DeepL, Google Translate or professional service: what to choose for a business document?

On sentence quality, the gap has closed

Let's be blunt: on an isolated sentence in everyday register, good free engines today produce a correct result. Claiming otherwise to sell a service would be dishonest, and would be disproved in ten seconds.

The gap has moved elsewhere: to what surrounds the sentence.

The five places where a document gets lost

Consistency across length

The same term translated three different ways on pages 3, 17 and 42. In a contract, that's a legal risk; in a manual, it's a part the technician can't find. An engine that processes paragraphs independently has no reason to stay consistent.

Domain terminology

Provision doesn't mean the same thing in accounting and in a contract. Charge doesn't either. A general-purpose engine decides based on the immediate context of the sentence; it doesn't know it's reading a balance sheet.

Layout

Copy-pasting a 40 MB PDF into a translation window, then rebuilding the document by hand, costs half a day of someone who's paid more than the translation itself. It's the cost item nobody counts.

Confidentiality

Question to ask before anything else: what happens to the text you paste? Free consumer offerings generally reserve the right to use content to improve their services; paid professional offerings from the same publishers don't. Read the line, it's there. For a takeover project, an exclusivity clause or a patent file, it's the only criterion that matters.

The trail

Who translated what, when, in which version? A browser window leaves nothing. A workspace keeps the files, the versions and the invoice — and that's what you'll be asked for in case of dispute.

When a free tool works very well

We tell our own prospects: don't buy translation to understand a three-line email, read an article, or grasp the general idea of a document you've received. Paste, read, discard. That's exactly the use case these tools are excellent for, and paying would be absurd.

The professional service begins when the document leaves your organisation : what you send to a client, a partner, an administration, an investor. At that point, the question is no longer "is it understandable" but "am I willing to put my name to it".

The real cost comparison

For a 6,000-word document to send to a foreign client:

• Free engine : €0 licence fee, plus one to three hours of formatting and internal proofreading. At a manager's loaded hourly rate, allow for €60 to €150. No audit trail, no confidentiality guarantee.
• Agency : €720 to €1,200, 5 to 10 days, human proofreading, liability assumed.
• Manuce : €35 to €207 depending on level (€107 on Professional), a few minutes, original layout preserved, files kept in your workspace, free sample to review before paying.

None of these three lines is the right answer in every case. The first to understand, the second for what goes to court, the third for everything you work on day to day.