How Deutsche Bahn, Weglot, and Alza used DeepL’s AI translation for more efficient localization

author_by DeepL Team

What you need to know about how DB, Weglot, and Alza used DeepL: 

  • Deutsche Bahn used DeepL to connect its global, multilingual workforce and ensure consistent, industry-specific communication 
  • Weglot's customers benefitted from DeepL API’s incredible accuracy and efficient translations, saving them time and money when localizing their content 
  • Alza integrated DeepL API to efficiently localize its website content into five different European languages, saving thousands of euros a month in operating costs 

 

Why AI translation is the best choice to streamline localization 

Localization isn't an easy process; it requires time, effort, and a great deal of expertise. However, there are ways to make localization easier and less time-consuming—namely, with AI translation. 

Great for localizing everything from your website content to customer support to marketing materials, an AI translation tool like DeepL allows companies to work more efficiently. With higher quality and more accurate machine translations that improve project alignment and lower costs, your company can get a leg up on the competition. 

But don’t just take our word for it—ask our customers. In this post, we’ll cover three case studies to see how real DeepL customers used AI translation to enhance their localization processes and take their businesses global. 

Deutsche Bahn x DeepL: connecting a multilingual workforce with consistent global communication  

Illustration showing a red DB train and the DeepL Pro logo over a bar graph

As the largest railway operator and infrastructure owner in Europe, Deutsche Bahn (DB) has employees all over the continent. Of its 320,000 full-time employees, only 64% are based in Germany—meaning communication across multiple languages is key to DB’s international success.  

Thankfully, DB has DeepL to enable seamless communication for its massive, multilingual workforce.  

To communicate at scale, DB knew that machine translation technology provided the best solution. However, the company had to overcome its main challenge: highly technical terminology.  

In order for employees with different native languages and professions to communicate clearly, the translation would have to account for industry-specific jargon, dialects, and idioms. That’s where DeepL’s glossary really came in handy. 

Since integrating DeepL, DB has added more than 30,000 entries to its glossary, allowing DB employees to communicate consistently across the organization. With the power to specify their own translations for words and even entire phrases, DB ensured the use of industry and company-specific vocabulary in all communications. 

Additionally, DeepL’s glossaries rely on morphosyntactic terminology integration—meaning that DeepL adapts the formulation of translations based on glossary entries and accounts for factors such as grammatical genders and plurals.  

This feature was especially important to Deutsche Bahn, with Tom Winter, Data Scientist & Computational Linguist at DB, saying: 

“The ability to adapt the engine to DB’s corporate language via glossaries is a main advantage of DeepL compared to other machine translation systems. The correct use of our corporate language is very important for consistent communication throughout the whole Group. And with DeepL, it can be done very easily as long as you have a well-organized terminology database.” 

DB has been a satisfied DeepL customer since early 2022 thanks to its best-in-class translation quality, excellent data security, and customizability via its glossary feature.  

Going forward, DB is exploring even more instances where machine translation may be able to assist with its railway operations—such as communications with border traffic. 

To learn more about how DB uses DeepL, you can check out the case study. 

Weglot x DeepL: enhancing localization offerings with the highest-quality AI translation  

 

illustration of a web page using machine translation tools to localize content

Weglot is a Paris-based SaaS company that provides localization and translation services to clients around the world. With demand for its localization services high, Weglot needed translation APIs of exceptional quality—which made a partnership with DeepL the ideal choice. 

As an early adopter of DeepL API, Weglot and its customers have benefited from our accurate, high-quality AI translations since 2018—having already helped over 50,000 companies build multilingual websites. 

So, why DeepL? Weglot’s founder and CTO, Rémy Berda, was on the lookout for top-quality language translation APIs to enhance his company’s offerings and services. When customers started asking, “Have you added DeepL?” shortly after our DeepL API release, Berda’s interest was sparked. 

Chosen for its ease of use for developers and high-quality translations, over the last six years, DeepL API has helped Weglot translate billions of characters a month for companies all over the world. 

Thanks to the accuracy of DeepL’s AI translations, Weglot’s customers save time during their localization processes, which led them to work more efficiently.  

Since integrating the API, Weglot received plenty of positive customer feedback thanks to DeepL’s speed and accuracy. In fact, Berda himself recommended DeepL to developers who are looking for a high-performing product that’s true to its word, stating: 

“The documentation is clear, and the API does what it says it does. If you’re a developer, you only need to read the documentation, and the API will do exactly what you want.” 

As the e-commerce industry becomes more international, it’s crucial that companies of all sizes have access to high-quality localization and translation services. Thanks to translation tools offered by DeepL and Weglot, quick, accurate multilingual communication with customers and markets around the globe is not only possible–it’s easy. 

Want to find out more about how Weglot uses DeepL? Read the case study.

Alza x DeepL: saving on localization operating costs with AI translation at scale 

illustration of three websites showing the localization process and machine translation

Known as the “Czech Amazon”, Alza is an e-commerce giant with key markets all over Europe—from Czechia to Germany to Hungary. Since its founding in 1994, Alza has grown from an online electronics shop to a complete marketplace, now offering laptops, video games, pet supplies, cosmetics, and more. 

In mid-2021, Alza noticed that DeepL added 13 new supported languages, with Czech, Slovak, and Hungarian being the most applicable. After some quality testing, Alza discovered DeepL to be a superior product to their current translation API and quickly made the switch.  

Since then, Alza has been using DeepL to localize its website into five different European languages: 

  • English 
  • Slovak 
  • Hungarian 
  • German 
  • French 

With over 3,000 employees, Alza is growing rapidly—at 20% annually—and recently expanded to Central Europe and the UK. To thrive in these new markets, Alza needed access to high quality translations that wouldn’t overburden its localization team with manual corrections.  

Thanks to DeepL’s superior translation quality, Alza saved thousands of euros per month in operating costs, as the brand’s human proofreaders spent significantly less time correcting DeepL translations—and could focus on higher-impact projects. 

Additionally, the migration from Alza’s previous translation API to DeepL took less than one week, and the effect was immediate. 

In the words of Jakub Kalina, head of Alza’s localization team: 

“When DeepL began supporting Czech and other key languages, we were quite surprised with the difference in quality. It sounded much more natural, so we decided it was worth making the switch.” 

Specifically, Alza used DeepL to translate large volumes of reviews, which provided quality assurance for potential customers. Having translated thousands of reviews from Czech into German and Hungarian, Alza saw a significant increase in its conversion rate. 

As for what’s next, Jakub also foresees a high-volume future for his team: 

“Thanks to a significant cost reduction and freeing up our translators’ time, we can now take on new translation projects, so it looks like our translation volume will continue to grow—it could even double or triple in the coming months.”  

Check out our Alza case study to learn more about how the Czech e-commerce giant uses DeepL to grow.

Improve your localization process with DeepL’s AI translation 

Clearly, DeepL’s high-quality, accurate AI translations are a contributing factor to these three companies’ successful localization processes.   

Reducing time spent on manual work, improving alignment, and driving down costs, DeepL continues to help streamline DB, Weglot, and Alza’s localization projects to reach global audiences—and we could do the same for your business. 

To learn more about how your company can benefit from DeepL’s AI translations, visit DeepL Pro for Business.