Unbabel

About Unbabel

Unbabel was founded in Lisbon, Portugal in 2013 and has grown into one of the most recognised AI-human hybrid translation platforms in the world. The core proposition is quality-assured machine translation: Unbabel's AI translates content rapidly, and a vetted community of bilingual human editors post-edits the output to remove errors, ensuring the final quality is suitable for customer-facing use cases. This hybrid approach makes it particularly relevant for customer support, marketing localisation, e-commerce, and regulated communications where pure MT quality is insufficient. The platform integrates natively with major customer service platforms including Salesforce Service Cloud, Zendesk, and Freshdesk, making it straightforward for support operations to add multilingual capability without replacing existing tooling. Unbabel also supports batch translation workflows for large document volumes and has a developer API for custom integration. For EU businesses, Unbabel's Portuguese incorporation is a clear compliance advantage. The company operates under Portuguese and EU law, provides a GDPR-compliant DPA, and processes data in EU-based infrastructure. Critically for enterprises, Unbabel publishes clear data handling policies for the human editing workflow — editors only see the text segments assigned to them, not full documents or customer context, which limits data exposure in the human-in-the-loop process. Unbabel holds ISO 27001 certification and is SOC 2 Type II compliant, which is strong for a European scale-up of its size. These certifications, combined with its EU legal jurisdiction, make it one of the compliance-friendliest translation platforms available for European enterprises. It is particularly well-regarded in regulated industries including financial services and e-commerce that require consistent, auditable multilingual output. Pricing is enterprise-oriented and typically quote-based, with costs depending on volume, language pairs, and quality tier. Unbabel has historically targeted mid-market to enterprise customers rather than SMBs, so entry costs are higher than pure MT tools like DeepL. However, for organisations where translation quality and compliance are non-negotiable, the combination of EU sovereignty, ISO 27001, SOC 2, and human quality assurance justifies the premium.