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DeepLcom / deepl-php

Official PHP library for the DeepL language translation API.
MIT License
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QUESTION: Question/Issue regarding translation speed for Tweet-sized sentences #2

Closed diderich closed 2 years ago

diderich commented 2 years ago

I am currently benchmarking DeepL against Google Translate for translating photo captions the size of a Tweet with a rather standardized sentence structure from English to German and French. 80% of the translated caption phrases are identical and in the last 20%, DeepL chooses a more appropriate vocabulary, e.g.

ORIGINAL: Belinda Bencic of Switzerland plays the ball during her third round match against Donna Vekic of Croatia on day two of the 2019 French Open at the Roland Garros stadium in Paris, France on May 31, 2019 (Photo by Claude Diderich / freshfocus)
DEEPL TRANSLATION:  PARIS, FRANKREICH - 31. MAI: Belinda Bencic aus der Schweiz spielt den Ball während ihres Drittrundenmatches gegen Donna Vekic aus Kroatien am zweiten Tag der French Open 2019 im Roland-Garros-Stadion in Paris, Frankreich am 31. Mai 2019 (Foto: Claude Diderich / freshfocus)
GOOGLE TRANSLATION: PARIS, FRANKREICH - 31. MAI: Belinda Bencic aus der Schweiz spielt den Ball während ihres Spiels in der dritten Runde gegen Donna Vekic aus Kroatien am zweiten Tag der French Open 2019 im Roland Garros-Stadion in Paris, Frankreich, am 31. Mai 2019 (Foto von Claude Diderich / freshfocus)

But I noticed that on the speed/latency side, Google is 2x to 3x faster (0.15s vs 0.31s, 0.13s vs 0.39s, 0.2s vs 0.52s, etc.). I was wondering if that is due to

  1. the fact that I am currently using the free version from DeepL, i.e., the paid version would be much faster, or
  2. the translation at deepl.com taking more time than Google does, due to the complexity of the translation algorithm used, i.e., it's coming from the software side, or
  3. deepl.com having less sophisticated hardware resources in place, i.e., it's coming from the hardware side, or
  4. me being located in Switzerland and my network connection to translate.google.com is faster than to deepl.com?
daniel-jones-deepl commented 2 years ago

Hi @diderich, good question, thanks. We're actively working on improving the speed of our service. I hope I can answer some of your questions:

We prioritize Pro requests higher than Free requests, so you may see a performance improvement by upgrading. However the speed depends on many other factors including the demand on our services at any moment.

Yes, some of the speed difference may be explained by location: while Google Cloud has regions in Zurich and Frankfurt, our servers are located in Finland for data security reasons.