Today I’m going to write about some software services that make my life easier. They are SaaS services – software as a service, i.e. software that runs in the cloud. As an end-user, I either use the application provided by the service creators or access the cloud services using my web browser.
DeepL
I’ll start with DeepL, a translation service based on artificial intelligence and neural networks, which has proven far superior to Google Translate. Among other things, DeepL translates the meaning of various expressions much better.
DeepL currently supports 29 languages, including Ukrainian, although some functions are not available in all languages.
I (still) go for the free version, which allows translation of up to 5000 characters at a time. For longer texts, I have to copy-paste in chunks, but it’s not too much of an inconvenience for me.
For IoS and Android, there are dedicated apps, These apps know how to use both a microphone and camera and dictation of the translated text. There is an app for Windows, and recently a Chrome add-on was released.
Grammarly
Grammarly is a spelling and grammar correction service for English. It knows how to correct punctuation. It can give suggestions for text clarity. It can provide recommendations for sentence rephrasing, and it has many other features.
I usually use Grammarly in conjunction with DeepL when I have to translate text from Romanian into English, including when writing on this blog. I perform the translation with DeepL first, and then put the translated text into Grammarly. The result is comparable to or even superior to the translation I could do myself.
