Europe's AI-powered Google Translate rival DeepL launches traditional Chinese language in Asia push

German artificial intelligence translation startup DeepL on Wednesday launchedtraditional Chinese as a language option as it looks to expand its presence in Asia.

DeepL, one of Europe's high-profile AI companies valued at $2 billion, sells translation software aimed at businesses rather than everyday consumers.

Traditional Chinese is a written form of Chinese used in Taiwan and Hong Kong. Both locations are key business hubs for technology and finance — a factor that attracted DeepL to launch its latest language in those markets.

Jaroslaw "Jarek" Kutylowski, CEO of DeepL, told CNBC that Taiwan and Hong Kong are "strong technological markets" that are "exporting" — especially in the case of Taiwan, which is home to the world's biggest chipmaker TSMC.

Wednesday's launch is not DeepL's first foray into Asia. The Cologne, Germany-headquartered firm already has Japanese and Korean on its platform.

"Looking especially at Taiwan, there is a lot of similarities in that market to other successful Asian markets we have seen in Japan and Korea," Kutylowski said.

The CEO added that for now, the traditional Chinese business will be run out of Japan before the company considers opening any physical presence in places such as Taiwan or Hong Kong.

DeepL last week launched its next-generation large language model (LLM), which it claims outperforms the latest version of ChatGPT, Google and Microsoft for translation quality. An LLM is an AI model trained on huge amounts of data. That is what underpins DeepL's translation software.

The firm, which has high profile venture backers including a fund from Mark Zuckerberg's family office called ICONIQ Growth and Index Ventures, is seen as a rival to Google Translate.

DeepL, however, focusesmore on