When DeepL met SyncWords

When you watch a global event like the Australian Open, or catch breaking news with real-time captions and subtitles, you probably don’t think about the technology behind the scenes. But for millions of viewers worldwide, seamless captions and translations make all the difference between being included or left out. That’s where SyncWords helps.

As a US-based leader in live and VOD captioning, subtitling, and AI-powered voice translations, SyncWords powers millions of video hours, supporting 100+ languages across the world’s biggest events, webinars, and corporate broadcasts.

But with increasing demand for high-quality multilingual support, particularly from European customers, SyncWords needed a translation solution that matched its commitment to speed, accuracy, and scale. Luckily, their customers knew exactly where they could find it, and urged SyncWords to collaborate 
with DeepL.

“Our customers needed higher-quality translations–especially in European languages–and we had to deliver. That’s why we brought DeepL into our live video workflows. Our clients actually asked us for them."

Giovanni Galvez, VP of Business Development and Strategy, SyncWords

The challenge: scaling multilingual video content without compromising quality

SyncWords isn’t just about automating translations—it’s about ensuring global audiences get the same seamless, engaging experience as native speakers.

But scaling high-quality translations and captions across live events, including breaking news, global sports tournaments, and corporate webinars presented major challenges.

The speed factor

Traditional live captioning and subtitling systems lagged behind by 4-8 seconds, making real-time engagement frustrating and disconnected. SyncWords needed AI-powered translations that kept pace with live video.

Accuracy and context

AI translation tools often struggled with industry-specific terminology, speaker tone or missing context.

Scaling across events and industries

SyncWords translates and captions millions of words daily across news, sports, media, entertainment, and corporate events—a volume that required seamless automation without compromising on accuracy.

Instant language scalability

The platform can dynamically add new languages whether a few or dozens in just seconds, ensuring every live stream or broadcast instantly reaches a diverse global audience.

Personalized translations: matching tone and intent

Live captions and voice translations must sound natural, not robotic. SyncWords has created a solution that can maintain the nuance of a speaker’s original speech pattern, including tone, pitch, and intent.

Compatibility with streaming platforms and protocols

AI engines don’t magically work with live streaming video formats like RTMP, SRT, HLS, and CMAF ingest. SyncWords has built a streaming workflow that can leverage the latest streaming technology while turning the magic of AI into plug and play.

The DeepL difference

• AI-powered translations that customers prefer

SyncWords had tested multiple AI translation tools to evaluate their ability to handle linguistic nuances, industry-specific jargon, and contextual subtleties, before integrating DeepL into its workflow. As demand for high-quality multilingual support—especially in European languages—grew, they needed a solution with superior fluency, terminology handling, and sentence structure across many industries.

Clients were thrilled to see DeepL seamlessly integrated into SyncWords' live streaming workflows, because it lets them tap into the latest DeepL innovations and instantly test language enhancements within all their video content.

• Real-time, synchronized captions & translations

For live broadcasts, even a slight delay in captions can break immersion. Before SyncWords enhanced its AI-driven workflow, captions often lagged, creating a frustrating user experience.

"During live broadcasting, the presentation of the captions typically lags between four and eight seconds behind the video/audio, while words and parts of sentences may be misspelled or missed completely. These issues cause bad end-user experiences."

AWS Blog on SyncWords & AWS Elemental Media Services​

SyncWords tackled this challenge head-on. By fine-tuning its AI-driven live streaming platform, SyncWords minimized latency, creating a seamless experience for live audiences. DeepL’s high-speed API operates at fraction-of-a-second speeds, ensuring live translations keep pace with even the fastest-moving conversations.

• Personalization that resonates

SyncWords understands that video localization goes beyond just words—it’s about maintaining context, accuracy, and speaker intent. That’s why they’re leveraging DeepL’s glossary feature to ensure terminology remains consistent across industries like corporate, legal, and technical broadcasts.

“Glossary usage has been a game-changer for maintaining consistency in complex technical translations and highly specialized content.”

Giovanni Galvez, VP of Business Development & Strategy, SyncWords

SyncWords is also pioneering AI-powered tone-matching for voice translations, ensuring that dubbed video content retains the original speaker’s pitch, emotion, and style for an authentic viewing experience. Furthermore, the platform excels even during dynamic group conversations with multiple speakers. SyncWords sees it as the next evolution of AI-driven translations for live news and sports.

• Simple and seamless API integration

SyncWords leverages Kubernetes for container orchestration, making sure that each live captioning and translation instance can dynamically scale based on demand. This setup allows the system to:

1. Auto-scale elastic resources dynamically when high-traffic live events like the Grand Slam Tennis tournaments, Olympic and Paralympic Games, political debates, breaking news or global summits create sudden demand surges.
2. Run DeepL’s API in distributed Kubernetes pods, balancing the load for real-time, ultra-low-latency translations.
3. Optimize cost-efficiency, spinning up resources only when needed, rather than maintaining costly on-prem infrastructure.
4. Deploying live subtitling and translations in various regions across the globe, keeping the live streaming workflow close to the source.
5. Integrate into existing live streaming workflows that require the redundancy of dual video pipelines, and resiliency within a global region.

"Scaling is critical for live streaming because demand fluctuates massively. With Kubernetes, we ensure that every live stream has the exact resources it needs—no overloading, no lag, just real-time AI-driven accuracy. Being able to caption or translate hundreds or thousands of  live streams instantly is now a reality.”

Giovanni Galvez, VP of Business Development & Strategy, SyncWords

So, SyncWords had already built a microservices-based architecture to support large-scale, real-time streaming captioning and translation. The challenge? Finding a translation API that could integrate smoothly, scale with demand, and maintain accuracy under pressure. DeepL’s API provided plug-and-play scalability without the need for specialized hardware or manual configuration, ensuring smooth delivery for millions of video hours daily. 

With DeepL’s API fully embedded into the Kubernetes-based environment, SyncWords can:

• Deploy real-time AI translations across thousands of simultaneous live streams, without bottlenecks.
• Ensure every containerized live streaming instance gets instant access to DeepL’s latest contextual translation models, improving language fluency in real time.
• Eliminate the need for costly, dedicated translation servers, instead using a fully cloud-native, auto-scaling deployment model.

Helping customers go global

SyncWords is more than a translation provider—it’s a trusted strategic partner for businesses looking to grow internationally.

With DeepL’s support, SyncWords is able to offer:

• Instant access to major European languages. This is critical for European market expansion.
• 4x higher audience engagement. Subtitled videos are watched to completion four times more often.
• Seamless regulatory compliance. This helps businesses meet legal accessibility mandates worldwide.
• Monetization and Distribution. This helps broadcasters license their live content across the globe to increase revenue.

What’s next: the future of 
AI-powered video localization

As video content continues to grow in importance and demand for multilingual video skyrockets, SyncWords is paving the way for more accessible and personalized multilingual communication:

• AI-driven tone-matching translations that deliver human-like dubbed voiceovers.
• Faster, more scalable workflows, handling millions of words daily.
• Expanding into new markets with DeepL powering the next phase of global reach.
• Support for emerging streaming video technology: 4k resolution video with surround sound translations for live - sporting events delivered with low latency.

“DeepL enables SyncWords to deliver high-quality translations in real-time, even for high-pressure live events.”

Giovanni Galvez, VP of Business Development & Strategy, SyncWords

Live video is the future, but only if it speaks your audience’s language. SyncWords and DeepL are making that happen–effortlessly, in real time, and at scale.