Italian startup Translated launches Lara, an AI-powered translation ...

Rome-based Translated, a provider of AI-powered language solutions, announced Lara on Monday as its official translation AI platform for individuals, teams, and enterprises.

The announcement comes three years after raising $30M in funding led by private investment house Ardian in 2021.

Image credits: Translated Lara: Outperforms Google Translate, DeepL, and OpenAI’s GPT-4o

Trained using 1.2M Nvidia GPU hours, Lara articulates its translation choices using the largely curated translation dataset,  a collection of 25 million real-world translations by top professional translators.

It includes machine-generated translations, reviewed and refined by professional translators, capturing errors, corrective feedback, and reasoning during disagreements.

Based on the project, users can also instruct Lara on the relevant style for a translation, whether fluid, faithful, or creative.

As per the company’s claims, Lara outperforms popular machine translation systems compared to popular machine translation tools, including Google Translate, DeepL, and OpenAI’s GPT-4o tuned for translation.

The Italian company says Lara consistently demonstrates superior accuracy, making fewer errors than median professional translators and approaching the language singularity.

Translated thinks that soon, the top 1 per cent of professional translators will spend the same amount of time reviewing AI-generated translations as they do with those from other translators.

They expect to reach language singularity by 2025 when a new and more powerful version of Lara will be launched.

“Lara is a significant milestone in our mission to allow everyone to understand and be understood in their language,” says Marco Trombetti, co-founder and CEO of Translated.

Lara is now accessible for personal and professional applications in the most frequently requested languages worldwide (English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, and both Simplified and Traditional Chinese) with a plan to support all 200 languages already covered by Translated’s solutions. 

“Language has driven human evolution, allowing us to understand each other, collaborate for a better future, and develop faster than any other species. Based on our experience with clients, once the technology approaches human standards, we estimate a growth in demand for both AI-powered translation (100x) and human translation (10x). By supporting global understanding, Lara is helping us to progress towards the next phase of human evolution,” Trombetti.

Translated: Helping to understand and be understood

Founded in 1999 by linguist Isabelle Andrieu and computer scientist Marco Trombetti, Translated is a language services provider and a pioneer in using artificial intelligence (AI) to assist professional translators.

In 2017, the company created commercial, context-adaptive machine translation (MT) in 2017 with ModernMT.

Currently, the company’s work is used by clients worldwide, including Airbnb, Uber, and Glovo, and has been recognised as leading in AI-powered translation technology by IDC Marketscape, CSA Research, and Gartner.

Translated uses ModernMT and Lara to combine the skills of over 500,000 native-speaking professional translators with fast machine translation. This enables them to handle complex localisation projects.

Currently, Translated offers quick, reliable, and high-quality translations to over 300,000 customers in 200 languages and more than 40 subject areas.