Bonjour, Weglot!

In 2016, two entrepreneurs spotted a seemingly glaring opportunity in web development. They wanted to offer fast, quality-driven translations that would seamlessly integrate into a multitude of CMS platforms, in a solution that was made for non-developers.

From one, to many

When Weglot first formed, e-commerce had really started to boom; creating a vast prospective online customer base for organizations, with fewer limitations on where they were located. The challenge, though, was how companies could present their websites accurately, fast and in multiple languages - especially non-native ones. 

Co-founders Rémy Berda and Augustin Prot - Weglot’s CTO and CEO respectively - assessed the landscape; quickly realising the huge use case potential. Everything from e-commerce to marketing, customer service to educational content to form fills needed translating, often by those without “backend” knowledge. So, they began work on creating a “no coding required” solution that effortlessly integrates language translation APIs into Content Management Systems (CMS) like WordPress, Shopify and Squarespace.   

By designing an intuitive interface to help users manage their translations all in one place, the team took what began as a single JavaScript library for one CMS provider and turned it into a robust sub-domain solution. Now, it integrates with any CMS or web frameworks, delivering machine translations instantly, straight to web pages and all in one place.

Onwards, to the next-level of success

When Remy and Augustin first went to market, they weren’t the only solution on the block. Finding a point (or two) of differentiation was going to be their key to big-time growth.

“We made a simple solution,” said Augustin. “But customers were split in their needs. Let’s say 25% were coming to us to improve translation quality, consistency and management, twenty-five per cent for technical simplicity, another quarter want to boost multilingual SEO and for the rest it’s about budget."

“It was clear from the start that we needed to find a translation engine that would be easy to use, super accurate, and fast to help customers get more for their money. We knew, at some point, clients would focus on protecting their data, so security was going to be a must.” 

Augustin Prot, CEO and Co-Founder

What’s the Weglot magic? DeepL

Augustin continued, “We began to look for a translation engine that would give us and our customers incredible speed, as much as it would accuracy.

"There was a lot of chatter about DeepL being the best for quality, speed and ease of use.  Some RFP’s even requested it. So, we evaluated the solution and chose it because of the number of language options, and its throughput rate was really impressive. But what we liked, more with DeepL than others, was that no customer data would be saved, so security was a win. Instantly, we knew DeepL would add to the magic of Weglot, for sure.”

Augustin Prot, CEO and Co-Founder

Teaming up meant game-changing results

With DeepL alongside, Weglot found that the sky really is the limit in terms of performance. Between 80-100% of customers’ translation work can be completed by DeepL’s translation engine, giving them massive scalability and accelerated speed to market. A big deal for lots of industries, especially e-commerce, where thousands of product pages need to be translated, and marketing offers introduced many times a month. 

As Rémy notes:

“Our users have been satisfied and often surprised with the high quality of machine translations. They sometimes don't need to edit anything in an entire page.”

Rémy Berda, CTO and Co-Founder

For high-value pages though, there may be a specific need. Some customers require a very specific tone of voice, or maybe to add in market-focussed nuance, and here Weglot also offer options for post-translation review. Pages can be edited, or translations reviewed, by a professional translation agency to add the final, tailored touches.

Today, Weglot does around 16 million API calls per month, with the average call from Weglot to the DeepL API being 350 characters, and a median entry time of 240 milliseconds - something unmatchable by human translation.

As a result customers who use Weglot see higher conversion rates and SEO rankings from localized pages and are able to be more reactive more quickly; giving them a competitive advantage and ultimately increasing their profitability. 

"Some of our customers are adding, let’s say fifteen languages, to their site, with no human touch, and going from zero to over a hundred converted customers for each language in just one month."

Augustin Prot, CEO and Co-Founder

From customer to partner… and beyond

With the ever-growing demand for speed and quality, without compromise on security - Weglot knew that DeepL would continue to power their translations. So it made sense to explore how to evolve the organizations' relationship. 

Now, the two have moved from long-term customer/provider into strategic partners. As a result Weglot and DeepL are realising both current, and future, benefits and opportunities for growth. 

“DeepL is a brilliant partner. We’ve been able to rapidly grow and now serve over 55,000 customers globally - giving them solid answers to some of their worries when moving from human to machine translation. These have included everything from how they can control and edit output, what happens to keep their data secure, how quickly they can scale with demand, and how we measure quality while ensuring the algorithms are regularly trained and improved,” explains Augustin. 

“We enjoy a superb experience with DeepL. They listen to our needs and those of our customers and they are independent, which our customers love. We both share the ambition to lead in our categories. That’s a powerful attraction that will keep us together and successful in future. I can’t wait to expand our offering into further use cases that drive excellent ROI and experiences for our customers,” he concluded.