Linguee is an online bilingual concordance that provides an online dictionary for a number of language pairs, including many bilingual sentence pairs. As a translation aid, Linguee differs from machine translation services like Babel Fish and is more similar in function to a

translation memory A translation memory (TM) is a database that stores "segments", which can be sentences, paragraphs or sentence-like units (headings, titles or elements in a list) that have previously been translated, in order to aid human translators. The translat ...

. Linguee is operated by

Cologne Cologne ( ; german: Köln ; ksh, Kölle ) is the largest city of the German western state of North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) and the fourth-most populous city of Germany with 1.1 million inhabitants in the city proper and 3.6 millio ...

-based DeepL GmbH (formerly Linguee GmbH), which was established in Cologne in December 2008.

Technology

Linguee uses specialized webcrawlers to search the Internet for appropriate bilingual texts and to divide them into parallel sentences. The paired sentences identified undergo automatic quality evaluation by a human-trained

machine learning Machine learning (ML) is a field of inquiry devoted to understanding and building methods that 'learn', that is, methods that leverage data to improve performance on some set of tasks. It is seen as a part of artificial intelligence. Machine ...

algorithm that estimates the quality of translation. The user can set the number of pairs using a

fuzzy search In computer science, approximate string matching (often colloquially referred to as fuzzy string searching) is the technique of finding strings that match a pattern approximately (rather than exactly). The problem of approximate string matching ...

, access, and the ranking of search results with the previous quality assurance and compliance is influenced by the search term. Users can also rate translations manually, so that the machine learning system is trained continuously.

Sources

In addition to serving the bilingual Web, Patent translated texts as well as the EU Parliament protocols and laws of the European Union (

EUR-Lex Eur-Lex (stylized EUR-Lex) is an official website of European Union law and other public documents of the European Union (EU), published in 24 official languages of the EU. The Official Journal (OJ) of the European Union is also published on EU ...

) as sources. In addition to officially translated text from EU sources, its French language service relies on translated texts from Canadian government documents, websites, and transcripts, along with Canadian national institutions and organisations which often provide bilingual services. According to the operator Linguee offers access to approximately 100 million translations.

History

The concept behind Linguee was conceived in the fall of 2007 by former

Google Google LLC () is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company focusing on Search Engine, search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, software, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, ar ...

employee Gereon Frahling and developed in the following year along with Leonard Fink. The business idea was recognized in 2008 with the main prize of a competition founded by the German

Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology The Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action (german: Bundesministerium für Wirtschaft und Klimaschutz, ), abbreviated BMWK (was BMWi), is a cabinet-level ministry of the Federal Republic of Germany. It was previously known as ...

. In April 2009, the web service was made available to the public. Linguee is operated by DeepL GmbH (formerly Linguee GmbH) based in

. In 2017, a team of Linguee employees around Jarosław Kutyłowski developed and launched the

DeepL Translator DeepL Translator is a neural machine translation service launched in August 2017 and owned by DeepL SE, based in Cologne. The translating system was first developed within Linguee and launched as entity ''DeepL''. It initially offered translati ...

, a freely-available translation service capable of translating to and from seven major European languages. Since then, DeepL was gradually expanded to offer 24 languages and 552 language pairs. With increasing focus on Kutyłowski's product (DeepL), Frahling decided in 2019 to leave the company. Kutyłowski restructured the company into the

Societas Europaea A ''societas Europaea'' (, ; "European society" or "company"; plural: ; abbr. SE) is a public company registered in accordance with the corporate law of the European Union (EU), introduced in 2004 with the Council Regulation on the Statute f ...

DeepL SE in 2021.

References

Bibliography

External links