Why not Google or DeepL?
Google Translate and DeepL are excellent translation tools. We're not here to trash their quality — it's genuinely good. But if you're translating sensitive documents, you should know what their privacy policies actually say.
Google Translate
From Google's Privacy Policy:
"Google processes uploaded document content and related usage data under its general Privacy Policy to deliver and improve Translate."
What this means: Your documents flow into the same data pipeline as everything else Google collects. They're used to "improve" services — which includes training AI models.
Google's business model is advertising. They make money by understanding you better than you understand yourself. Free translation is part of that ecosystem.
DeepL
From DeepL's Terms of Use (Free tier):
"Texts and documents submitted to DeepL Free may be processed to train and improve its neural networks."
What this means: If you're using the free version, your documents can be used to train DeepL's AI. You have to pay for DeepL Pro to opt out of this.
Even with Pro, DeepL stores your translations for 30 days by default. You can turn this off, but it's opt-out, not opt-in.
ChatGPT and AI assistants
From OpenAI's Terms of Use:
"We may use Content you provide us to improve our Services."
What this means: By default, conversations with ChatGPT (including documents you paste in) can be used to train future models. You can opt out in settings, but most users don't know this.
Other translation tools
| Service | What their policy says |
|---|---|
| Doclingo | "Deletes or anonymizes translation content once jobs finish" — but offers manual deletion, not automatic |
| Linnk AI | "Documents are processed securely and not stored permanently" — vague on timeline |
| OpenL | "Deletes translation data after processing unless history is enabled" — opt-out, not opt-in |
How noll is different
| DeepL Free | DeepL Pro | noll | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Trains AI on your docs | Yes | Yes | No | No |
| Stores documents | Unclear | Yes | 30 days (default) | 30 minutes |
| Auto-deletion | No | No | No | Yes |
| EU-only processing | No | No | Optional | Yes |
| Opt-out required | N/A | N/A | Yes | N/A |
The bottom line
If you're translating a public blog post or a restaurant menu, use whatever's convenient. Google and DeepL are fast and free.
But if you're translating contracts, legal documents, medical records, financial statements, or anything you wouldn't want to see in a training dataset — you need a tool built for privacy.
That's what we built.
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