Linguee

Linguee GmbH was established in Cologne, Germany, in December 2008 by Gereon Frahling and Leonard Fink. The public launch of their web service occurred in April 2009 after Frahling, a former Google research scientist, and Fink developed the initial concept. Their objective was to create a more contextually aware translation tool. The company’s focus on leveraging large datasets for translation quality stems from Frahling's background.

The core of Linguee's service is a unique combination of an online dictionary and a search engine for translated texts. Unlike traditional machine translation services, Linguee does not automatically translate user-inputted text. Instead, it functions as a bilingual concordance, sourcing vast quantities of professionally translated, parallel texts from the internet, including EU Parliament protocols and patents. This allows users, primarily students and professionals, to see words and phrases in multiple real-world contexts, helping to grasp nuanced meanings and idiomatic expressions that automated translators might miss. The service is particularly useful for legal and technical fields due to its sources.

Linguee operates on a freemium business model. The primary online dictionary and concordance search are free to use, supported by targeted advertising on the platform. Revenue is generated through its sister service, DeepL, which was launched by the Linguee team in August 2017. The company, which subsequently rebranded to DeepL GmbH (now DeepL SE), offers a premium subscription service called DeepL Pro. This service provides high-volume, privacy-enhanced machine translation and integration with professional translation tools, catering to businesses and professional translators. The development of DeepL, a neural machine translation system, was a significant milestone, leveraging the extensive Linguee database for training its advanced neural networks. This strategic evolution positioned the company as a major player in the machine translation market. Keywords: online dictionary, bilingual concordance, translation memory, language technology, contextual translation, professional translation, freemium model, language learning, terminology search, parallel corpora, translation aid, DeepL, Gereon Frahling, Leonard Fink, neural machine translation, language AI, multilingual dictionary, translation search engine, EU parliament texts, patent translations