: List all the words you can make from the letters in “Washington,” for example, using them only as often as they appear. So you could use the two N’s to get “inn,” but you couldn’t get “ass” because there’s just the one S.

Then there were cryptograms. A quote or a set of related words, like “vegetable salad ingredients,” would be written using one simple substitution cipher, which you had to break. He taught me cheats like ETAONRISH, the most frequent letters, in order, used in normal English text.

He tricked me into reading the dictionary. I browsed the dictionary more than I now browse the internet. He sneakily lured me into a guide at the end of the dictionary that laid out the most common proofreading symbols. The attraction was, ‘Hey, you like symbols; here’s pages of them, all for free.’

He made sure I had access to the Encyclopedia Britannica, buying a set when I was born.

He had fellow officer buddies who came to the house to play Scrabble(™). A fourth rack was going unused, so he talked me into joining in. My father could outplay me all the time, but he enjoyed seeing me beat his two friends.

At the time, we were living at an Army base 35 miles outside of Boston, and we were subscribed to two Boston dailies. One was the Hearst paper. My father got me reading the papers daily. I don’t know how he pulled it off. I don’t even know if it was planned. The way it went down was he had a rule that no one read a section of the paper until he finished.

Well, there was just me, my mother and the dog. The dog was not considered a suitable reader of the papers. So my mother and I had to watch Dad read the A-sections, and then we could move in.

But — and here’s where he may have gotten devious — he offered to let me read the B-sections while he was reading the A-sections. On the condition I folded them back up like they were to begin.

The B-sections were the best part! They had the editorials and the letters to the editors. The A-sections were soup and salad. The B-sections were salami and cheese.

It made more sense to read the editorials first every day because they tried to make sense of the previous day’s news. The A-section just hit you with today’s news without preparation, raw and unprocessed.

Some of the editorials of those times reinforced my dictionary reading. I needed help to get through William F. Buckley’s pieces.

In his twenties, my father, who wasn’t able to go to college (it was the Depression), had a long-shot plan to get to be a writer. He signed up with the Government Printing Office (GPO) as an apprentice printer. The goal was to somehow end up owning a press and supplying his own writing to it. He told me he got the idea from Izzy Stone, somehow. I never understood that. Anyway, WWII and the draft interfered with the plan, so he became a cryptanalyst for the U.S. Army instead, which is a position all about words.

One of my father’s projects at the GPO before he was drafted was helping create a copiously illustrated monograph on color printing, which I devoured. To his dismay, I learned straight past it, branching out to other ideas about color, like the physics and biology of the subject. The encyclopedia helped. We argued about which was more important: subtractive color combination or additive.

I studied wave theory to understand physics, and then I got hooked on math. He saw me turning my back on his vague dream for me. I must have seemed to slip away into higher dimensions.

An article on algebraic geometry in the Encyclopedia Britannica made up my mind to become a mathematician.

That’s the problem with buying a newborn baby a set of encyclopedias: You never know what they’ll get out of it.

Dr. Wes is the Real Change Circulation Specialist, but, in addition to his skills with a spreadsheet, he writes this weekly column about whatever recent going-ons caught his attention. Dr. Wes has contributed to the paper since 1994. Curious about his process or have a response to one of his columns? Connect with him at [email protected].

Read more of the May 8–14, 2024 issue.

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Translation troubles: the truth of the milanesa - Buenos Aires Herald - Translation

Trabajo en negro/blanco

In honor of International Worker’s Day, and bearing in mind that the Lower House approved the omnibus bill with its multiple labor reforms, here’s a work-related phrase that’s come up a lot recently and we’d rather it didn’t. In Argentina, people refer to unregistered or informal work as trabajo en negro (literally “work in black”). Meanwhile, employment that’s above board — i.e. with a contract, paid time off, health insurance, etc. — is en blanco (“in white”).

Given the acknowledgment of its racist connotations, in recent years there’s been a push toward just calling it what it is, trabajo no registrado (“unregistered” work — an awkward translation but infinitely preferable to the first). 

Correrse la bola

The ball has moved! Similar to something snowballing in English, when Juan said that empezó a correrse la bola (the ball started to roll) he meant that the word had gotten out. In this case, that Martina’s place is safe haven for cats. Not that she meant to get that ball rolling, which would be the literal translation and means something quite different.

The traditional Spanish definition of correrse la bola seems to imply that the news that’s being spread like wildfire is in fact uncorroborated or potentially untrue. But in Argentina, it just means that the cat is out of the bag — or dropping by Martina’s place to pilfer the cat food meant for her own feline companions.

La verdad de la milanesa

Why would you say something so prosaic as “the truth of the matter” when you could say “the truth of the milanesa”? Friday was Milanesa Day, an informal date to celebrate the quintessentially Argentine dish descended from the Italian cotoletta alla milanese which can be eaten in a myriad of ways: with mash, “on a horse,” or “Neapolitan style” (anathema to the Italian north/south divide, I know). 

But what on earth is the verdad de la milanesa? Ironically, there doesn’t seem to be one true story as to why we say this. Theories range from international debates about the original recipe (the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Germany, or indeed…Milan) to the fact that you can’t know the “truth” until you cut into it and reveal whether it’s meat, fish, soy, whatever the case may be.

Given how important they are to us, I’m not surprised that milanesas were chosen to represent irrefutable fact. Although if our newsroom chats about Milanesa Day are any indication, we’re all out here living our own truths.

You may also be interested in: Five ways to enjoy milanesas, Argentina’s favorite dish

Share your thoughts and translation hang-ups with us on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram!

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Beyoncé's name set to be added to French dictionary - USA TODAY - Dictionary

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Beyoncé's name set to be added to French dictionary  USA TODAY

Council Conservatives Got Their Precious Audit, but Still Won't Talk About Progressive Revenue - The Stranger - Dictionary

According to a recent in-depth review of the City budget, council central staff attributes 79% of the City of Seattle’s increased spending between 2019 and 2024 to inflation and the rising cost of labor associated with it. 

One would think that such a finding would challenge some of the new conservative council members' assumptions that the previous City Council ripped the projected $241 million hole in the 2025 budget by reckless spending and, in turn, would bolster the argument for new, progressive revenue to pay workers and expand social services. So far that’s not the case.

No one in the committee meeting gave a clear indication of whether the audit has swayed them one way or the other on taxes in last week’s meeting. But there’s plenty of time before the fall budgeting process when the council will have to balance the budget. For now, the council will meet once a month this summer to continue examining the 224-page report in what Budget Chair Dan Strauss calls his “Select Summer Budget Series.” Strauss says the council will go through the budget trends department by department to inform which of their limited levers they should pull to balance the budget—lay off staff, cut services, take from already-earmarked funds, or increase revenues. 

Council Members Rob Saka, Joy Hollingsworth, Maritza Rivera, Cathy Moore, Bob Kettle, Tanya Woo, and Sara Nelson did not respond to The Stranger’s request for comment about the audit. 

I’m used to it, but this is especially frustrating because the council newbies avoided questions about the budget deficit during their 2023 campaign by calling for a budget audit before they took a stance on new revenue or major cuts. The promise of an audit served as a bat signal to their supporters at the Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce and Downtown Seattle Association because it endorsed an underlying assumption that the previous council suffered from a “spending problem” and detracted from the ongoing conversation about new streams of revenue the City could use to fill its looming budget shortfall. 

The council quickly realized they could not conduct as thorough an audit as they would like, but Strauss thinks that the central staff’s analysis fits the dictionary definition of an audit. 

Some of the council newbs seem satisfied, others not so much. Kettle said he “loves” the report in the committee last week. But Rivera said she and Strauss will have to “agree to disagree” on the definition of an audit in a council briefing Monday. 

Whether this achieves their campaign promise or not, every council member knows the report is as close to an audit as they are getting this year. They can still punt the conversation by saying they need to wait until the council finishes the Select Summer Budget Series. 

That’s kind of what Strauss did on the phone with The Stranger when he avoided advocating for more revenue or specific cuts based on the high-level presentation of the audit that central staff gave last week. He said, so far, the audit provides “no obvious decisions anywhere” for solving the looming deficit because the council is still “looking under every couch cushion and under every rock.”

That’s sort of his style, annoying as it is to journalists, voters, and the girls who love the gossip. But he did praise JumpStart, a payroll tax on the biggest businesses in Seattle, for saving the budget and countless City jobs. And he ran on a loudly pro-progressive revenue platform in 2023, so he may start making more noise for taxation when the real budget negotiations begin in the fall. 

But the austerity has already started. Last month Seattle Public Libraries announced 1,500 hours of service cuts between April 12 and June 2 because of staffing shortages exacerbated by the Mayor’s hiring freeze. Instead of jumping to save the public amenity by taxing the rich or corporations, Libraries, Education, and Neighborhoods Committee Chair Rivera blamed the unions and the markup on ebooks. Expect more of those kinds of arguments as the Select Summer Budget Series continues.

Unsurprisingly, the only council member to take the audit’s findings as a sign of the City’s need for new progressive taxes is Council Member Tammy Morales, the only reliable progressive in the bunch. In an email statement, Morales said, “We need to pass new progressive revenue that ensures corporations are paying their fair share. Cuts to working-class services like libraries, community centers, and food assistance are not the answer.”

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