Linguee
Linguee is a web service from DeepL GmbH (until 2017: Linguee GmbH ) based in Cologne, which provides an online dictionary for the 25 languages Bulgarian , Chinese , German , Danish , English , Estonian , Finnish , French , Greek , Italian , Japanese , Latvian , Lithuanian , Maltese , Dutch , Polish , Portuguese , Romanian , Russian , Swedish , Slovak , Slovenian , Spanish , Czech and Hungarian on the Internet, whereby the translation options between the languages are partially limited. For example, for the languages Chinese , Japanese and Russian, only translations from and into English are possible.
In contrast to comparable services such as LEO or dict.cc , Linguee's dictionary is combined with a search engine that enables access to large quantities of bilingual, translated sentence pairs in a database, most of which come from the World Wide Web .
As a translation aid, Linguee differs from automatic translation services such as Babel Fish or Google Translate and is similar in function to a translation memory .
technology
Linguee uses a specialized web crawler to search the Internet for suitable bilingual texts and to break them down into parallel sentences. The pairs of sentences found undergo an automatic quality assessment in that a machine learning algorithm trained by humans assesses the quality of a translation. The user can access the set of sentence pairs with the aid of a fuzzy search , the ranking of the search results being influenced by the previous quality assessment and the match with the search term. Users can also rate translations manually, which means that the machine learning system is continuously trained.
Data sources
In addition to the bilingual web, translated patent texts as well as EU parliamentary protocols and legal provisions of the European Union ( EUR-Lex ) serve as sources. According to the operator, Linguee offers access to around 1 billion translations.
history
The concept behind Linguee was devised by former Google employee Gereon Frahling in autumn 2007 and developed together with Leonard Fink the following year. In 2008, the business idea was awarded the main prize in the start-up competition of the Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology . In April 2009 the web service became publicly available.
The former startup has been able to bear its costs since 2013 with the advertising income generated .
On August 28, 2017, a machine translator called DeepL, based on artificial neural networks, was put online and trained on Linguee's collected database. In this context, Linguee GmbH and its 22 permanent employees changed their name to DeepL GmbH.
In 2020 the company had 70 employees, the managing director is Jaroslaw Kutylowski.
Awards
- 2010: SUMA Award (2nd place)
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Ingo Pakalski: Linguee: search engine for translations. In: golem.de. Golem.de, April 8, 2009, accessed March 15, 2018 .
- ↑ Information at linguee.de , accessed July 19, 2018
- ↑ BMWi awards winners of the "Start-up Competition - Successful Start with Multimedia" at IFA 2008 with prize money of up to 25,000 euros. Archived from the original on March 13, 2012 ; accessed on February 7, 2017 . (BMWi press release of September 1, 2008)
- ↑ Timo Brücken: How a startup from Cologne wants to depend on Google Translate . In: Gruenderszene.de . August 31, 2017, accessed January 17, 2018.
- ^ Business register Bundesanzeiger Verlag, accessed on September 7, 2017.
- ↑ Is Deepl speculating on the Google exit, Jaroslaw Kutylowski? March 25, 2020, accessed April 21, 2020 .