We’re happy to announce an important upgrade to our translation services. From now on, DeepL will handle all PDF translations in-house, without the help of third parties, using our privately operated servers based in Europe. This change comes in response to product feedback and our goal of providing you with the best possible translations while maintaining the highest security standards. By bringing the PDF translation process in-house, we’re able to do just that. When it comes to translating whole PDF files, you have two options: 1. Translation of whole PDF files, keeping the formatting in place 2. Translation of text extracted from PDF files without retaining the formatting Going forward, we’ll translate your PDFs—regardless of your account type or location—with the highest security standards on our European servers. And as always, you can expect DeepL’s translations to be consistently accurate and reliable. Note: Whole PDF translation is possible using the web translator, DeepL API, and the DeepL desktop apps. Law firms working with international clients and colleagues must navigate language barriers, foreign laws, and cultural nuances. To address these challenges, legal teams are increasingly incorporating AI translation technology into their workflows to streamline legal translations, improve multilingual communication, and increase productivity. Thanks to major progress in natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) algorithms, AI translation technology is more sophisticated than ever. DeepL Translator exemplifies this. With its precise, contextually relevant, and natural-sounding translations, DeepL Translator is a top choice among businesses worldwide—including those in the legal sector. The adoption of AI translation in the legal industry is part of a larger digital transformation trend. According to Gartner research, in-house legal departments will handle 50% of major corporate transaction work using NLP and ML technologies by 2024. By 2025, they’re expected to triple their spending on legal technology, which makes sense as AI can reduce workloads for lawyers by up to 90%. In this post, we’ll explore how legal teams can leverage DeepL Pro—an industry-leading suite of AI translation tools—to overcome language barriers, deliver better legal services, and drive business success. Translate legal documents quickly, accurately, and at scale DeepL Pro provides a fast, cost-effective, and highly accurate solution for teams in need of convenience translations that are non-binding. Trained on millions of translated texts, including public European Union (EU) legal documents, DeepL Translator’s neural network technology can understand complex, nuanced texts and translate them with precision. Additionally, DeepL Pro offers a scalable solution for translating entire documents, including PDFs, Word files, and PowerPoint presentations, while preserving the original formatting, images, and fonts. This feature makes DeepL an ideal choice for law firms and lawyers that need to get legal translations done quickly and efficiently. Stay compliant with data privacy laws DeepL recognizes the necessity of client confidentiality and data privacy in the legal industry and takes great care to ensure both through state-of-the-art security measures. Data encryption safeguards against unauthorized access, and translations are deleted immediately after completion. Compliant with strict standards like the EU's GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation), DeepL also offers business customers a DPA (Data Processing Agreement) upon request. According to Dr. Anna Zeiter, LL.M., CIPM, CIPP/E, Associate General Counsel & Chief Privacy Officer at eBay, this is a level of protection law firms and lawyers should expect from their technology providers: “Data protection is a critical issue regarding AI communication technologies and their adoption by global business players, employing thousands of people and serving millions of users. As AI-powered systems are increasingly used to collect and process vast amounts of personal data, we need to ensure that AI providers take appropriate measures to protect the privacy of their customers.” Overcome language differences with multilingual clients As global mobility increases and countries become more diverse, lawyers can expect to serve more multilingual clients and meet more language barriers. In the US, the American Bar Association (ABA) guides lawyers when encountering language access issues, suggesting either an interpreter or technological assistance to fulfill professional obligations and enable informed client decisions. The ABA states that once clients face a language access issue, lawyers must decide whether an interpreter or technological assistance is necessary to fulfill their professional obligations and ensure that clients can make informed decisions. They also note that “the availability of assistive and translation technologies is another example of the ever-increasing impact of technology on the practice of law and underscores the duty of lawyers to develop an understanding of relevant technology.” DeepL Pro effectively bridges language gaps for lawyers and clients by offering fast, accurate translations across platforms, including web translators, apps, browser extensions, and an API. Integrations with applications like Microsoft Word, Outlook, and Google Docs facilitate seamless communication, enabling lawyers to provide top-tier services to multilingual clients. Maintain consistency when translating legal terminology DeepL's glossary feature is a game-changer for legal teams because it lets them create and manage their own legal terminology database. This makes sure translations stay consistent by customizing and standardizing how specific words and phrases are translated. Plus, these glossaries can be shared with coworkers, teams, or even the whole company. Whether it's for a small project or something bigger, shared glossaries help keep legal translations top-notch and prevent problems that can arise from mistakes and oversights. Simplify international legal research International law is complex. It deals with diverse legal systems and cultures and is constantly evolving to address new global issues. To practice it effectively, it’s important to stay informed through ongoing research. AI translation is the perfect aid according to Dr. Axel Freiherr von dem Bussche, LL.M. (L.S.E.), CIPP/E, Partner at Taylor Wessing: “Using AI and technology-enabled tools in the legal sector is becoming increasingly important to remain competitive and improve efficiency. These tools can assist lawyers with legal research, document review, and contract analysis and translation, freeing up time for more complex and strategic work.” With features like whole document translation and glossaries, DeepL Pro streamlines international law research, enabling lawyers to translate foreign legal texts accurately and quickly. This reduces the need for manual translations, which can be time-consuming and tedious, and allows for more strategic work. The bottom line AI translation technology is transforming the legal sector. Law firms that collaborate with colleagues and clients from across the world are more empowered than ever to overcome language differences and work across cultures. Those that embrace AI translation technology now will be able to provide their clients with the best possible legal representation, surpass competitors that were resistant to digital transformation, and become industry leaders. Learn how your law organization can leverage DeepL Pro for global expansion and the opportunities and risks of AI in global communications from legal experts at eBay and Taylor Wessing. Join our upcoming webinar on May 8, 2023, Data Privacy and AI: Scaling Your Business Safely in the Global Market. Back in May 2022, we explored how to create glossary entries to ensure that words and phrases are always translated your preferred way. So far in 2023, we’ve leveled up this feature with shared glossaries and the implementation of 28 glossary language combinations between English, Spanish, German, Japanese, French, Italian, Polish, and Dutch. Here we’ll explore how the glossary feature's latest improvements can specifically help businesses grow their enterprise, consolidate internal and external communication, and increase team productivity. Glossaries ensure consistency in messaging across multiple languages. For multinational companies, standardizing things such as technical terminology, product names, or product documentation keeps everyone—clients, customers, and team members—on the same page. This also helps to reduce cost and time lost with manual editing. We’ve recently introduced shared glossaries for users with a DeepL Pro for Business subscription. This means team members can create their own glossaries and then share those with other colleagues or their entire team—increasing collaboration and translation efficiency all at once. Glossaries help ensure translation consistency by tailoring and standardizing the output of specific words and phrases. To create an effective DeepL glossary for your team, it is essential to consistently update it with the latest company terminologies. This involves adding entries for new products and services or removing or amending entries when they are discontinued. By doing so, you can ensure that your translations are always up to date and minimize having to manually edit internal and external communications. When team members use the shared glossaries feature, they can all access the same pre-defined entries. This guarantees that everyone translates specific words and phrases uniformly, regardless of who is doing the translation. The glossary feature can be used as a part of a subscription plan (Starter, Advanced, or Ultimate) as well as with the DeepL API. With a subscription plan you can: With the API you can: Global companies use DeepL glossary to ensure consistency throughout their communication. For example, Deutsche Bahn, Germany’s national railway company—and the largest railway operator in Europe—uses the DeepL glossary feature to maintain translation consistency for its 320,000 employees worldwide. This is especially important for train conductors and station employees who must communicate across languages for safety and scheduling purposes. Glossary is also highly used by organizations in the legal industry, where translation errors and inconsistencies can have immense consequences. DeepL's AI is consistently trained using official EU documents, allowing it to accurately translate intricate linguistic nuances in complex legal texts. Maintaining consistent messaging helps keep growing teams on the same page. It also ensures that prospective customers develop a clear understanding of your business and how you can alleviate their pain points. If you'd like to refine your company's messaging using DeepL Pro, get in touch with our Sales team. You can also learn more about the glossary feature in our Help Center. We’re pleased to announce that the DeepL for Windows app is officially available for download in the Microsoft Store—allowing even more people to benefit from our powerful desktop apps. Once downloaded, our DeepL for Windows app is integrated directly into your computer's operating system—making it the easiest and fastest way to use DeepL. A seamless experience from start to finish, it provides access to DeepL translations anywhere and everywhere you need them on your desktop. How can our DeepL for Windows app help streamline your workflow? Packed with time-saving features and unparalleled flexibility, our DeepL for Windows app makes translation simple and efficient—increasing productivity and reducing effort. From high-quality document translation to our much-loved customization capabilities—such as alternative translations and glossary entries—our Windows app allows you to integrate DeepL into your daily workflow with ease. Additionally, you can use your DeepL Pro subscription in the DeepL for Windows app—meaning you’ll retain full access to all the Pro benefits you know and love. Check out our DeepL for Windows app page for more details or download directly from the Microsoft Store. In May 2022, the government of Québec passed Bill 96, which amends the province’s Charter of the French Language, initially passed in 1977. Bill 96 is the latest in numerous amendments to the charter over the past 40-plus years and affects how businesses must conduct internal communication and serve customers. As of March 2023, the bill’s initial requirements are in effect, with further amendments to be enforced in the coming months and years. What does Bill 96 mean for businesses operating in Québec? Québec businesses will be expected to operate in French, internally and externally. Furthermore, businesses based outside of the province but who operate or transact with customers in Québec must provide services in French. While all businesses regardless of size must comply, businesses with more than 25 employees will need to submit formal documentation to the Office of the French Language for a compliance assessment. Businesses will be required to communicate in French in the following contexts: Given these new legally binding language requirements, translation will become more important than ever in the coming years. Businesses that do not comply with the new requirements could face challenges in court. Montréal lawyer Antoine Aylwin outlines why compliance is especially important: "Businesses should be aware of how Bill 96 will impact their operations. Companies must serve their Québec clients and customers in French, communicate with employees in French, and follow stricter hiring standards. Therefore, it is crucial for businesses to understand and adhere to the new requirements to comply with Bill 96 and to be successful within Québec." - Antoine Aylwin (Partner, Co-leader, Privacy and Cybersecurity at Fasken) To ensure your organization can transition successfully, DeepL offers a full suite of AI-powered translation products designed to help your business translate as seamlessly and cost-efficiently as possible. How can DeepL help businesses in Québec? DeepL is considered the world’s most accurate AI translator. According to blind tests, professional translators chose DeepL’s translations over those of our leading competitors by a factor of 3:1—with English<>French translations consistently chosen over competitors. DeepL also guarantees maximum data security and is trusted by government agencies and law firms around the globe who translate with DeepL while keeping their data safe. Québec’s companies will now need multiple versions of their product documentation, and DeepL is the perfect solution for simple and efficient translation—able to translate web pages, product documentation, internal tools and software, user reviews, customer service information, and more. Teams can also use our glossary feature, allowing you to customize translations with product-and-industry-specific naming conventions—ensuring translations stay consistent with your business’ terminologies. DeepL’s translation products Our Advanced and Ultimate subscriptions are the most efficient way for your team to access instant, cost-effective, and accurate translations across our web translator, desktop and mobile apps, and browser extensions. Subscriptions include unlimited text and enhanced document translation capability. Subscriptions are useful to businesses based outside of Québec who are pursuing customers within Québec—team members can email clients, provide customer service, and send translated documents all in French. They are also particularly beneficial for French-speaking teams to communicate with multilingual clients outside of Québec. DeepL API provides an automated solution to website translation across all pages. The advanced neural networks that power DeepL’s technology mean these translations capture the nuance and context of your industry and product line. The API provides instant site translations crucial to conveying product and customer review information to potential clients. What customers are saying about DeepL DeepL's business customers in Québec are adequately prepared for the changes to the law—able to translate their internal documents, employee communication, and customer interactions with accuracy and speed. Users from around the globe use DeepL to translate from English to French and vice versa—and agree that the quality makes their day-to-day tasks more manageable. With DeepL Pro, I can translate entire documents that I have created in German directly into the languages that I mainly work with (French, English) . . . DeepL Pro is very practical and provides good translations with alternative variants. DeepL Pro makes my work much easier. - DeepL Pro for Business user, Switzerland Want to ensure Bill 96 compliance for your organization? Contact our Sales team to learn more about how DeepL can help your organization navigate this transition. Our team is excited to say “환영합니다” and “Velkommen” to our Korean- and Norwegian (bokmål)-speaking users! Korean and Norwegian (bokmål) are now available on the web translator, desktop and mobile apps, Chrome and Edge browser extensions, and the DeepL API. With these additions, we hope to reach over 80 million native speakers, as well as many more additional users from Europe, Asia, and all over the world. We are continuing to expand our language availability so users can communicate with friends and family abroad, write emails to colleagues—or even expand their businesses to new markets. Every new language release helps to break down communication barriers for people all over the globe. As always, our dedicated team of engineers, researchers, and language experts conducted quality assurance checks to ensure high-quality translations. Try out our new Korean and Norwegian (bokmål) translation now! The beta version of DeepL Write, our newly minted AI writing companion, is free and available for anyone to use! What is DeepL Write? DeepL Write is an AI writing tool that improves written communication in both English and German. Write tackles more than just grammar—it puts you in control of your writing by offering suggestions on phrasing, tone, style, and word choice. With so many options, you’ll never compromise your authentic voice. Who can use DeepL Write? DeepL Write offers something for everyone, regardless of language proficiency. Whether you need to fine-tune some phrasing in your native language or double-check accuracy in your second (or third!) language, you can use the tool to feel more confident in your writing. Write is especially useful for professionals such as journalists, writers, or academics looking to boost their creativity through sentence, word, and rephrase suggestions. Multilingual teams in global companies can also use Write to draft clear and concise emails, campaign proposals, reports, and presentations for international clients. Why are we launching DeepL Write? Through conversations with loyal users of our translator, we found they often improve their writing by switching between source and target language—this gave us the idea to create a new tool exclusively to fine-tune written communication. Similar to the translator, Write utilizes sophisticated neural network technology that captures the context and nuances of the original text to provide rephrasing suggestions and alternative word choices. Where can I use DeepL Write? DeepL Write is available on your desktop browser at DeepL.com/write and via the mobile website on your personal device. As DeepL Write is in the beta phase, we are constantly improving the tool to ensure accuracy in its suggestions. DeepL Translator is already used by millions of people every single day. The addition of Write furthers our mission to build tools that help overcome communication barriers worldwide. ? Questions? Check out our Help Center for more information! The first few days of 2023 have been exciting to say the least! Just this week we announced our partnership with four new investors—all of which are major players in the tech and communications industry: IVP, Bessemer Venture Partners, Atomico, and WiL. We’re honored to join them in this investment partnership! Since 2017, DeepL has changed the game of AI translation with its powerful neural network technology. This latest round of funding brings our company valuation to €1B—meaning we will accelerate our world-renowned research, develop new products, support the growth of our team, and further transform how people and organizations around the world communicate. “From the very beginning our goal has been to raise the standards of AI technology. We’ve consistently invested in researching and improving the advanced neural network technology that makes such accurate translations possible,” said Jarek Kutylowski, CEO and founder of DeepL. “We see this funding round as the next step in our journey to transform DeepL into a wider communications platform through new product offerings.” We’d like to thank our investors for their support and confidence as we dive into this new era. Our new partners have invested in tech heavy-hitters such as Slack, Dropbox, Asana, and more—we're ready to join their growing list of successful ventures. This would not have been possible without our loyal customers and talented team members. Together we’re building a world without communication barriers. If you’re interested in joining our dynamic and growing team, check out our Careers page. 2022 was a big year here at DeepL! We added new languages to the translator, released new products and features, expanded our dedicated team—and even met up as a company for the first time in years. It’s been an exciting time, and we’d like to look back on what made this year so special. New languages Back in May, we released Turkish and Indonesian, expanding usage of the translator to millions more users worldwide. In September, we released our most requested language of the year—Ukrainian—with the hope of easing communication challenges for those relocating abroad. As always, we tested each language release thoroughly to ensure translation accuracy reached DeepL’s high standards. New products and features First off, 2022 brought the release of the Android mobile app. Android users can now translate on the go in 29 languages. We also released not one, but two browser extensions: DeepL for Chrome and DeepL for Microsoft Edge. These extensions allow users to translate snippets of web pages or even their own emails as they write them—all without leaving their browser. DeepL Pro subscribers can utilize full-page translation with the new extensions. Finally, we expanded options on our glossary feature, adding 5 new language pairs, including English<>Japanese, English<>Italian, English<>Polish, English<>Dutch, and German<>French. We also introduced shared glossary, allowing users to share their glossary entries with team members to keep company communication consistent. Going global DeepL Pro subscriptions are now available in Mexico and Singapore, enabling more users to access unlimited translation, maximum data security, and more. We also saw unparalleled success in Japan, with our CEO and founder Jarek Kutylowski receiving a very warm welcome at the Global Management Forum after his talk on how DeepL is helping Japanese companies go global through AI translation. Growing our team We added more team members than ever before in 2022! For the first time since 2019, we brought our team together for an offsite to build collaboration, celebrate successes, and plan for the future. We’d like to thank our loyal users for an incredible (and inspiring) year—stay tuned for more exciting news coming up in early 2023. Once per month, DeepL employees participate in a company-wide Hack Friday, taking on projects outside of their day-to-day work. Hack Fridays are a great opportunity to tinker with our API, and sometimes the results make it to users. In fact, our recently released Google Sheets-DeepL script was the result of a Hack Friday project! On a Hack Friday in September 2022, DeepL software developer Marvin Becker and developer evangelist Tim Cadenbach built a prototype DeepL API add-in for Microsoft Word, making it possible for users to translate with DeepL directly in a Word document. You can see it in action here: Why were we interested in this integration? Business communication is a popular DeepL use case—DeepL translations can enable a global, multilingual workforce to collaborate efficiently while keeping sensitive company data secure. We often hear requests from customers who want to build their own Office Add-in with the DeepL API and are looking for resources to get started. We wanted to learn first-hand what an integration would require so that we can provide better answers when our customers ask us questions. In this post, we’ll share what we learned. We'll also provide open-source code to help you get your project off the ground more quickly. Ready? Let’s build! If you’re brand new to the Office APIs, we suggest reading Understanding the Office JavaScript API in Microsoft’s documentation. In short, all Office products provide a Common API with product-specific APIs on top. It could also be helpful to skim through this tutorial before moving to Tip 1. Script Lab is an open-source project maintained by Microsoft. Script Lab makes it possible to experiment with the Office JavaScript API without leaving Excel, Outlook, Word, or PowerPoint. The Script Lab GitHub repository includes a tutorial to help you get started. We used Script Lab to create an initial prototype of our add-in because it's an ideal way to quickly write code and see it in action—and it consists of only a single JavaScript, HTML, and CSS file. While this initial step isn’t the add-in you can share with team members just yet, it gives you an idea of what is possible with the DeepL API and what sort of user experience you'll be able to provide with your add-in. Earlier in the post, we promised you an open-source code! Script Lab offers a way to import someone else’s “snippet”, so we’ve open sourced the DeepL-Word snippet we created so that anyone can give it a try. You can find it in GitHub here. You’ll also need a DeepL API key if you'd like to follow along with this step. You can sign up for an account here. Simply copy and paste the Gist YAML as outlined in the instructions, insert your DeepL API key in the placeholder in line 32, and you'll be able to run our snippet in just a few clicks. The best part? The Script Lab snippet can be repurposed as you're setting up the add-in template, so all the work you do in Script Lab will come in handy later. Now that we’ve done some prototyping in Script Lab and know the basics of Office scripting, we can start to create an actual add-in using Yeoman. Yeoman is an open-source scaffolding tool that makes new projects relatively easy. For Office Add-ins, there’s a pre-made template by Microsoft you can use, often referred to as “Yo Office”. The process is covered here: Office Add-in Yeoman Generator. After following the setup instructions, copy the code from Script Lab to your newly created repository. There’s more to configure, but you can get started right away by executing 'npm run start’. This will launch Word and automatically sideload your add-in. You can use any IDE for developing, though the generated template works best with Microsoft’s own code editors VS Code or Visual Studio. For a better coding and debugging experience we recommend using Visual Studio. Our implementation of DeepL is straightforward—a JavaScript fetch script calls the text translation endpoint. For our simple prototype, that was sufficient. If you want to enable glossaries in your add-in, you’ll need to put in a bit more work. We didn’t use DeepL’s official Node.js client library for the project because the library isn’t meant for client-side JavaScript code. The reason here is security—you'd expose your API key when calling client-side code. You can look at the GIST file we shared above to see our approach in more detail (starting on line 102). In recent years, Microsoft has made significant investments to support Mac users. While Mac support is quite good for .NET Core development, it’s still not good enough for core Windows development—including Microsoft Office apps. Unfortunately, the Microsoft app versions for Mac users aren’t configured for easy debugging. Tim is a Microsoft loyalist (and MVP!), so he didn’t have any issues, but Mac user Marvin needed to download Parallels to debug properly. Running Microsoft Office and Visual Studio code in Parallels will let you debug apps and work on the add-in properly. It's not a 100% seamless solution, but it gets the job done! Office Add-ins are loaded into the web view that runs in Office apps and are displayed using iFrames, so you’ll need to host it on a web server you have access to. You can read more about how to deploy and publish Office Add-ins in the Microsoft documentation. Once you have the add-in up and running, any Office admin can deploy it to users and groups in their organization via the Microsoft 365 admin center. Add-ins deployed via admin center are available to use right away. It’s easy to extend your add-in to other apps. Office Add-ins share a lot of components, and an add-in for one application should work in all supported applications (Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Visio, and OneNote). However, all the apps have different events. In our Word example, we’ve been using OnTextSelected, whereas in Excel you would probably use something like OnColumnSelected or Row. To make your add-in work in other apps, add the corresponding events or actions you want your add-in to react to—it’s that simple. Most of your code can be re-used across applications. It’s generally recommended to turn your specific code into a function that you can re-use and call again with the application specifics you need. We suggest reading through the articles available here. Also, there’s a nice MS Learn module that can help. We hope you found this overview helpful! If you have any questions, feel free to create an issue in the GitHub repository with the Script Lab snippet and let us know. We wish you all the best on your DeepL API-Microsoft Office journey.