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Linguee is an
online bilingual concordance A parallel text is a text placed alongside its translation or translations. Parallel text alignment is the identification of the corresponding sentences in both halves of the parallel text. The Loeb Classical Library and the Clay Sanskrit Libra ...
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 trans ...
. Linguee is operated by
Cologne Cologne ( ; ; ) is the largest city of the States of Germany, German state of North Rhine-Westphalia and the List of cities in Germany by population, fourth-most populous city of Germany with nearly 1.1 million inhabitants in the city pr ...
-based
DeepL DeepL Translator is a neural machine translation service that was launched in August 2017 and is owned by Cologne-based DeepL SE. The translating system was first developed within Linguee and launched as entity ''DeepL''. It initially offered ...
GmbH (; ) is a type of Juridical person, legal entity in German-speaking countries. It is equivalent to a (Sàrl) in the Romandy, French-speaking region of Switzerland and to a (Sagl) in the Ticino, Italian-speaking region of Switzerland. It is a ...
(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 study in artificial intelligence concerned with the development and study of Computational statistics, statistical algorithms that can learn from data and generalise to unseen data, and thus perform Task ( ...
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 is the official online database of European Union law and other public documents of the European Union (EU), published in 24 official Languages of the European Union, languages of the EU. The Official Journal of the European Union, Offici ...
) 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

Linguee pioneered the online bilingual concordance. The concept behind it was conceived in the fall of 2007 by former
Google Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...
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 Energy (, ; abbreviated BMWE, formerly BMWi) is a cabinet-level ministry of the Federal Republic of Germany. It was previously known as the "Ministry of Economy". It was recreated in 2005 as "Minis ...
. In April 2009, the web service was made available to the public. Linguee is operated by DeepL GmbH (formerly Linguee GmbH) based in
Cologne Cologne ( ; ; ) is the largest city of the States of Germany, German state of North Rhine-Westphalia and the List of cities in Germany by population, fourth-most populous city of Germany with nearly 1.1 million inhabitants in the city pr ...
. In 2017, a team of Linguee employees around Jarosław Kutyłowski developed and launched the
DeepL Translator DeepL Translator is a neural machine translation service that was launched in August 2017 and is owned by Cologne-based DeepL SE. The translating system was first developed within Linguee and launched as entity ''DeepL''. It initially offered t ...
, 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 (, ; "European society" or "company"; plural: ; abbr. SE) is a public company registered in accordance with the European corporate law, corporate law of the European Union (EU), introduced in 2004 with the Council Regulation on the Statute ...
DeepL SE in 2021.


See also

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Neural machine translation Neural machine translation (NMT) is an approach to machine translation that uses an artificial neural network to predict the likelihood of a sequence of words, typically modeling entire sentences in a single integrated model. It is the dominant a ...
*
Parallel text A parallel text is a text placed alongside its translation or translations. Parallel text alignment is the identification of the corresponding sentences in both halves of the parallel text. The Loeb Classical Library and the Clay Sanskrit Libr ...
*
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 trans ...


References


Bibliography

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External links

* {{Authority control Translation databases Natural language processing software Computer-assisted translation