DeepL Translate

I want to preface this by saying that DeepL is the gold standard as far as machine translation goes for quick, simple translations that sound like natural language. I’ve used this app for a few years and I stay using it for a reason. However, a major pain point is that DeepL often hallucinates details which aren’t there, and which occasionally create drastically different meaning than the intent of the original text. For example, when translating passages from Japanese, DeepL’s translation will often invent pronouns which are not present in the original text and will stubbornly gender parties being spoken about, to the point of inventing descriptions in the alternative suggestions that are not even remotely applicable to the original text. For example, a sentence which makes no mention of a subject’s gender may be changed to definitively state that the subject is a “her”, and will even suggest alternatives like “little girl” when this is not implied or stated anywhere in the source text. Further, it does not give the option to change this in the alternative suggestions. I run into this problem routinely with Japanese text, even when the source text states outright that the subject being discussed is male. Once you’ve learned the particular idiosyncrasies of this app and how to anticipate what elements will reliably be incorrect, it’s definitely useable and very useful, but personally I think it can be a little bit fraught if you simply take its output at face value.

The Spanish-English/English-Spanish translations have been of really low quality for a couple of months now. Before, I used to celebrate within myself just how well DeepL translated subtleties of these two languages. Now, it can only muster up a literal definition that anyone with a book dictionary can produce; the "Alternatives" feature seems to be functionally deactivated. The brilliance of DeepL has been replaced by AI slop and DeepL hasn't returned it to its former glory.