Language barriers are a significant obstacle to cross-border expansion. Although English is commonly regarded as the global business language, only 20% of the world’s population speaks it fluently, affecting various business operations. Recent research from DeepL identified the primary challenges businesses face due to language barriers, including difficulty expanding into new markets, serving international customers effectively, delivering successful customer support and facilitating smooth internal communication between teams speaking different languages.
In response, enterprises are turning to modern solutions like Language AI tools. But how effective are these solutions for business communication? Let’s explore how Language AI, including the tools offered by industry leader DeepL, is helping businesses achieve global growth and success, driving greater efficiency, significant cost savings and improved cross-border collaboration.
What is Language AI?
Language AI refers to artificial intelligence systems designed to understand, process and generate human language. These systems handle tasks like translation, writing and text generation, speech recognition, and more, and typically rely on natural language processing (NLP), machine learning (ML) and neural networks to analyze text or speech, interpret its meaning and respond appropriately. However, the specific techniques utilized for a particular task may vary, with some tasks requiring only one or a combination of these methods.
Language AI has numerous powerful applications today. DeepL, for instance, provides a comprehensive Language AI platform built for businesses and enterprises. It offers highly accurate and secure AI-powered translation tools for spoken and written communication, along with advanced writing and editing capabilities designed to break down language barriers and enable businesses to communicate effectively across multiple languages.
Specialized vs. General AI Models for Translation: What’s the Difference?
Language AI offers many modern benefits that can help you scale your business locally and internationally, but not every AI model out there will cater to your specific business needs. Therefore, it’s essential to understand the distinction between the available models to choose one that aligns with your particular goals and requirements.
There are two primary categories of AI models on the market: specialized and general. General AI models are designed to address a wide range of tasks using a broad and diverse dataset, often sourced from the publicly available internet. Notable examples include ChatGPT-4 and Gemini. While these models can be versatile and suitable for consumer-level tasks, they often lack the precision and quality needed for business and professional use cases. In contrast, specialized AI models are designed and optimized for specific industries or use cases. Specialized models are trained on domain-specific data, making them highly effective for tasks such as medical diagnoses, credit scoring, and language translation.
Within the realm of language and communication, there are various consumer-driven translation tools powered by general AI models that offer basic translation and writing/editing support for everyday use cases, ranging from menu translation and travel assistance to social media posts and personal communication. In contrast, DeepL is a specialized Language AI solution with AI translation and writing solutions tools that are purpose-built for language use cases. This specialization enables DeepL to achieve higher accuracy, quality, and contextualization while minimizing hallucinations and misinformation, which is critical for complex business use cases that demand higher accuracy, customization, data privacy, and security.
An In-Depth Look at DeepL’s Language AI Platform for Businesses
Since its inception in 2017, DeepL has become the go-to specialized Language AI provider for businesses around the world, offering cutting-edge translation and writing solutions trusted by over 200,000 businesses and governments including industry leaders like Softbank, Mazda, Harvard Business Publishing, The Ifo Institute, Panasonic Connect and more.
The DeepL Language AI platform offers the following key products, specifically designed to support a broad range of enterprise use cases covering both internal and external needs, from employee collaboration and customer support to marketing localization, document review and more:
DeepL Translator produces highly accurate, personalized, human-like translations across 33 languages to help businesses and professionals communicate seamlessly in multiple languages across text and document translation, image translation, and speech-to-text translation.
DeepL Voice empowers teams to communicate confidently across languages in real-time, whether in virtual meetings or face-to-face interactions with colleagues, partners, or customers. DeepL Voice includes two offerings: Voice for Meetings, which eliminates language barriers in virtual meetings, and Voice for Conversations, designed to facilitate one-on-one, in-person discussions on mobile devices with translated captions.
DeepL Write is an AI-powered writing assistant designed to enhance written communication for businesses and professionals, offering real-time suggestions for improving word choice, spelling, grammar, punctuation, phrasing, style and tone. With DeepL Write, users can achieve flawless spelling, grammar, and punctuation, sound fluent and professional, and fine-tune their writing with alternative words and sentences. The product also allows users to adjust the style and tone to suit various audiences.
DeepL API enables customers to integrate DeepL’s Language AI technology within their own infrastructure, bringing the company’s high quality translation and writing capabilities directly to businesses’ websites and applications. Common use cases for the DeepL API include website translation, company communications, as well as the creation of multilingual products, enabling real-time chat translation to localized comments and reviews, and more.
From an accuracy and quality perspective, DeepL significantly outperforms competitors. According to 2024 blind tests, translations powered by its next-gen LLM are proven to require significantly fewer edits than competitors, with Google and ChatGPT requiring between two and three times more edits to achieve a comparable level of quality. Additionally, DeepL is consistently preferred by professional translators over Microsoft, ChatGPT and Google Translate.
DeepL remains at the forefront of Language AI innovation, continually investing in new features and products designed to meet evolving customer demands. Within the last several months, the company has introduced significant enhancements to its API solution for businesses, including advanced translations powered by next-generation AI models and the addition of the DeepL Write API; and also upgraded its Translator with the introduction of the Clarify feature, which acts as an interactive AI companion that resolves translation ambiguities and provides users with greater control throughout the process, resulting in higher-quality, more nuanced translations.
Choosing DeepL also means prioritizing security and efficiency for your enterprise. DeepL’s products adhere to the highest enterprise-grade privacy and security standards to protect user data, including state-of-the-art data encryption and GDPR, ISO 27001 and Soc2 Type 2 compliance. Paid customer data is never used to enhance or train DeepL’s models.
Driving Real-world Business Success in Global Markets
Deploying Language AI solutions like DeepL offers businesses several strategic benefits, including enhanced collaboration and improved communication, time and efficiency gains, cost savings and competitive differentiation. In the e-commerce industry, for example, Alza (also known as the “Czech Amazon”) successfully leverages DeepL to drive growth in its key European markets. With the help of DeepL, Alza has efficiently localized its website into five languages, reducing the burden on Alza’s localization team and significantly cutting manual corrections – saving thousands of euros in monthly operating costs. By translating large volumes of customer reviews from Czech into German and Hungarian, Alza has also seen a significant increase in conversion rates, demonstrating the direct impact of high-quality translations on customer retention and revenue.
In the media and marketing industry, iCrowdNewswire, an international press release distribution company, has significantly enhanced the quality and efficiency of its multilingual press release translations with DeepL’s powerful API solution. iCrowdNewswire translates every press release into nine languages for more exposure and better message control for its customers – and leveraging DeepL’s API to translate between 45 and 55 million characters per day allows iCrowdNewswire to turn what had been an expensive and highly manual process into a scalable, high-quality and reliable solution delivering accurate, human-like translations; all while maintaining cost efficiency, increasing customer satisfaction and reducing operational costs by approximately $150,000 annually.
Europe’s largest railway operator and infrastructure owner, Deutsche Bahn, has also overcome its multilingual communication challenges by integrating DeepL. With approximately 320,000 full-time employees, only 64% of whom are based in Germany, clear and accurate multilingual communication is critical to Deutsche Bahn’s international operations. And with the help of DeepL’s translation technology and glossary functionality, the company can now address the complexity of highly technical terminology, dialects and idioms across different languages. Since integrating DeepL, Deutsche Bahn has added more than 30,000 entries to its glossary, ensuring consistent, precise communication tailored to industry-specific vocabulary.
These real-world results align with findings from a 2024 study by Forrester, which quantified the transformative impact of DeepL. The study highlights a 90% reduction in translation time and a 50% workload reduction, as well as a 345% return on investment (ROI). Together, these advantages empower enterprises to seize new growth opportunities and operate effectively in increasingly competitive global markets.
Embrace the Future of Business Communication
As globalization continues to accelerate, mastering cross-border multilingual communication is proven to help your business operate more efficiently and drive significant ROI. Powerful Language AI solutions from DeepL have become a go-to solution for companies looking to break the barriers that are holding your business expansion back.
To learn more about how Language AI can help your global business unlock its full potential, visit deepl.com/en/pro.
