Translator service DeepL sees Korea as big market

DeepL plans to release a paid service, named DeepL Pro, for both individuals and corporate clients in Korea in August.

Jarek Kutylowski, CEO and founder of DeepL, speaks during a press conference held at the Josun Palace Hotel in Gangnam District, southern Seoul, Tuesday [DEEPL]

DeepL, a Cologne, Germany-based machine translation start-up, sees Korea as one of its biggest markets for its artificial intelligence-powered translator service in the future, says the company’s CEO.

“We are always on the lookout for the countries in the world where we can actually make a difference,” said Jarek Kutylowski, DeepL CEO and founder, during a press conference held at the Josun Palace Hotel in southern Seoul, Tuesday.

While Korea has a high language barrier in the global market, the country is known for being tech-savvy, which resulted in the fast-growing demand for DeepL’s translation service, according to Kutylowski.

“I’m personally expecting Korea to become at least one of our top five markets in the future,” said the CEO.

DeepL, founded in 2017, is known for its strong performance in understanding the context of inputted language and therefore comparatively more natural-sounding results in the target language of translation.

The company plans to release a paid service, named DeepL Pro, for both individuals and corporate clients in Korea in August.

The service will ensure improved data security features that guarantee all of the texts translated are immediately deleted afterward, as well as no limitation in the number of texts users can translate.

DeepL currently has 500,000 paid users and 20,000 enterprise customers, according to the company.

Answering a question on the heated competition in the global AI market led by Microsoft and Google, Kutylowski said that he is “confident” in DeepL’s chance against its much bigger rivals.

“We’ve been competing against those [big players in the market] since the beginning of the company,” said Kutylowski, explaining that focusing on one specific area of AI services and dedicating its resources to improving it made the company competitive against general AIs.

“Our advantage here has been a lot of focus on solving a particular problem for our users, and this has allowed our research teams to be very effective,” stressed Kutylowski, adding that “I’m very confident to be able to continue that further on.”

BY SHIN HA-NEE [shin.hanee@joongang.co.kr]