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On the surface, there are more than 100 companies in the world that build and offer machine translation (MT) on a noticeable scale. Below the surface, there are hundreds of thousands of individual practitioners who build MT, and the most popular tools see millions of downloads per month. With the democratization of AI, an engineer can build an MT model in one day. However, beating Google or DeepL in quality, performance, and market presence is another story. So, who are the teams that are able to compete, stand tall, and beat the odds in the market of MT? Here are some of our top picks.

Big Tech MT

All of the top software giants in the world have built MT capabilities. Search engines like Google wanted to increase the number of websites people could discover, read, and engage with. After achieving success with the Chrome integration, they built MT into a cloud business. eCommerce companies like Amazon and Alibaba started by translating millions of inventory items on their online shopping platforms and expanded the technology into business later. Big Tech leads today’s MT market by the number of business users, and quite often in linguistic quality. 

1. Google Translate

Probably the largest MT business in the world in terms of sales, and one of the leading players in linguistic quality, Google Translate is ubiquitous. On top of churning billions of words each day in Chrome for the good of mankind, the product-built business features including customization with translation memory and terminology bases, and document translation via the Google Translation Hub.

2. Microsoft Translator

The closest rival to Google Translate, Microsoft Translator has the edge when it comes to Office applications. It is built into Outlook, Word, Teams, Excel, and other apps that billions of people use every day at work. On the business side, the advantage of Microsoft Translate is probably the only translator that can be hosted in a private cloud, so a bank can unplug it from the Internet and run it on their own hardware.

3.  Amazon Translate

Amazon entered the MT game later than its Big Tech rivals and built new features that give it a unique selling proposition to compete. One of them is ”dynamic adaptation”, the ability to learn daily from user corrections without lengthy model retraining operations. Moreover, they introduced controls for the tone of voice and formality very early on, making their MT better for conversational translations. Still lagging behind Google and Microsoft in language coverage, Amazon is able to win large accounts like BMW due to their prowess in marketing to developers.

More options:

• Alibaba
• Tencent

Dedicated MT/NLP Companies

With the exception of the newly minted unicorn DeepL, dedicated MT companies are mostly niche players that generate the majority of their revenues in on-premise deals with banks, government agencies, and intelligence services. Wherever the client doesn’t want to go to the Cloud due to security issues, dedicated MT firms excel.

LSP MT Brands

Many translation and language services companies have built their own models over the years, and attempted to commercialize them with varying degrees of success.