SlatorPod: Recent Episodes

Slator

SlatorPod is the weekly language industry podcast where we discuss the most important news and trends in translation, localization, and language technology. Brought to you by Slator.com.

Artur Nowakowski, Co-founder and CTO of Laniqo, joins SlatorPod to talk about the language technology platform’s (LTP) origins, business model, and research-driven approach to AI translation.

Artur shares that Laniqo emerged from machine translation research at Adam Mickiewicz University after his team won a WMT 2022 shared task, attracting PONS Langenscheidt, which became the company’s main investor and helped commercialize the university’s technology.

Laniqo initially developed its own neural machine translation models but shifted toward open-source large language models as their translation capabilities improved. According to Artur, controlling and adapting these models remains essential for domain-specific use cases and lower-resource language pairs.

He highlights Laniqo’s work with Central and Eastern European ecommerce platform Allegro, where the LTP supports the translation of hundreds of millions of product offers. Key challenges include scalability, cost control, terminology, limited source context, and detecting critical errors across volumes that human linguists cannot review manually.

Laniqo is also developing quality estimation tools that identify error spans, assign MQM categories, and suggest corrections. Its recently published ForMaT dataset supports research into PDF translation that preserves document layouts without relying on conversion to Microsoft Word.

Looking ahead, Artur outlines how Laniqo plans to expand beyond text translation into voice, images, and broader language AI applications, while continuing to prioritize privacy and deeper domain adaptation.

Sean Hopwood, Founder and CEO of Day Translations, joins SlatorPod to talk about building a global language solutions integrator (LSI) over the past 20 years, adapting to AI, and why a passion for languages continues to shape the LSI's strategy.

Sean reflects on how his entrepreneurial mindset and fascination with languages led him to launch Day Translations, which has grown from handling small community projects into serving enterprise, legal, medical, and government clients while remaining bootstrapped.

He explains why human expertise remains central as the LSI adopts AI across its workflows, develops its own large language model for enterprise and government procurement, and plans to commercialize these capabilities while continuing to invest in technology.

He discusses the DayInterpreting app, which integrates with Zoom and Microsoft Teams, supports rapid interpreter connections, and is already prepared for AI interpreting when customers require it.

He argues that constant learning, business growth, and technological adaptation are essential for long-term success, while also stressing that translation plays a vital role in preserving cultures and protecting linguistic diversity.

He concludes by outlining plans to expand the interpreting platform, strengthen the LSI's B2B focus, secure additional compliance certifications, and continue combining human expertise with AI-powered language solutions.

Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the past couple of weeks, beginning with the newly released 2026 Slator Language AI 50 Under 50, which tracks emerging startups less than 50 months old.

The duo observe how this year’s cohort reflects a shift from standalone language technologies toward AI solutions built around complete business workflows.

They also highlight seven trends, including the rise of agentic AI, AI-first language solutions integrators, specialist sign language startups, and the growing importance of proprietary customer data as a competitive advantage.

Florian covers a stream of language AI announcements from Google, Apple, and Anthropic as the platforms continue to expand their multilingual capabilities.

Esther recaps recent investment activity, with Rylo's USD 85m funding round for AI solutions serving deaf users, Dell Technologies Capital's USD 50m investment in voice AI startup Bland, and Gridly's USD 1.5m raise to add agentic AI capabilities to its content management platform.

Esther concludes with her M&A corner, where Powerling acquires French language solutions integrator Atlantique Traduction and Sweden-based DigitalTolk expands into Switzerland through its acquisition of legal translation specialist Hieronymus.

Slator's Anna Wyndham joins Florian on the pod to discuss key highlights from the Slator Data-for-AI Market Report, which sizes the global market at USD 9.3bn and examines the ecosystem supplying the data needed to train, adapt, align, evaluate, and deploy AI systems.

Anna explains how the market has evolved far beyond traditional data labeling. While annotation and large-scale training data remain important, she argues that the market’s focus has shifted toward helping organizations deploy AI safely and effectively in real-world settings.

Anna highlights the growing importance of “deployment data”, data used to adapt models for specific domains, align behavior with policies, conduct adversarial testing, and evaluate performance. She notes that these activities increasingly rely on subject-matter experts, creating demand for professionals such as physicians, lawyers, engineers, and financial specialists.

The discussion also explores how frontier AI labs, enterprises, and sovereign AI initiatives are driving demand. Anna shares that buyers increasingly need trusted providers capable of sourcing expert talent, scaling rapidly, and maintaining rigorous governance around data provenance and quality.

For language solutions integrators (LSIs), Anna sees both opportunity and challenge. Existing strengths in multilingual operations and workforce management provide a natural advantage, but success requires new capabilities, including expertise in machine learning workflows and AI evaluation.

Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the past few weeks, beginning with a recap of SlatorCon London, which attracted a record 250 attendees.

They highlight growing interest in language AI, startup innovation, and research, as well as a broader shift in industry sentiment toward viewing LSIs and LTPs as integral parts of the AI economy rather than businesses being disrupted from the outside.

Drawing on Slator’s newly released market report, Florian shares that the total addressable market for language solutions and AI reached USD 30.85bn in 2025, declining 2.7% year on year. Traditional LSIs saw a steeper 5.1% decline, while LTPs grew nearly 20%.

The duo also examine the wider AI landscape, discussing massive funding rounds and IPO plans at Anthropic and OpenAI. Florian argues that these developments create challenges for LTPs seeking defensible market positions, citing OpenAI’s launch of real-time speech translation shortly after DeepL announced an expanded focus on voice translation.

On company news, Florian and Esther review the bankruptcy of voice AI startup Lovo following legal disputes over voice rights and data usage, as well as the financial difficulties facing transcription specialist VIQ Solutions.

Esther closes with an overview of recent M&A activity, including acquisitions by TransPerfect, RWS, and The Translation People, alongside the formation of Germany’s new IMK Group. She also notes growing consolidation in the voice AI sector and highlights a recent funding round for Japanese AI translation startup Yellow Blue.

Sharath Narayana, CEO and Co-Founder of Sanas, joins SlatorPod to talk about the evolution of real-time speech AI, the rise of accent harmonization, and why voice will become the next major enterprise interface.

Sharath traces his journey from engineer to entrepreneur, including the founding of Observe.AI before launching Sanas alongside Stanford researchers focused on solving low-latency speech processing.

The CEO explains that Sanas initially operated as a speech lab focused on improving human understanding in conversations. The company developed multiple algorithms covering noise cancellation, speech enhancement, accent harmonization, and language translation before discovering that enterprises were most willing to pay for accent-related technology.

Sharath emphasizes that Sanas’ accent technology is not designed to erase identity, but to improve clarity and reduce friction in customer interactions. He says enterprises, especially contact centers, adopted the technology to improve first-call experiences and reduce mistrust between agents and customers.

He also discusses Sanas’ focus on on-device AI infrastructure rather than cloud-only deployments, where running speech AI locally improves latency, protects data sovereignty, and lowers compute costs.

Looking ahead, Sharath says Sanas is preparing broader launches for real-time language translation, universal accent translation, and developer SDKs that will allow third parties to build voice applications on top of the Sanas platform.

Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the past few weeks and Slator’s newly launched website, which reflects a clearer positioning around research, advisory, consulting, events, and market intelligence.

The duo breaks down the 2026 Slator Index, highlighting that while revenues appear to have grown, this does not signal real market expansion. Instead, growth is concentrated among a few large players, often driven by acquisitions, while many companies report declining revenues.

Florian touches on the RWS–Cohere strategic partnership, with RWS strengthening its technology stack by integrating advanced AI translation, while Cohere gains enterprise distribution. The move reflects a broader trend of companies recognizing they cannot build everything in-house.

Off the back of Slator’s Data-for-AI Market Report, Florian sees AI data services as a major growth opportunity. He explains that the industry’s bottleneck has shifted from building models to making them usable in real-world settings. Esther notes growing interest from companies exploring acquisitions and investments in this space.

Esther wraps things up by talking through recent M&A and funding deals, including Star7’s private equity buyout, GlobalComix’s expansion into manga localization with the acquisition of INKR, and VoiceLine’s EUR 10m funding round in voice AI.

Paul Carr, CEO of Welo Global, joins SlatorPod to talk about the company’s strategic repositioning, continued AI investment, and evolving demand in the language solutions industry.

Paul notes that the company has narrowed its focus to a few core areas and reorganized around client segments. He adds that client centricity and specialization have been central themes, alongside increased investment in AI and data engineering.

The CEO highlights that two-thirds of Welo Global’s revenue now comes from outside of traditional localization departments. He says the business increasingly serves content owners such as legal teams, clinical managers, and AI labs.

Paul describes the launch of Welo Global as a branding shift to reflect this broader scope. He explains that the new structure includes five client-facing brands tailored to specific industries and use cases, including Welocalize, Welo Data, Welo Life Sciences, Park IP, and Adapt.

The CEO emphasizes that AI has driven major change, particularly through the development of the company’s Opal platform. He says the system delivers significantly higher-quality output than traditional machine translation by using agentic workflows and enterprise-specific data.

Paul argues that localization ROI is difficult to isolate because it is usually part of broader investments like sales and marketing. He suggests simplistic ROI models risk undermining credibility.

He concludes that demand remains strong and success will depend on adapting quickly, building new capabilities, and maintaining a culture that embraces continuous change.

Ben Faes, CEO of RWS, joins SlatorPod to talk about the markets’ perceptions of LSIs, the company’s AI strategy, and how RWS is repositioning itself for long-term growth.

Ben positions RWS as a technology-led partner helping enterprises operate globally, from enabling multilingual communication to protecting intellectual property and improving market understanding.

The CEO highlights the rapid acceleration of innovation and the democratization of AI, where individuals and companies can now build and deploy solutions at unprecedented speed. He argues that the real opportunity lies in using these capabilities more effectively, rather than applying them to low-value tasks.

He describes the partnership with Cohere as a fundamental shift, with RWS integrating Cohere’s models into its Language Weaver Pro platform, moving beyond traditional, segment-based translation toward context-aware, LLM-driven solutions.

Beyond translation, Ben sees strong growth in AI data services, especially in areas like cultural intelligence and multimodal training, where human expertise remains critical.

Internally, RWS has reorganized into three divisions — Generate, Transform, and Protect — to better align with customer needs, buyer personas, and evolving use cases.

Despite short-term uncertainty, Ben remains optimistic, noting that new AI-driven services and products account for a growing share of revenue and signal how quickly the market is evolving.

Jessica Powell, CEO of AudioShake, joins SlatorPod to talk about how AI-powered audio separation is making audio more usable for both human and machine workflows, and enabling new use cases across localization, broadcasting, and media production.

Jessica emphasizes that early traction came from the music industry, particularly in areas like sync licensing and remixing. However, the company’s expansion into film and television happened organically as new use cases emerged.

The CEO explains that AudioShake’s core technology uses source separation to break complex audio into individual components such as dialogue, music, and sound effects. She describes how this allows users to gain precise control over audio for tasks like editing, transcription, and multilingual dubbing.

In localization, Jessica highlights how separating dialogue from music-and-effects (M&E) tracks enables both traditional dubbing and AI-assisted workflows, particularly for legacy content where original stems are unavailable.

Beyond localization, Jessica underscores the importance of clean audio inputs for speech recognition systems. In noisy environments like sports broadcasts or unscripted content, separating dialogue before transcription significantly improves accuracy.

Jessica also reflects on the broader AI landscape, noting that the rise of generative AI has increased awareness of audio as a critical modality. However, she distinguishes AudioShake’s work as non-generative, focused on extracting structure rather than creating new content.

The CEO discusses the current funding environment in the Bay Area and how the investor narrative has evolved leading up to AudioShake’s late 2025 Series A.

Looking ahead, Jessica points to real-time processing and copyright-compliant audio editing as key areas of innovation, as the company continues to expand its role in media and AI ecosystems.

Daniel Sebesta joins Florian and Esther on the pod to talk about the latest language industry news, AI translation developments, and key insights from the Slator Pro Guide: Growth Hacks for Language Technology Platforms (LTPs).

The trio begin with TransPerfect’s latest financial results, which reported USD 1.32 billion in revenue, up 7% year on year. They also discuss leadership changes at Straker, where founder Grant Straker stepped down as CEO after more than 25 years.

Florian shares new AI-powered contextual features in Google Translate that allow users to refine translations and adjust tone or phrasing. Daniel believes these interactive capabilities aim to improve trust in AI systems by giving users more visibility and control over translation outputs.

The discussion also turns to ElevenLabs and its partnership with Deutsche Telekom to embed live translation into phone calls. The integration could enable real-time multilingual conversations, summaries, and contextual assistance for telecom customers.

The trio then cover Walmart’s internal AI localization initiative, where the system now translates millions of catalog items across 22 languages while reducing translation costs by about 99%.

Daniel concludes by outlining the Growth Hacks Pro Guide, which explores strategies for scaling LTPs. He highlights areas such as go-to-market strategy, partnerships with language solutions integrators, enterprise sales execution, and security readiness as key drivers of scalable growth.

Georg Ell, CEO of Phrase, returns to SlatorPod for round 3 to talk about how the language technology platform (LTP) is evolving amid the AI boom and the shifting dynamics in enterprise SaaS.

Georg shares how Phrase has doubled down on a platform and ecosystem strategy that encourages customers to build solutions on top of the LTP’s system rather than forcing them into a closed system.

The CEO addresses the broader AI narrative affecting SaaS companies and explains that investor uncertainty about long-term software value has created anxiety across the sector.

Georg argues that the AI boom has triggered a “build vs buy” debate inside many enterprises, with engineering teams experimenting with internal solutions. He explains how the gap between building a demo versus running a reliable, scalable system is where most internal projects fail.

Georg notes that core AI translation quality improvements seem to be plateauing, but AI continues to significantly enhance the layers surrounding translation. He highlights improvements in context handling, evaluation, automated post-editing, and orchestration that allow companies to translate more content at lower human review rates.

The CEO says localization must move beyond cost reduction narratives and instead focus on business outcomes such as hiring efficiency, support performance, and revenue metrics.

Georg predicts 2026 will bring more production-grade AI applications, including personalization, multimodal content, and automation across the enterprise. He believes language technology will be framed as content adaptation and delivery rather than simply translation.

Daphne Tay, Founder and CEO of Bluente, joins SlatorPod to talk about building an AI-powered document translation platform that goes beyond text and tackles the complexities of formatting at scale.

Daphne explains that formatting challenges vary significantly across file types, from scanned PDFs to multi-column layouts and complex graphics, requiring deep technical handling of document structures.

The CEO points to legal and financial services as core verticals, citing the example of investment banking teams uploading hundreds of pages overnight to meet tight deal deadlines.

Daphne discusses how large language models have accelerated translation quality and increased market openness to AI adoption, especially among legal professionals who want to reduce time spent on non-billable translation tasks.

She highlights that human reviewers still remain essential for court filings, arbitration, and high-stakes documents requiring certification or final sign-off.

Daphne shares that Bluente raised funding to expand internationally, increase brand visibility, and partner with investors experienced in scaling B2B SaaS and AI businesses.

The pod wraps with Daphne outlining a forthcoming feature that enables temporary translation memory, allowing only recently edited sections of a document to be retranslated while preserving previously approved text.

Slator’s Head of Research Anna Wyndham joins Florian on the pod to discuss Slator’s new Pro Guide: Growth Hacks for Language Technology Platforms, describing it as a practical playbook for turning strong AI products into scalable revenue.

Florian highlights ElevenLabs’ USD 500m raise at an USD 11bn valuation and Synthesia’s USD 200m round as evidence that investor appetite for voice AI is accelerating rapidly.

Florian connects that funding momentum to product launches, including ElevenLab’s Expressive Mode and YouTube’s expanding AI dubbing push.

The duo then reviews YouTube’s AI dubbing in German and Spanish, finding the intelligibility and naturalness impressive, but rhythm and intonation still mirroring the English source language too closely.

Anna turns to new academic research arguing that current text-to-speech evaluation methods under-test real-world deployment factors such as long-form consistency, punctuation handling, and robustness across messy inputs.

Anna reports that Appen delivered double-digit revenue growth and an EBITDA turnaround in Q4 FY25, driven by a higher share of generative AI projects and strong momentum in China.

Florian closes by touching on prompt injection issues in AI translation tools, RWS’s return to growth, and Lionbridge’s ownership transition.

Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the past few weeks, starting with senior hires in revenue and operations at DeepL and what this signals about the LTP’s next phase.

The duo then turns to new data from AI labs and hyperscalers, where Florian highlights findings from Anthropic’s research showing AI is settling into a support role rather than full automation, with usage concentrated around review and validation, and humans remaining firmly in the loop.

On the consumer side, Esther points to Microsoft Copilot data showing translation and language learning as one of the most common everyday AI use cases. Florian flags Adobe’s new “Translate this PDF” feature, where formatting was the main issue rather than translation accuracy.

The conversation then shifts to infrastructure, where Florian emphasizes how NVIDIA is positioning itself at the center of real-time multilingual voice ecosystems by open-sourcing models while driving demand for its hardware.

The duo unpacks OpenAI’s quiet launch of ChatGPT Translate. Esther notes that reactions have been mixed, with many seeing the interface as basic, while Florian stresses the strategic importance of the move. Then the two disagree on whether or not the AI’s default prompt to make the translation sound “more fluent” makes any sense.

Esther walks through recent M&A activity and funding rounds, highlighting acquisitions in Europe and the US alongside major raises by Synthesia, Deepgram, and reportedly ElevenLabs.

Florian concludes with a look at an S-1 filing by a tiny company, using it as an example of how the US capital markets accommodate everything from billion-dollar AI firms to survival-stage experiments.

JC Penet, Reader in Translation Industry Studies at Newcastle University, and Joss Moorkens, Associate Professor at DCU, join SlatorPod to talk about the new open-access book Teaching translation in the age of generative AI: New paradigm, new learning?

The duo explains how large language models (LLMs) have a different impact than earlier machine translation breakthroughs as they generate human-like text, respond to prompts, and adapt output to context.

Public hype around LLMs has affected demand for some translators and fueled misconceptions around the value of studying translation. Although, JC and Joss stress that translation education must adapt.

JC outlines how students need to assess whether output is appropriate for purpose, audience, risk, and context. This places greater importance on skills such as selection, evaluation, and effective prompting, while still relying on core linguistic and cultural competence.

Joss adds that this shift reflects real industry practice, where different content types already receive different levels of automation and human involvement. Drawing on healthcare research, he highlights how AI can outperform traditional workflows in some contexts but fail badly in others, especially across languages with uneven data coverage.

Joss also highlights ethical blind spots that arise when performance metrics dominate decision-making. He describes a “triple bottom line” approach that weighs people, planet, and performance equally.

On fears of de-skilling, JC argues that excluding AI from classrooms poses a greater risk. Without guided engagement, students may use tools uncritically or fail to develop AI literacy altogether. Joss points to initiatives such as LT-LiDER, an Erasmus+ project designed to build AI literacy among educators.

Looking ahead, the duo contends that studying languages and translation remains valuable because it develops deep reading, critical thinking, intercultural awareness, and adaptability.

In the 2025 year-end episode of SlatorPod, hosts Florian Faes and Esther Bond reflect on a year defined by rapid AI investment, shifting policy, and structural change across the language industry.

Esther opens the year-in-review by highlighting January’s twin funding milestones in the language AI and product space. Florian follows with February, which saw hyperscalers and AI labs release data highly relevant to the way AI translation is being used.

March, April, and May saw major developments both on the regulatory side and in terms of bolt-on acquisition deals.

Past the mid-year point, OpenAI’s decision to hire a localization manager was what grabbed the industry’s collective attention. The AI lab’s decision contrasted with September’s news, which saw the closure of one of the world’s most recognized academic programs for localization.

The year closed on publicly listed LSIs releasing mixed results and major announcements in AI translation for literature and live speech translation rollouts.

The duo closes with 2026 predictions!

Josh Miller and Christopher Antunes, Co-Founders and co-CEOs of 3Play Media, join SlatorPod to talk about the company’s trajectory as a leading language solutions integrator (LSI) in multilingual video accessibility.

The duo explains how the two met at MIT, where an early challenge from OpenCourseWare revealed that captioning thousands of technical videos was financially impossible, leading to the company’s founding, where they developed proprietary tooling, leveraged AI, and incorporated expert-in-the-loop solutions.

Josh describes how their platform evolved into a dual system supporting both customers and large-scale operations. Chris notes that the LSI now serves media and entertainment, higher education, e-learning, and corporate clients.

Chris explains that three major trends — the European Accessibility Act (EAA), advancements in voice technology, and the rise of live events — drove their expansion into global localization.

The co-CEOs detail their dubbing journey, noting rapid learning over the last 18 months and the emergence of a big mid-tier market between high-end theatrical dubbing and low-cost AI-only output.

Josh explains how the EAA is pushing companies to prepare for large columns of multilingual captioning and audio description. He notes that interpretations of the law still vary, but major media firms are already investing to avoid disruption.

The duo shares findings from their 2025 State of ASR Report, where they found that accuracy initially improved sharply with generative models but has now plateaued.

Looking to the future, the co-CEOs are working on shifting their model to incorporate AI-generated scores and analytics, allowing customers to decide on the level of expert intervention.

Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the past few weeks, reflecting on SlatorCon Remote and announcing that SlatorCon London 2026 is open for registration.

The duo touch on IMDb’s decision to recognize dubbing artists as part of new professional credit categories, explaining how this expands visibility for multilingual voice talent. They then move on to Coursera’s strategy shift and outline how its new CEO is betting on AI translation and AI dubbing to revive slowing growth.

Florian and Esther talk about Amazon’s rollout of AI-translated Kindle eBooks, and question authors' willingness to rely on automated translation despite Amazon’s promise of fast turnarounds, in as little as 72 hours.

Florian highlights research on spatial audio improving AI live speech translation, and reflects on how clearer speaker differentiation could enhance comprehension. Although he stresses ongoing challenges in live settings, like latency and overlapping speech.

In Esther’s M&A and funding corner, healthcare AI technology startup No Barrier raises USD 2.7m, Cisco acquires EZ Dubs to enhance WebEx’s real-time speech translation capabilities, and audio AI startup AudioShake raises USD 14m.

Florian analyzes OneMeta’s financials and notes its rapid revenue growth despite significant ongoing and limited marketing presence. Esther details the landmark UK NHS framework agreement for language services, including scope and the number of awarded vendors.

Florian concludes with updates on interpreting performances at Teleperformance and AMN Healthcare, noting mixed results.

Amir Haramaty, Co-Founder and President of aiOla, joins SlatorPod to talk about how spoken, multilingual data can transform enterprise workflows and unlock real ROI.

The Co-Founder introduces himself not as a serial entrepreneur but as a serial problem solver, focused on one core challenge: most enterprise data remains uncaptured, unstructured, and unused.

Amir emphasizes that traditional speech tech fails in real-world conditions, where accents, noise, and hyper-specific jargon dominate. He illustrates how he tackles this challenge by building workflow-specific language models that extract only the data relevant to a process.

Amir says aiOla converts speech not into text but into structured, schema-ready data, allowing organizations to automate workflows, improve compliance, and identify trends long before humans can. He explains that the company focuses on narrow processes rather than general conversation, enabling precision in niche environments.

Amir shares how aiOla routinely cuts multi-hour procedures down to minutes, drives efficiency across frontline roles, and creates previously unavailable datasets that feed enterprise intelligence. He highlights ROI examples from supermarkets, airlines, manufacturing, and automotive industries.

Amir explains that after proving aiOla’s value, he realized the fastest way to scale was through firms already embedded in enterprise digital transformation. He notes that aiOla now partners with UST, Accenture, Salesforce, and Nvidia, creating a distribution engine capable of replicating wins across thousands of clients.

He calls this channel strategy a force multiplier that shortens sales cycles and embeds aiOla inside broader modernization initiatives. Amir adds that these partners not only bring scale but also domain expertise aiOla deliberately chose not to build in-house.

Amir outlines future priorities, including product-led growth, speech-based coding, and speech-prompted AI agents. He predicts that agentic systems will rely heavily on high-quality spoken data, making aiOla’s role even more central.

Tom Kocmi, Researcher at Cohere, and Alon Lavie, Distinguished Career Professor at Carnegie Mellon University, join Florian and Slator language AI Research Analyst, Maria Stasimioti, on SlatorPod to talk about the state-of-the-art in AI translation and what the latest WMT25 results reveal about progress and remaining challenges.

Tom outlines how the WMT conference has become a crucial annual benchmark for assessing AI translation quality and ensuring systems are tested on fresh, demanding datasets. He notes that systems now face literary text, social-media language, ASR-noisy speech transcripts, and data selected through a difficulty-sampling algorithm. He stresses that these harder inputs expose far more system weaknesses than in previous years.

He adds that human translators also struggle as they face fatigue, time pressure, and constraints such as not being allowed to post-edit. He emphasizes that human parity claims are unreliable and highlights the need for improved human evaluation design.

Alon underscores that harder test data also challenges evaluators. He explains that segment-level scoring is now more difficult, and even human evaluators miss different subsets of errors. He highlights that automated metrics built on earlier-era training data underperformed, particularly COMET, because they absorbed their own biases.

He reports that the strongest performers in the evaluation task were reasoning-capable large language models (LLMs), either lightly prompted or submitted with elaborate evaluation-specific prompting. He notes that while these LLM-as-judge setups outperformed traditional neural metrics overall, their segment-level performance varied.

Tom points out that the translation task also revealed notable progress from smaller academic models around 9B parameters, some ranking near trillion-parameter frontier models. He sees this as a sign that competitive research is still widely accessible.

The duo concludes that they must carefully choose evaluation methods, avoid assessing models with the same metric used during training, and adopt LLM-based judging for more reliable assessments.

Nikita Agarwal, Founder of Milestone Localization, joins SlatorPod to talk about her journey founding a language solutions integrator (LSI) and launching Cavya.ai, a platform designed to streamline translation project preparation.

Nikita began Milestone Localization in 2020 after discovering the language industry while working in international sales. She was drawn to the field’s global scope and low barrier to entry. She emphasizes that sales experience played a crucial role in landing early clients and understanding the value of hiring people from within the industry.

The founder reflects on the past 16 months as a period of intense change marked by AI disruption, client pressure on pricing, and shifting expectations. She highlights how regulated sectors like life sciences have helped stabilize the company amid volatility. She details how the LSI specializes in medical device translations and regulatory submissions across Europe.

Nikita explains that her new platform, Cavya.ai, emerged from internal needs to improve project preparation. She says the tool automates glossaries, style guides, and document analysis, reducing time and boosting consistency for small and mid-sized projects.

The founder shares her observations on India’s evolving language technology landscape, noting significant progress in AI for major Indian languages. She says increased internet access and AI-driven localization are expanding education and job opportunities across the country.

Nikita concludes that she sees the future in expanding life sciences work, refining Cavya, and developing an AI-powered QA tool. She notes that some clients are showing “AI fatigue” and returning to human-led workflows.

Thordur Arnason, Global AI GTM Lead at Capgemini Invent, joins SlatorPod to talk about how the consulting giant is embracing language AI through BabelSpeak, its new real-time AI speech translation platform.

Thordur explains that the idea emerged from Capgemini’s AI Futures Lab while researching multimodal AI. Inspired by Meta’s launch of the Seamless M4T model, the team set out to tackle the hard problem of live AI speech translation.

He notes that early pilots with DNB Bank, the Norwegian Red Cross, and the Norwegian Police tested BabelSpeak in critical situations — from refugee banking access to emergency communication.

Thordur highlights Capgemini’s partnerships with Nvidia and Telenor, saying Nvidia provides the AI hardware and models, while Telenor’s sovereign AI infrastructure ensures security, GDPR compliance, and data sovereignty.

He emphasizes that BabelSpeak’s reliability comes not just from AI models but from engineering precision, reducing latency from three seconds to under 300 milliseconds.

Thordur discusses Capgemini’s exploration of agentic AI, where autonomous systems perceive, reason, and act independently. He describes how the company built an “Agentic Workbench” to help non-technical users experiment with AI agents safely and sees BabelSpeak as a potential tool within larger agentic systems.

He concludes that Capgemini is expanding BabelSpeak into a broader suite of language tools, combining secure AI infrastructure with advanced multilingual communication for enterprise and government clients.

Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week, with congratulations to Villam Language Services on its sale to InAnyLanguage. Slator served as joint exclusive advisor with Maveria Advisory, representing Villam throughout the end-to-end M&A process.

The duo turns to Perplexity’s Localization Manager job posting, which they found almost identical to OpenAI’s earlier post, down to matching structure, order, and phrasing. They question whether copying such a specific ad shows a lack of seriousness or simply reflects practicality and efficiency.

Esther and Florian talk about RWS's new leadership hires: Stephen Lamb as Chief Financial Officer and Michael Wayne as Head of Media and Entertainment. Esther outlines how the appointments strengthen RWS’s investment strategy in media localization, dubbing, and content adaptation.

Esther next mentions that Visual Data has named Maz Al-Jumaili as SVP of Worldwide Localization, to lead subtitling and dubbing operations and strengthen client partnerships.

The duo wrap up with the UK government’s bizarre energy-efficiency study, claiming AI translation is a thousand times greener than human translation. They review the flawed logic, where the report assigns human translators the entire office energy costs while excluding AI infrastructure.

Tom Bridges, CEO and Founder of CaptionHub, joins SlatorPod to talk about how a small in-house tool evolved into a global AI-powered multimedia localization platform.

Tom began his career in post-production and visual effects before stumbling into subtitling when a client needed to localize a video into 16 languages overnight. He reveals that the disorganized workflows relying on spreadsheets inspired him to create a more efficient, centralized solution, which became CaptionHub.

Tom explains that CaptionHub has since grown from a subtitling tool into a full multimedia localization platform integrating speech recognition, machine translation, and synthetic voice. He adds that the platform’s strength lies in being AI-agnostic and offering end-to-end workflows that balance automation with human-in-the-loop processes.

Tom describes how CaptionHub’s new product suite, Timbra, enables real-time media localization and has already supported major live events. He says live captioning is technically complex but benefits from the company’s years of research into video-on-demand subtitling quality.

Tom notes that accessibility regulations like the European Accessibility Act are driving demand, while AI and language models are opening new frontiers such as lip-sync and sign-language integration.

Tom envisions a future where speech-to-speech translation, synthetic dubbing, and real-time localization merge into seamless, scalable experiences. CaptionHub’s mission remains to make multimedia communication universally accessible and efficient through human and AI collaboration.

Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week, with breaking news that DeepL is reportedly exploring an initial public offering (IPO) in the US at a potential USD 5bn valuation. This comes as DeepL now positions itself as a “global AI product and research company”. Florian also notes the launch of DeepL Marketplace and the appointment of Gonçalo Gaiolas as Chief Product Officer.

Florian opens with the first-ever Slator Award at ZHAW Zurich University of Applied Sciences, where Guy Ratnitsky won for his thesis on data security and confidentiality in AI. The program will soon be renamed MA in Multilingual Communication Management to reflect market realities.

The duo turns to Anthropic’s new Economic Index, which shows translators and interpreters make up 0.63% of Claude AI usage, while OpenAI data previously showed translation-related conversations at 4.5%.

Florian unpacks comments from German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, who, during a visit to Spain, suggested AI could replace EU interpreters in the medium term. He explains that Spain is pushing for Catalan, Basque, and Galician to become official EU languages, but Merz cited translation workload and complexity.

Florian and Esther then run through live AI speech translation updates: Zoom’s in-house rollout, Apple’s AirPods, Google’s translation features, Microsoft’s API, and Meta’s Ray-Bans.

In Esther’s M&A corner, she reports on Bering Lab’s acquisition of Intersphere in Korea and Iyuno’s partnership with Motion Picture Solutions in the UK for a film localization pipeline. Meanwhile, Testronic secured funding to scale down in some locations while expanding in Manila as a hub for QA testing and localization.

Slator’s Senior Research Analyst Alex Edwards joins Esther and Florian on the pod to discuss ElevenLabs’ move from a pure-play language technology platform (LTP) to becoming a language solutions integrator (LSI) by adding a managed service offering.

He outlines that the LSI will now offer managed services such as dubbing, transcription, and subtitling, hiring in-house linguists and vendor managers, while charging about USD 22 per minute for dubbing.

Florian then turns to YouTube’s rollout of multi-language audio tracks, which allows some creators to upload high-quality audio directly to videos and opens major opportunities for AI dubbing providers.

The discussion shifts to OpenAI’s research on ChatGPT usage, reporting that translation accounted for 4.5% of more than a million sampled conversations, underscoring massive global demand for AI translation.

Esther highlights Microsoft’s launch of its Live Interpreter API, which promises real-time speech translation with “human interpreter level latency”. Esther also details Mistral’s USD 2bn funding to advance European AI capabilities, allowing them to compete with US and Chinese AI giants. Esther closes by reporting on WIPO’s new Korean-English post-editing tender.

Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the past few weeks, beginning with a recap of SlatorCon Silicon Valley 2025, where the duo noted strong localization buyer and user turnout, and tech-focused discussions across presentations and panels.

One key highlight was Cohere’s well-timed launch of Command A Translate, which allowed Kelly Marchisio to share details on building multilingual LLMs. Esther notes that Cohere’s multilingual models focus on high-quality coverage of about 20 languages rather than attempting hundreds.

Florian turns to the Apertus launch in Switzerland, where EPFL, ETH Zurich, and the Swiss Supercomputing Centre released a multilingual model trained on over 15 trillion tokens and covering more than 1,000 languages, including Swiss German and Romansh.

Esther reveals that Middlebury Institute will phase out its graduate translation and interpretation programs by 2027, marking the loss of a key training ground.

Esther reports on TransPerfect’s acquisition of Unbabel, with plans to integrate its AI tools, such as TowerLLM and EuroVLM, into GlobalLink, while CEO Vasco Pedro will stay briefly during the transition.

Florian outlines Apple’s launch of AirPod Pro 3 with live AI translation and Google’s new Gemini-powered updates for AI live speech translation.

Esther concludes with the Inc. 5000 rankings, highlighting 11 language industry companies. She highlights Propio, Boostlingo, and CQ Fluency as repeat entrants, with Propio topping the list but also announcing job cuts following its acquisition of CyraCom.

Dipak Patel, CEO of GLOBO, joins SlatorPod to talk about his journey into language services and the challenges and opportunities of integrating AI into healthcare communication.

Dipak explains that his career began in consulting and private equity, but a personal experience with his mother’s healthcare highlighted the importance of interpretation services and led him to GLOBO.

The CEO emphasizes that since 2020, GLOBO has doubled down on healthcare, embraced AI and large language models, and addressed the mounting pressures of clinician shortages and aging populations.

Dipak gives an overview of GLOBO’s platforms: HQ provides backend data and reporting, Connect enables access to interpreters through mobile devices, and KAI is the company’s AI interpreter, which is undergoing pilots across US hospitals.

Dipak cautions that AI cannot replace expert interpreters in all situations as interpreters serve as more than simple conduits; they clarify meaning, act as cultural brokers, and advocate for patients. He believes the near-term role of AI is filling gaps in the patient journey where interpretation currently does not happen.

Dipak details how GLOBO is using AI to monitor interpreter quality in real time, checking professionalism, background noise, and accuracy. He stresses that security, data protection, and careful testing are crucial to AI adoption in healthcare.

Dipak reflects on the growth of GLOBO, attributing it to a strong team and relentless focus on innovation. He concludes that while AI will play a bigger role in the next decades, the key lies in balancing it with human expertise.

Gayatri Shahane, Founder and CEO of early-stage startup Naitiv, joins SlatorPod to talk about her entrepreneurial journey and building a conversational AI tool for business communication.

Gayatri describes how Naitiv’s conversational AI agent is built as a desktop app to manage latency and audio challenges in live interpretation. She explains that it supports different conversation modes for casual and professional contexts, with a voice orchestration engine developed to handle turn-taking, speaker overlaps, and multiple languages.

The Founder recalls testing the technology in live Discord language-learning channels, where she conversed with Spanish, Korean, and Japanese speakers who often did not realize they were speaking with an AI.

She highlights that her early adopters include B2B companies expanding into Asia, Latin America, and Europe, using the platform for sales, onboarding, and critical client meetings.

Gayatri acknowledges the competitive market in real-time AI interpreting, but believes there is space for smaller, more specialized tools. She adds that marketing has so far been founder-led and organic.

Gayatri concludes by sharing her plans to raise a pre-seed round and evolve Naitiv beyond meetings into a full AI agent.

Rick Woyde, Co-Founder of Pairaphrase, joins SlatorPod to talk about his entrepreneurial journey co-founding a language technology platform (LTP) focused on simplicity and accessibility.

Rick describes identifying early adoption of Google Translate among businesses and spotting a gap for a platform that served both non-technical users and professionals without the complexity of traditional LTP tools.

The Co-Founder highlights that Pairaphrase now serves diverse clients, from US schools translating educational documents to corporations managing multilingual content, with SaaS-based offerings and annual subscriptions.

He outlines how the AI boom has expanded the market for translation software and how Pairaphrase integrates generative AI to enable file translation via ChatGPT, custom GPT models, and prompt-based original content creation.

Rick emphasizes the growing importance of language variety, the flexibility of LLMs, and the ability to quickly meet niche language requests. He also discusses the challenge of adding features without overcomplicating the UI, prioritizing automation of complex tasks in the background.

The Co-Founder shares how Pairaphrase grew largely under the radar through SEO and content marketing before expanding its marketing team. He acknowledges challenges from changes in Google’s search landscape and notes growing referrals from AI tools like ChatGPT.

Rick closes by previewing upcoming developments, including a proprietary GPT designed to deliver high-quality, customizable translations and the launch of a mobile real-time speech translation app.

Slator’s Head of Research Anna Wyndham joins Florian on the pod to discuss Microsoft’s research paper “Working with AI: Measuring the Occupational Implications of Generative AI”, a study that stirred significant debate across social media.

The paper, based on 200,000 anonymized Microsoft Copilot interactions, aims to understand what tasks people ask AI to perform and how effectively those tasks are completed. Pairing this with the US O*NET database of occupational tasks, researchers created an "AI applicability score" to assess overlap between AI-capable tasks and real-world job functions.

Anna emphasizes that the researchers distinguish between AI performing individual tasks and full jobs. Even the most affected roles, like interpreters and translators, show only partial overlap, around 50%, with activities AI can complete.

Florian and Anna stress that the research does not claim AI will replace top-ranked occupations. Rather, it shows where AI is most often helpful, with knowledge-based activities like writing, summarizing, and gathering information topping the list.

The Microsoft researchers also acknowledge key limitations. For example, jobs are more than bundles of disconnected tasks; they involve context, judgment, and synthesis, often referred to as the "glue" that AI lacks. Additionally, Anna points out that Copilot’s integration into tools used by knowledge workers may bias the results in its favor.

Ultimately, the duo agree the paper validates what’s already known: AI is helpful for language-related tasks, but not transformational enough yet to supplant the people who perform them.

Martina Russo, CEO of The Action Sports Translator (TAST), joins SlatorPod to talk about her journey from being a multilingual outdoor sports enthusiast to leading a language solutions integrator dedicated exclusively to action and outdoor sports.

Martina describes how each action sport has unique subcultures and terminology, from mountain biking’s multiple disciplines to climbing’s variety of techniques and jargon. Even within the same sport, regional language differences present challenges.

For Martina, authentic translation in this industry means more than linguistic quality; it requires a translator who genuinely lives and breathes the sport to capture its culture, humor, and insider tone. She emphasizes the difficulty in sourcing linguists who are both trained translators and passionate sports practitioners, especially for rare languages or specific verticals.

The CEO shares how TAST deploys AI internally for operational efficiency and leverages it in content creation and localization, though she’s cautious about fully replacing human experts. Product copy and FAQs are areas where AI is more applicable, but the authentic, emotional connection critical to sports brands often requires a human touch.

Despite industry challenges amid fluctuating demand, TAST has been experiencing strong growth, even surpassing previous expectations. Martina attributes this success to unwavering niche focus, technological adaptation, and a company culture deeply immersed in the sports it serves.

Looking ahead, Martina remains committed to investing in developing AI solutions, hiring for roles in that department, and staying on top of trends in the outdoor sports and organization industries.

Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week, including the newly released Slator 2025 Language AI 50 Under 50, showcasing fifty of the most innovative and fast-growing language AI startups founded within the past fifty months.

The duo explain how Slator sifted through hundreds of companies, assessing innovation, practical solutions to real buyer problems, and strong market positioning. The final fifty span five categories: multilingual video and audio, live speech translation, transcription and captions, translation and text generation, and accessibility.

The conversation then moves on to language AI and services in the public sector. Esther talks about a new language AI tool, DiploIA, developed and deployed by the French Government for diplomatic agents in sensitive missions.

Turning to the US, Esther reports that SOSi secured a significant USD 260m language services contract with the US Drug Enforcement Administration. Meanwhile, the US Defense Health Agency is looking for providers to deliver large volumes of translation and interpreting services.

Esther also revisits the major acquisition of CyraCom by Propio, calling it one of 2025’s biggest language industry deals. Propio now joins forces with CyraCom’s established presence in healthcare and legal interpreting, creating a combined entity with revenues exceeding half a billion dollars and positioning them strongly in the US interpreting market.

Florian questions AI voice startup ElevenLabs’ plans for an IPO within five years. He then wraps up the pod by exploring large reasoning models (LRMs) and their mixed performance in AI translation. While LRMs outperform traditional LLMs in complex, open-domain translation tasks, research indicates they remain prone to significant weaknesses.

Florian and Esther catch up on a few weeks’ worth of language industry news with a surge of developments in speech translation. Apple’s on-device translation debuts in apps like iMessage and FaceTime, and OpenAI enhances ChatGPT‘s Advanced Voice Mode with more human-like interactions and real-time translation.

Florian unpacks YouTube’s broad rollout of AI dubbing for 80 million creators in 20 languages, where he trials German and finds robotic voices, bad translations, and no editing options, leaving much to be desired.

Esther talks about RWS acquiring Papercup’s IP, aiming to embed AI dubbing into Trados and significantly boost RWS’s capabilities and market reach. RWS’s half-year financials also show slight revenue drops but rising AI-driven revenue, alongside a reorganization into three divisions: Generate, Transform, and Protect

The duo analyzes Meta’s USD 14bn investment for a 49% stake in Scale AI, which raises concerns from other tech giants uncomfortable with a major competitor owning a key data-labeling supplier. They note opportunities arising for competitors like Labelbox, RWS’s TrainAI, Welo Data, and many other LSIs as clients reconsider vendor relationships in light of Meta’s involvement.

In Esther's M&A corner, Propio acquires CyraCom to become a half-billion-dollar language solutions integrator, DigitalTolk buys 24translate to expand into the DACH region, and Powerling boosts its life sciences footprint with the acquisition of Idem.

Rounding out the episode are leadership changes, with XTM appointing Rob Finney as CMO and CQ Fluency naming Tameeka Smith as CEO following the long tenure of Elisabete Miranda.

Davit Baghdasaryan, Co-Founder & CEO of Krisp, joins SlatorPod to talk about the platform’s journey from a noise cancellation tool to a comprehensive voice productivity solution.

Originally built to eliminate background noise during calls, Krisp has expanded into real-time accent conversion, speech translation, agent assistance, and note-taking — technologies being rapidly adopted in enterprise environments.

The company’s accent conversion is now deployed by tens of thousands of call center agents, significantly improving metrics like customer satisfaction and call handling time.

Davit details Krisp’s live AI speech translation feature which uses a multi-step pipeline of speech-to-text, text translation, and text-to-speech. The majority of use cases are in high-resource language pairs such as English, Spanish, French, and German, although Davit recognizes the importance of expanding to lower-resource languages.

He shares how Krisp is also seeing increased demand in human-to-AI voice communication. AI voice agents are highly sensitive to background noise, which disrupts turn-taking and response accuracy. Krisp’s noise isolation tech plays a foundational role in enabling smoother voice AI interactions, with billions of minutes processed monthly by major AI labs and startups.

The CEO discusses LLMs' impact, noting how they enable advanced features like note-taking, call summaries, and real-time agent guidance. He sees Krisp as a platform combining proprietary technologies with third-party AI to serve both B2B and B2C markets.

Davit advises startups to explore the vast and still underdeveloped voice AI landscape, noting the current era is ripe for innovation due to AI advancements. He highlights Krisp’s roadmap priorities: expanding accent packs, refining voice translation, and building more AI Agent Assist tools focused on voice workflows.

Stefaan van der Jeught, Professor of EU Constitutional Law at Vrije Universiteit Brussel, and a Press Officer at the Court of Justice of the European Union, joins SlatorPod to talk about the complex relationship between language and law in the EU.

Stefaan outlines the historical evolution of EU language policy, from French-only founding treaties to the gradual inclusion of all member state languages. Despite formal equality, institutions largely define their own internal language regimes, leading to fragmented and often English-centric practices.

Stefaan’s book EU Language Law, now in its second edition, examines these issues in depth. Updated with new case law, legislation, and developments in AI and governance, it includes a 10-point roadmap for reform. Stefaan advocates for greater transparency, legal protection of linguistic diversity, and a constitutional debate on the role of language in EU integration.

AI, Stefaan believes, is a tool that can enhance multilingual access and consistency across EU communications. However, he cautions against using AI as a cost-cutting measure that replaces linguistic expertise. Instead, AI should serve as a support tool, with human revision, especially in legal contexts.

On regional languages like Catalan, Basque, and Galician, Stefaan notes they face legal hurdles at the EU level because they lack full legislative status in their home countries. He argues for a more transparent and constitutional debate on language policy, drawing inspiration from multilingual countries like Switzerland and Belgium.

Stefaan concludes by advising universities to train future legal linguists by going beyond technical instruction to foster critical thinking, comparative law expertise, and cultural literacy.

Tom Elias Hanna, COO of Hanna Interpreting Services (Hanna), joins SlatorPod to talk about how a family-run interpreting initiative grew into a national language solutions integrator (LSI).

Tom explained that the company was born out of necessity during an influx of Arabic-speaking refugees in San Diego, with his mother providing interpretation and him leveraging his legal background to establish a compliant, scalable business that now serves healthcare, government, education, and social service sectors across California.

Tom described how their inclusion-focused work led to partnerships like one with San Diego FC, where they provide ASL at every home game. He emphasized that while AI holds potential in sign language interpretation, it must evolve with and for the deaf community to be truly effective, due to cultural, emotional, and experiential nuances that current technologies cannot replicate.

On-site language interpretation remains the core service, especially across healthcare, education, and social services. Though remote interpreting and AI are on the rise, Tom emphasizes the irreplaceable value of human interpreters, particularly in high-stakes, emotionally nuanced settings like hospitals.

Tom explained that their recent rebrand emphasizes both human connection — central to their on-site interpreting services — and technological growth.

Initially, without a sales team, Hanna grew through referrals, client satisfaction, and high service quality. Only after COVID did Tom begin to formalize a sales strategy and identify account management as a natural extension of their client-first approach.

Tom expressed that despite considerable internal and industry-wide discussions, the Trump Executive Order designating English as the only official language of the US had no tangible effect on Hanna, so far. He noted that no clients inquired about it or changed their behavior.

Looking ahead, Tom aims to scale geographically, explore strategic acquisitions, and develop proprietary technologies to improve experiences for clients, staff, and linguists alike.

Florian and Esther welcome Slator’s Anna Wyndham and Alex Edwards to SlatorPod to explain the rationale behind the new industry framework introduced in the Slator 2025 Language Industry Market Report.

Drawing from the flagship report and echoing the buzz of SlatorCon London, the team explains why the traditional labels, Language Service Providers (LSPs) and Translation Management Systems (TMSs), no longer capture the scope and complexity of the evolving market. Instead, Slator has introduced two new terms: Language Solutions Integrators (LSIs) and Language Technology Platforms (LTPs).

Anna defines LTPs as pure-play technology providers that develop language tools, applications, orchestration platforms, and AI models. LSIs, she explains, are organizations whose core offering is to deliver fit-for-purpose multilingual content solutions by integrating language technology and AI with human experts as part of a fully managed solution.

Esther confirms early advisory adoption of the terms, noting investor interest in clearer tech-service distinctions. Alex adds that automatic dubbing startups tend to fit LTPs better than LSPs, as they often operate self-serve AI platforms.

Anna clarifies that big tech players like OpenAI and Google are excluded from the market sizing as they are foundational enablers, not language-focused businesses. The team also discusses why the term “AI” was excluded from the new categories as it may become as ubiquitous as “Cloud”.

To close, Anna points out that LSIs currently capture the bigger portion of the total addressable market (TAM). The team sees a strong demand for expert-in-the-loop services and growing LTP–LSI partnerships.

In a SlatorPod first, four guests — Scott Cooper, CEO of Language Services Associates (LSA), Pablo Tercero, COO of LSA, Jerry Song, CEO of Lingolet, and Edward Varela, VP of Business Development at Lingolet — shared their insights into a newly forged partnership.

Scott explained that the decision to partner instead of building an in-house AI solution allowed LSA to stay focused on its core strengths while leveraging Lingolet’s technical edge. The alliance goes beyond a vendor agreement, with LSA taking an equity stake in Lingolet, anchoring the relationship in shared strategy and long-term commitment.

For Jerry and Edward, the partnership is a natural progression, rooted in their deep knowledge of both software development and the language services market.

In a standout use case, the two companies helped a Major League Soccer team enable multilingual, AI-assisted communication in coaching sessions — bridging language gaps in real time for international players.

On the tech front, Jerry and Edward explained that Lingolet doesn’t build large language models from scratch but instead acts as an orchestrator, offering clients the ability to customize and deploy AI tools within secure, dedicated environments.

Pablo underscored LSA's HIPAA and PCI compliance, as security, compliance, and privacy are essential pillars, especially in regulated sectors like healthcare.

Looking ahead, LSA and Lingolet are preparing to offer hybrid solutions where AI can bridge the gap during interpreter unavailability, even for brief moments, potentially transforming session wait times.

Their roadmap includes broader language coverage, deeper integration with healthcare platforms, and innovative pricing models that will reshape how interpretation services are sold and scaled.

Rong Yan, CTO of HeyGen, joins SlatorPod to recount the company’s transformation from a Metaverse-focused startup to leading the emerging field of AI video generation.

Rong recounts HeyGen’s beginnings and the pivot to its current avatar model, which saw ARR go from zero to USD 1m within six months.

Rong attributes HeyGen’s success to its emphasis on three key elements: quality, consistency, and controllability. The company’s newest model, Avatar IV, enables full-body video generation with natural gestures, synchronized audio, and emotion to speech.

While some of the platform’s growth has been viral, Rong believes sustained success comes from building something users truly value, with a focus on pushing video quality from 70% to 95%.

The platform extends beyond avatars, offering translation, voice cloning, and real-time interactivity. Its dynamic duration feature adjusts translated speech to fit original video timing, preserving realism. Rather than build everything from scratch, HeyGen integrates external models with its own orchestration and user data, optimizing output across languages and contexts.

Rong emphasized that HeyGen’s long-term vision is not entertainment or Hollywood, but helping everyday professionals, especially marketers and educators, who lack traditional video production skills.

Looking ahead, Rong sees video agents, tools that generate complete videos from simple prompts, as the next frontier, driving accessibility and transforming storytelling through AI.

Véronique Özkaya, Co-CEO of DATAmundi, returns to SlatorPod for round 2 to talk about the company’s strategic rebrand and how it is positioning itself as a key player in the data-for-AI space.

Véronique details her journey to leading DATAmundi, formerly known as Summa Linguae, where she now drives a strategic shift from traditional language services to AI-focused data enablement.

The Co-CEO explains that their LSP background makes them well-suited to offer fine-tuning services for AI, especially in multilingual and domain-specific contexts. However, she cautions that language expertise alone isn’t enough; deep tech infrastructure, data science capabilities, and the ability to quickly build custom workflows are also essential.

While many companies still rely on crowd-sourced, basic annotation, DATAmundi targets higher-complexity projects requiring domain experts and linguists. Véronique notes the market for data-for-AI is growing significantly faster than traditional LSP work and sees a second wave of demand from enterprises needing to adapt pre-trained models.

Véronique highlights data scarcity, hallucination, and bias as core AI challenges that DATAmundi tackles through technical solutions and expert guidance, helping enterprises as they face pressure to implement AI despite legacy systems and unclear strategies.

Looking ahead, DATAmundi plans to expand its consultative services through further acquisitions, focusing not on tech per se, but on organizations that deepen its expertise in data application and AI deployment.

Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week, with DeepL becoming the first third-party translation app users can set as default on the iPhone, a position gained by navigating Apple’s developer requirements that others like Google Translate have yet to meet.

Florian and Esther examine RWS’s mid-year trading update, which triggered a steep 40% share price drop despite stable revenue, healthy profits, and manageable debt.

On the partnerships front, the duo covers multiple collaborations: Acclaro and Phrase co-funded a new Solutions Architect role, Unbabel entered a strategic partnership with Acclaro, and Phrase partnered with Clearly Local in Shanghai.

Also, KUDO expanded its network with new partners, while Deepdub was featured in an AWS case study for its work with Paramount. Wistia partnered with HeyGen to launch translation and AI-dubbing features and Synthesia joined forces with DeepL, further cementing the trend of avatar-based multilingual video content.

In Esther’s M&A corner, MotionPoint acquired GetGloby to enhance multilingual marketing capabilities, while OXO and Powerling merged to form a transatlantic LSP leader. TransPerfect deepened its media footprint with two studio acquisitions from Technicolor, and Magna Legal Services continued its acquisition spree with Basye Santiago Reporting.

Meanwhile, in funding, Linguana, an AI dubbing startup targeted at YouTube creators, raised USD 8.5m, and pyannoteAI secured EUR 8m to enhance multilingual voice tech using speaker diarization. The episode concluded with speculation about DeepL’s rumored IPO, which could have broader implications for capital markets.

John Worne, CEO of the Chartered Institute of Linguists (CIOL), joins SlatorPod to discuss CIOL’s mission to support and promote language professionals and the value of languages for the public good through professional standards, advocacy, and intercultural understanding.

John highlights the challenges of applying AI in high-stakes contexts like court interpreting. He references the UK House of Lords inquiry into language services in the legal system, which emphasized the risks of AI, particularly for low-resource languages and nuanced human communication. He warns that casual, unsupervised AI use in public services risks serious harm without proper oversight.

The CEO describes the industry’s current AI experience as mixed. While late 2024 saw falling workloads and experimentation by clients with generative AI, early 2025 brought a more stable picture, with some freelancers regaining lost business. Still, the community remains divided: about half of CIOL’s members embrace AI tools, while the rest resist them, concerned about quality and trust.

John raises questions about AI’s influence on how we use and shape language. He notes how generative AI introduces patterns into the linguistic mainstream, creating an "AI-mediated average" that may dilute cultural identity. He argues that language is a “human meta skill”, encoding not only communication but identity, culture, and belonging.

Looking ahead, John is cautiously optimistic for the next generation of linguists, as digital natives may be more adept at using AI creatively and multitasking across tools. CIOL plans to expand free resources and community engagement in 2025, ensuring that the future of language work remains inclusive, ethical, and informed by real human insight.

Luke Innes, CEO of Creative Translation, joins SlatorPod to discuss how the global transcreation agency puts “human at the heart of the process” of multilingual branding by combining creativity, cultural insight, and strategic use of AI.

Luke recounts his unconventional entry into the language services industry, charting a path from his roots in design to leading Creative Translation. Despite early skepticism around the term “creative translation,” he built a business model that puts creativity at its core, serving global brands with distinctive voices seeking international reach.

The CEO explains that the company’s talent pool includes not just translators, but copywriters, cultural consultants, subject-matter experts, and art directors, tailored to the unique needs of each project.

While large enterprises were once the primary clients for transcreation, Luke notes that AI is lowering barriers and enabling smaller companies to invest in higher-quality multilingual branding.

Luke emphasizes that AI is a productivity tool — not a creative replacement. It supports tasks like workflow automation and translation memory management but cannot replicate the insight and originality of a human linguist.

To prepare professionals for this evolving landscape, Luke founded the Creative Academy. It supports both new graduates and experienced linguists in mastering creative briefs and adopting AI responsibly.

Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week, breaking down Slator’s 2025 Language Service Provider Index (LSPI), which features nearly 300 LSPs and reports 6.6% combined growth in 2024 revenues, totaling USD 8.4bn.

Florian touches on a surprise USD 10m donation from private equity executive Mario Giannini to launch a new MA translation and interpreting program at California State University, Long Beach. The duo talks about McKinsey’s State of AI report, which continues to classify translators as AI-related roles and shows that hiring them has become slightly easier.

In Esther’s M&A corner, TransPerfect announced two acquisitions, Technicolor Games and Blue Digital Group, further expanding its presence in gaming and media localization. In Israel, BlueLion and GATS merged to form TransNarrative, and Brazilian providers Korn Translations and Zaum Langs joined forces under the Idlewild Burg group.

Meanwhile, in funding, Teleperformance invested USD 13m in Sanas, a startup offering real-time accent translation for call centers to improve global communication. Lingo.dev raised USD 4.2m, while Dubformer secured USD 3.6m to develop the ‘Photoshop of AI dubbing’.

Florian shares insights from Slator’s 2025 Localization Buyer Survey, which found that over half of buyers want strategic AI support from vendors and many cite inefficient automation as a key challenge.

Joe Corkery, MD, CEO and Co-Founder of Jaide Health, joins SlatorPod to discuss how Jaide Health is driving medical interpreting and translation with AI, bridging communication gaps for limited English proficiency (LEP) patients and improving healthcare accessibility.

With a background in computer science, medicine, and AI product leadership at Google, Joe co-founded Jaide Health with Julie Wilner, RN, in 2023 to address a long-standing need for real-time, interactive communication for the LEP patient population.

Unlike older machine translation models, which worked sentence by sentence without context, Joe shares how generative AI can maintain coherence, track gender references, and infer meaning from prior context — crucial in medical settings.

The CEO remains pragmatic about Trump’s executive order designating English as the US's official language and revoking previous language access mandates. He argues that such policies will not change the healthcare industry's commitment to multilingual patient care but may push hospitals to seek more cost-effective solutions — potentially accelerating AI adoption.

Looking ahead, Jaide Health is focusing on expanding into document translation, particularly for discharge instructions and patient portal messaging, areas where current solutions are slow or impractical.

Anna Albinsson, CEO of Gridly, joins SlatorPod to talk about the company’s evolution into a content operations platform, its expansion beyond gaming, and the increasing role of AI in localization.

Anna discusses Gridly’s transition from a niche CMS for gaming companies into a comprehensive content operations platform. Initially built by game developers for game developers, the company is now expanding into fintech and edtech, as demand for streamlined multilingual content management grows.

The CEO also announces the launch of integrated translation management system (TMS) and translation productivity (CAT) functionalities within its platform. This consolidation helps companies streamline workflows, reduce costs, and improve collaboration, particularly for enterprises with complex content pipelines.

Anna sees AI as an opportunity rather than a disruption, emphasizing that accountability remains key. While AI can accelerate translation and localization processes, companies still need governance, workflow management, and quality control to ensure accuracy.

Anna shares her views on sales and marketing, pointing out that Gridly’s lead gen is nearly 100% inbound-driven, with strong brand recognition in gaming. While SEO and digital marketing remain crucial, Anna emphasized the importance of human relationships.

Looking ahead, Gridly plans to further develop AI capabilities to improve contextual accuracy, consistency, and automation in multilingual content.

In response to President Trump’s executive order designating English as the official language of the US, SlatorPod gathered Dipak Patel, CEO of GLOBO, and Peter Argondizzo, CEO of Argo Translation, to discuss its implications for the US language industry.

The discussion highlighted that language access has long been a key part of US policy, particularly in healthcare, education, and legal services. Dipak pointed out that eliminating language services would create inefficiencies, making it harder for medical professionals to provide accurate care.

Peter emphasized the broader uncertainty the order creates as many organizations rely on federal funding for language services, and a lack of clear guidance could lead to reduced support in schools, courts, and public services.

Both CEOs acknowledged that while this order presents challenges, the language services industry has historically adapted to change. Dipak suggested that financial pressures may push the industry to innovate, potentially accelerating AI adoption in interpreting.

While the long-term impact remains unclear, the consensus is that language access will persist — driven by business needs and market demand.

Peter Reynolds, CEO of memoQ, joins SlatoPod to talk about the impact of AI on translation technology and how memoQ is enhancing its tools to meet the changing needs of enterprises, LSPs, and translators.

Discussing AI, Peter recounts memoQ's response to the rise of generative AI, leading to the launch of memoQ AGT (Adaptive Generative Translation). By providing contextual data to LLMs, they replicated the advantages of custom machine translation without extensive training.

The CEO acknowledges industry concerns about AI replacing human translators but argues that expert linguists remain essential. He compares this shift to software development, where AI tools enhance, rather than replace, skilled professionals.

Peter discusses memoQ’s acquisition of Globalese, explaining how its on-premise AI translation capabilities strengthen memoQ’s offerings for high-security industries like banking and life sciences.

On the product side, Peter teases upcoming developments, including a fully revamped web interface and research into handling larger translation segments beyond the traditional sentence-level approach.

Florian and Esther, along with Slator Head of Research, Anna Wyndham, discuss the language industry and AI news of the week, with findings from Anthropic’s recent research on Claude’s usage. The analysis of over 4 million conversations revealed a surprising fact about how people use AI for translation.

Turning to YouTube, Florian discussed CEO Neal Mohan’s statement that AI dubbing is among the platform’s "big bets" for 2025.

In a spree of AI announcements, Deepgram unveiled its Nova-3 speech-to-text model for enterprise use and Panjaya launched Pod Pro, an AI-powered multilingual sync tool. Meanwhile, Adobe expanded Firefly to include language capabilities, and Centific launched FLOW, an enterprise-grade AI solution.

In Esther’s M&A and funding corner, Lingopal secured USD 14m in funding to enhance real-time multilingual broadcasting, focusing on sports and live events, and TransPerfect acquired Apostroph Group to solidify its position in the DACH region.

Anna discussed Meta’s Language Technology Partner Program, which aims to improve AI for low-resource languages and preserve linguistic diversity. The episode wrapped with Florian noting Supertext’s rebranding and comparison with DeepL, where it claimed superior results in document-level translation quality.

Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week, where they reviewed ElevenLabs’ AI dubbing, on the back of a USD 3bn+ valuation. While they found the translation quality was strong, minor timing issues and lack of lip-syncing meant the output felt slightly unnatural.

Esther then provided an update on M&A activity, where UK-based XTM International acquired US-based Transifex and DEMAN Übersetzungen expanded its presence in Germany by acquiring life sciences translation specialist German Language Services.

Meanwhile, Sorensen Communications acquired Hand Talk, which uses AI-powered avatars for automated sign language translation, and OmniBridge, which employs computer vision to convert sign language into speech or text.

Florian shared how experts received DeepSeek’s AI translation capabilities, noting its strong Chinese-English performance and cost efficiency but highlighting skepticism over data security, domain-specific accuracy, and potential political bias.

The duo noted that ZOO Digital has joined Amazon Prime Video’s Preferred Fulfillment Vendor Program, a positive development amid its recent market fluctuations and historically low share prices.

Florian gave his thoughts on Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses with live translation, noting their inconsistent performance with fast or quiet speech and questioning their usefulness for media consumption compared to traditional subtitles.

Bryan Forrester, Co-founder and CEO of Boostlingo, returns to SlatorPod for round 2 to talk about the company’s growth, the US interpreting market, and the evolving role of AI.

Bryan shares how the company has tripled in size since he last appeared on the pod, driven by strategic acquisitions, including VoiceBoxer and Interpreter Intelligence, and a rebranding effort to unify its product portfolio.

Bryan explains how Boostlingo balances innovation with practicality, ensuring that new features align with customer needs. He highlights the company’s three-pronged strategy: retaining existing customers, enabling growth, and making long-term bets on emerging trends.

While tools like real-time captions and transcription enhance efficiency, Bryan stresses that AI alone cannot replace human interpreters in complex industries like healthcare. He highlights privacy, compliance, and the nuanced expertise of human interpreters as critical factors, positioning AI as a supportive tool rather than a replacement.

Bryan discusses market dynamics and regulatory changes, including how those under the new US administration could influence language access demand, particularly in areas like healthcare and public services.

He describes Boostlingo’s strategy of leveraging third-party AI models, optimizing them with proprietary data, and rigorously testing to ensure quality and reliability. Looking ahead, Boostlingo plans to expand internationally and integrate AI ethically and effectively into its offerings, guided by its newly formed AI Advisory Board.

Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week, focusing on Slator’s latest M&A and Funding Report, which highlights over 50 mergers, acquisitions, and financial investments, and nearly 20 funding rounds in 2024.

Florian discusses OpenAI’s ChatGPT o1 model, praising its translation accuracy for complex texts like German legal documents, though he notes slower processing speeds and challenges with low-resource languages.

In Esther’s first M&A and funding corner for 2025, MotionPoint has acquired KeyContent, Synthesia has raised a USD 180m Series D, bringing its valuation to over USD 2bn, and Pocketalk raised USD 15.8m in funding, despite talks of a potential IPO last year.

Florian talks about Acrolinx’s leadership change, with Matt Blumberg becoming CEO and aiming to expand the AI-powered content governance platform’s presence in the US market. DeepL launched its AI-powered speech-to-speech translation product, DeepL Voice, with NEC as its first enterprise client.

Esther notes LinkedIn's ranking of “Interpreter” as the 22nd fastest-growing job in the UK, driven by demand across industries like localization, museums, and even zoos. Florian wraps up with AWS’s latest guide on integrating translation memories with large language models to improve AI-driven translation workflows.

In the 2024 year-end episode of SlatorPod, hosts Florian Faes and Esther Bond, along with guest Anna Wyndham, explore pivotal language industry trends from the past year and predictions for 2025.

First, the language industry news of the week, with LXT’s acquisition of clickworker, which aims to expand its AI data capabilities and potentially double revenues by 2025. Meanwhile, Esther shares how EzDubs, a speech translation startup, secured USD 4.2m in seed funding.

Florian notes that RWS reported stable revenues for 2024, with GBP 180m coming from AI-driven products and services. He also highlights YouTube’s AI dubbing rollout, unlocking new possibilities for multilingual content, though noting current limitations, like robotic voice quality.

The trio discusses the UK House of Lords inquiry into court interpreting and translation, which raised concerns about interpreter pay, quality issues, and AI’s role in quality assurance.

Reflecting on 2024, Anna outlines three major trends: speech-to-speech translation, “translation as a feature,” where translation capabilities are integrated into everyday software like project management tools, and the evolution of localization roles toward AI-driven skills.

Looking ahead, Anna predicts rapid AI adoption in the public sector due to cost constraints and scalability needs, while Florian anticipates further breakthroughs in machine translation quality estimation and potential IPOs in the language tech sector. Esther forecasts increased M&A activity as niche providers seek stability and scalability in a competitive environment.

Katharine Allen, Director of Language Industry Learning at Boostlingo, and Dr. Bill Rivers, Principal at WP Rivers & Associates, join SlatorPod to discuss the challenges and opportunities AI brings to interpreting. Both are founding members of the Interpreting SAFE AI Task Force, which aims to guide the responsible use of AI in language services.

Allen describes AI as a double-edged sword — capable of expanding multilingual access but limited in its ability to handle the nuanced human dialogue essential in fields like healthcare. She emphasizes the ongoing shift toward a hybrid model, where human interpreters collaborate with AI tools.

Rivers underscores the importance of ensuring AI solutions are “fit for purpose.” Drawing from his background in computational linguistics, he explains how insufficient data, particularly for lesser-diffused languages, limits AI’s reliability.

The duo express concern over the unregulated use of AI, citing examples where inaccuracies in AI translation led to significant consequences. The SAFE AI Task Force seeks to mitigate such risks by establishing guidelines and fostering collaboration across sectors.

Despite these challenges, Allen is optimistic about AI’s potential to help interpreters’ preparation and productivity, such as generating context-specific glossaries or simulating practice scenarios, saving time, and improving skill development. However, she cautions against over-reliance on AI, particularly in situations requiring deep human judgment.

Through the SAFE AI Task Force, Allen and Rivers advocate for collaboration and education to use AI responsibly, ensuring it serves as a tool to help interpreters rather than diminish the profession.

Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week, where they explore how AI is influencing content creation and translation, noting its progress and limitations.

A recent study on GPT-4 revealed its ability to match junior translators but lag behind experienced professionals, particularly in nuanced contexts. Florian highlights the public’s heightened perception of the risks of AI, such as OpenAI’s Whisper, in critical sectors such as healthcare, where transcription errors and hallucinations can have severe implications.

Esther delves into leadership transitions in the language industry, with notable appointments including Benjamin Faes, a tech veteran with experience at Google and AOL, as RWS’ new CEO.

Sorenson appointed Pajet Alves as CEO, while BLEND welcomed Yoav Ziv to lead after significant growth and acquisitions. Anna Albinsson took the helm at Gridly, with plans to expand beyond its gaming localization focus into MedTech and EdTech.

In M&A and funding, Esther covers Teleperformance’s acquisition of ZP Better Together for USD 490m, with plans to fold it into LanguageLine Solutions. Meanwhile, Writer.com raised USD 200m in Series C funding, to expand its generative AI capabilities.

Florian discusses big tech developments, such as Microsoft’s Translator Pro app for speech and document translation, while Amazon teased its "any-to-any" AI capabilities during the AWS re:Invent conference, hinting at future innovations in multilingual processing.

Florian unpacks Straker Translations’ financial results, which reflected industry trends of increased volumes but declining revenue, highlighting pricing pressures. Their new Verify.ai tool, designed to validate AI-generated translations, underscores the pivot toward technology.

Charles Campbell, President of tbo., returns to SlatorPod for round 2 to talk about his efforts to unite and professionalize the language services industry in Latin America and the Caribbean through the association Juntos.

Founded just before the pandemic, Juntos aims to raise standards in translation, interpreting, and localization by fostering collaboration, mentoring, and quality benchmarking. Despite challenges posed by the vast geography and diverse cultural landscape, the organization has seen significant growth, hosting conferences in Rio de Janeiro and Lima, with the next planned for Mexico City in 2025.

Campbell sees immense potential in Latin America, noting its rich linguistic diversity and a growing pool of passionate professionals entering the field. While many countries in the region lack the established quality norms and associations found in Europe or North America, Juntos is actively working to close this gap. He also highlights the affordability of hosting events in the region, coupled with its cultural richness, as factors drawing increased international participation.

Campbell addresses the role of AI in the industry, recognizing its strengths in high-resource languages like Spanish and Portuguese. He stresses that while AI is a valuable tool, human expertise remains essential, particularly in nuanced and culturally specific translations.

As Latin America and the Caribbean continue to gain visibility in the language industry, Campbell remains optimistic. Through Juntos, he encourages stakeholders to collaborate, innovate, and embrace the region’s unique opportunities.

Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week, with Slator’s latest Translation as a Feature (TaaF) Report, which explores how AI translation is becoming an integral feature in enterprise technology.

Florian talks about Reddit’s success with machine translation (MT). By localizing content into French, the social media platform quadrupled daily active users in France, demonstrating the high ROI of investing millions in AI-driven localization each quarter.

In an M&A corner, Esther discusses Wolfestone’s acquisition of TauRho Transcribes, beefing up Wolfestone’s offerings in transcription and life sciences. She also covers TransPerfect’s fourth acquisition of 2024 with Plint selling its Netherlands-based media localization studio to the Super Agency.

Esther highlights Panjaya.ai’s USD 9.5m funding for BodyTalk, which perfects multilingual AI translation by synchronizing lip movements and gestures. Meanwhile, Neuphonic, a UK-based voice AI startup focused on ultra-low latency speech technology, has raised GBP 3m in pre-seed funding.

Florian reviews major AI launches: Translated’s Lara, a customizable large-scale AI-powered translation model, DeepL’s "DeepL Voice", offering real-time speech-to-text capabilities, and Unbabel’s Widn.AI, a platform offering advanced MT customization.

Stuart Green, CEO of ZOO Digital (ZOO), joins SlatorPod to discuss the role of AI in media localization and the essential role human linguists will continue to play in producing high-authenticity content in multiple languages.

A technologist by training, Stuart recounts his entry into the media localization industry and how ZOO transitioned from DVD production to leading-edge solutions in multilingual entertainment content.

The CEO shares key highlights from ZOO’s AI white paper, “Will Robots Take Over The World of Localisation?”, where he views AI as a valuable “artificial assistant” rather than a replacement for human talent. As such, AI can streamline repetitive tasks and support creatives by handling administrative duties, thus allowing them to focus on higher-value work.

On AI lip-syncing Green suggests that it could mitigate the common mismatch between speech and mouth movements in dubbed media. However, he emphasizes that maintaining the “suspension of disbelief” in high-value content requires nuanced, culturally relevant adaptation — a task that still demands human interpretation of context, mood, and subtle humor.

While AI tools are improving, particularly in speech-to-text accuracy, Green foresees human expertise remaining integral in areas demanding cultural nuance and emotional resonance. He highlights ZOO’s commitment to quality-driven localization for major entertainment clients and the unique demands of its publicly listed status, balancing transparency with the need for a competitive edge.

Christian Elongue, Managing Director of Ghana-based consulting firm and language service provider (LSP) Kabod Group, joins SlatorPod to share his insights into the African language services landscape, recounting his journey into language advocacy.

Christian describes Kabod Group as a dual-purpose organization, offering translation services primarily to nonprofit clients, while advancing social impact projects for African language professionals with initiatives such as the Network of African Language Translators and Teachers (ALATT) and the Association of Language Companies in Africa (ALCA).

Christian discusses the unique challenges of Africa’s language landscape, which spans over 2,000 languages and requires localized solutions. He notes that demand varies widely across regions, with West Africa focused on French-English translation, East Africa on Swahili, and North Africa on Arabic. However, limited data and lack of standardization pose challenges for developing language technologies and machine translation for African languages.

To address these gaps, Christian advocates for increased local investment in African language technology. He highlights projects like Masakhane, which develops datasets for low-resource languages but stresses the need for more African-led funding. Christian also urges international LSPs to support Africa’s language industry by sharing resources and facilitating professional exchanges.

Christian concludes the podcast with a call to action: empowering African languages is key to preserving cultural heritage and fostering economic growth.

Sijie Wei, Co-CEO of language services, technology, and game localization specialist EC Innovations (ECI), joins SlatorPod to talk about his new role as co-CEO and leading one of Asia’s largest LSPs with revenues exceeding USD 50m in 2023.

Sijie shares how ECI, initially focused on helping Western blue-chip firms enter China, expanded to assisting Chinese tech giants like Tencent and ByteDance in globalizing their products.

Sijie highlighted the challenges of the Asia-Pacific market, where localization maturity still lags that of the US and Europe in certain verticals. However, he sees significant growth potential as industries like e-commerce, AI, and electric vehicles mature.

Regarding language AI, Sijie pointed out that Chinese companies prefer to develop their own solutions, making the market highly competitive. ECI benefits from this research, applying cutting-edge advancements in AI to client projects.

In game localization, Sijie continues to see substantial growth potential. He recognizes that localizing games from China to global markets and vice versa is equally challenging due to differences in player preferences, monetization methods, and cultural contexts.

Sijie gave his insights on the investment landscape, noting that current market valuations are lower due to uncertainty around AI adoption across industries like localization.

Sijie concluded by addressing the balance between AI and human expertise in localization, emphasizing that while AI can drive efficiency, human quality remains superior in many contexts.

Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week, with Slator’s latest Pro Guide on Audiovisual Translation, which outlines opportunities for language service providers (LSPs) and how AI is impacting the field.

In a language AI corner, Florian covers Alibaba’s recent launch of a proprietary large language model (LLM) for translation, which will help expand the e-commerce giant’s global reach. He also adds that Reddit has piloted machine translation (MT) for French content, a success that will see it roll out to more than 35 countries.

Florian highlights NVIDIA’s move into MT and transcription services, adding to the growing competition in AI-driven language solutions. He talks about Meta's AI-powered lip-sync dubbing for content creators, bringing AI into the social media space.

The duo dive into OpenAI’s advanced voice mode, which allows for real-time communication in multiple languages through ChatGPT. Esther notes its potential for consecutive interpreting, though simultaneous interpreting remains a challenge.

Esther shares key takeaways from the recent AMTA conference in Chicago, noting that a key focus was how LLMs are influencing MT. She also discusses Propio’s rapid expansion through its acquisitions of ULG, Akorbi, and ASL, making it one of the largest LSPs globally.

Wrapping up, Esther discusses Gladia, an AI start-up specializing in real-time speech-to-text solutions, that recently raised USD 16m in Series A funding.

Gregor and Olivera Rosulnik, Co-founders of Slovenia-based language service provider GORR, join SlatorPod to discuss their journey into the language industry, the challenges they faced, and the strategies they've employed to grow their business.

Gregor and Olivera share how they initially targeted Slovenian companies, especially startups and scaleups, and after adjusting their focus, expanded internationally to also work with government entities and large corporations.

The duo highlights their use of AI tools to enhance their language services, noting the improvements in machine translation quality over the years. However, they acknowledge the perception challenges posed by AI, where clients might erroneously assume that translation is a completely automated process.

Gregor emphasizes the importance of resilience and adaptation, noting that ‘crises’ like ChatGPT are a natural part of business and that success often depends on how well a company can navigate through them.

Discussing their approach to vendor management, Olivera emphasizes the importance of recommendations and personal interactions in building a reliable network of qualified linguists.

Looking forward, Gregor and Olivera aim to grow sustainably by focusing on quality service, nurturing client relationships, and integrating new technologies, all while maintaining their core values and commitment to communication.

Shamus Sayed, COO of Interpreters Unlimited, and Anna Wyndam, Slator’s Head of Research, join SlatorPod to discuss key findings from the 2024 ALC Industry Survey Report, covering industry growth, profitability, service diversification, and the impact of AI.

Shamus kicks off the podcast by explaining the origins and purpose of the Association of Language Companies (ALC) and its annual survey, which aims to establish industry standards and measure the value added by language service companies.

Anna shares details about the survey, which saw a 50% increase in participation from last year, with 127 companies taking part. Participants mainly consisted of small to mid-sized companies, with a significant portion coming from the US.

Shamus provides insights specific to interpreting services, noting strong revenue growth and the rise of remote interpreting. He discusses the impact of AI, challenges in sourcing skilled interpreters, and pricing trends.

Anna highlights that companies are focused on growing revenue, developing new service offerings, and cutting operational costs. She also discusses the heightened interest in M&A activity, with smaller companies more interested in selling, while larger ones remain opportunistic buyers.

Shamus recaps the ALC annual summit in Montreal, highlighting the camaraderie, networking, and potential business opportunities that arose from the event.

Looking ahead to 2025, Shamus shares that the ALC aims to focus on AI integration, workforce development, service diversification, and M&A support.

Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week, where they give their impressions from SlatorCon Silicon Valley and touch upon the findings from the 2024 ALC Industry Survey.

In a significant funding update, Esther reports that Smartcat raised USD 43m in a Series C round, bringing their total funding to USD 70m. This funding will support product innovation in AI translation and multilingual content generation.

Florian talks about YouTube's potential launch of AI dubbing, a feature in testing that aims to generate translated audio tracks for videos, significantly enhancing content accessibility and engagement.

In Esther’s M&A corner, Cloudbreak, now rebranded as Equiti, acquired its competitor Voyce and brought on a new private equity partner, Heritage Group. Meanwhile, EasyTranslate acquired World Translation, expanding its reach in the Nordic and DACH regions.

The duo bid farewell to publicly traded Keywords Studios, which is delisting after being acquired by private equity firm EQT. They also note the shutdown of Viva Translate, a speech-to-speech translation company that will open-source its tools as it winds down.

George Bara, Founder and Chief Strategist of tech company Zetta Cloud, joins SlatorPod to talk about the nuances of AI technology and its applications in text analytics and multilingual data processing.

George shares insights from his career journey, including his tenure at SDL and RWS before co-founding Zetta Cloud, which focuses on building small, specialized language models rather than large, generalized ones.

The founder discusses the challenges and misconceptions clients have about AI, especially with the hype surrounding large language models (LLMs). George notes that many clients mistakenly believe LLMs can solve all their data processing needs instantly.

However, Zetta Cloud's approach allows their models to be more efficient, flexible, and deployable in customers' infrastructures, which is particularly valuable for clients in the public sector who prioritize data privacy.

George highlights the differences in AI adoption and expectations across various industries and regions. He observes that public sector clients often have a more advanced understanding of AI's capabilities compared to commercial clients.

The founder also discusses the importance of staying updated with the latest AI developments and how Zetta Cloud selectively integrates new technologies that align with their clients' needs.

George concludes by sharing his involvement in Romania's national AI strategy, stressing the importance of regulatory compliance and the potential for government grants and partnerships to drive AI innovation in Europe.

Dr. Christopher Kurz, Head of Translation Management at wind turbine manufacturer ENERCON, joins SlatorPod to talk about the development of ISO 5060, a new standard focused on the evaluation of translation output.

Christopher discusses how his involvement with ISO standards since 2011, coupled with his experience in translation quality management, led him to spearhead the creation of ISO 5060 in early 2020.

Christopher outlines that the primary aim was to produce a reliable international standard for evaluating translations objectively, countering the subjective judgments often encountered in the field.

The standard itself includes a detailed error typology, ranging from terminology and accuracy to style and audience appropriateness, and introduces four severity levels — neutral, minor, major, and critical — allowing for a nuanced evaluation of translation quality.

Despite advancements in AI, Christopher asserts that human judgment remains crucial for evaluating translation quality. AI can assist in identifying errors like typos or grammar issues, but understanding the meaning and context of a translation requires human expertise.

Christopher shares that ISO 5060 will undergo systematic review in five years, allowing for updates and improvements based on industry feedback. He hopes that the standard will be widely adopted by both the industry and academia, promoting a more professional approach to translation evaluation.

Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week, with key highlights from the latest Slator Pro Guide: The Future of Language Industry Jobs. The guide focuses on the future of jobs and freelance opportunities in the language industry, noting the impact of AI on employment trends.

The duo analyze the 2024 Inc. 5,000 list, which includes 14 LSPs this year, with companies like PGLS, Propio Language Services, and Boostlingo among the highest-ranked, demonstrating strong growth over the past three years.

In other industry news, amid a rocky Q2 2024, AMN Healthcare Services reported an 18% year-on-year increase in revenue for its language services division, driven by strong utilization of video interpretation.

Florian addresses a recent content hack involving media localizer Iyuno, where unreleased Netflix shows were leaked online, underscoring the importance of security and confidentiality in the industry.

Esther touches on recent labor strikes affecting the game localization and dubbing sectors, driven by the Screen Actors Guild's action. Keywords Studios also announced layoffs of linguists in Italy, sparking a linguist strike and highlighting ongoing tensions between AI and human talent in localization.

The podcast concludes with Esther’s M&A and funding corner, including Translate.One's acquisition of Intertext and funding rounds for Language I/O and Bering Lab, signaling continued investment and growth in the language industry.

Spence Green, CEO and Co-founder of LILT, the AI solution provider for enterprise translation, joins SlatorPod. On the podcast, Spence discusses the evolution of LILT's end-to-end platform, which integrates AI models with human verification to ensure quality standards.

The CEO notes a significant shift in enterprise approaches towards localization, now being more software-driven rather than service-driven, which has been influenced by the broader adoption and focus on AI technologies post-ChatGPT.

Spence emphasizes the importance of continuous training and customization of AI models to improve accuracy and efficiency in translation. He highlights how localization has emerged as an early winner to showcase the return on investment in AI.

Spence addresses the impact of AI on the translation industry, including the potential for linguist shortages due to low rates driven by machine translation post-editing. He predicts that the market will eventually adjust, but in the meantime, there is a need for higher-skilled linguists to manage the gap left by AI models.

The podcast concludes with insights into LILT's recent features, such as AI Analytics, which provide clients with deeper insights into the impact of AI on their localization processes. Spence also talks about the potential for multilingual content creation using AI, the challenges of segment-level interfaces, and the importance of workflow orchestration in localization.

Paul Ghio, Co-founder of AI video localization startup Supernative, joins SlatorPod to talk about how language AI is reshaping how we create and consume content globally.

Paul shares how his passion for helping creators and his experience with internationalization at Shutterstock and Yelp led him to start Supernative, with a mission to democratize video localization using AI.

The Co-founder outlines Supernative's technology stack, which includes well-known models like Whisper for speech-to-text, ChatGPT for translation, and ElevenLabs for speech generation. He highlights the importance of improving these core capabilities, such as voice cloning and lip-syncing, to deliver high-quality dubbing at a competitive cost.

Paul discusses the current landscape and challenges of the AI localization market. He notes that while there is significant interest and potential in AI-driven localization, retaining users remains a challenge due to the novelty factor wearing off.

He elaborates on Supernative's strategy to introduce collaborative features to better align with the workflows of content creators and businesses, which could be a more sustainable strategy for user retention and growth.

Paul also touches on their long-term vision, including more comprehensive localization tools that cater to cultural and contextual nuances, and the possibility of localizing video content itself.

Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week, with a nearly USD 4m settlement involving Language Line Services and ongoing disputes in Canada, where freelance interpreters are protesting against unpaid breaks during debates.

Florian highlights a YouTube video about UN simultaneous interpreting and the rigorous standards and working conditions for UN interpreters.

Esther shares a significant procurement opportunity from the UK's Crown Commercial Service, which plans to issue a GBP 250m tender for various language services.

In tech news, the duo talk about DeepL’s new LLM launch that claims to outperform competitors in translation quality. They also touch on the trend of adding translation features to various SaaS platforms, like Airtable and Happy Scribe.

A tweetstorm by venture capitalist Olivia Moore from Andreessen Horowitz introduces the concept of "AI Scribes," suggesting a significant market opportunity for AI-driven transcription services.

In an M&A and funding corner, AI video startup Captions raised USD 60m at a USD 500m valuation and Mantra, a Japanese manga translation startup, raised nearly USD 5m. Toppan Digital Language acquired Austria’s Meinrad and Universal Music Group partnered with SoundLabs AI for voice cloning and language transposition in songs.

João Graça, Co-founder and CTO of language operations platform Unbabel, joins SlatorPod to talk about the present and future of large language models (LLMs) and their broad impact across all things translation and localization.

First, the CTO explains how Unbabel was founded to address language barriers for people using services like Airbnb, combining MT with human validation to improve translation quality.

João believes that LLMs are quickly replacing neural MT models as much more R&D is going into LLMs vs NMT. He highlights that LLMs can handle more complex tasks like automatic post-editing, source correction, and cultural adaptation, which were previously difficult to achieve with traditional models.

He also tells the backstory of the company's decision to develop TowerLLM. João shares how Unbabel's approach involves using open-source LLMs, fine-tuning them with multilingual data, and applying techniques like retrieval-augmented generation to improve translation quality in production settings.

Despite the advancements, João acknowledges that human intervention is still necessary for high-stakes translation tasks.

The podcast concludes with the hiring environment for AI talent and the future directions for LLM development, with João expressing optimism about the continued progress and potential of these models.

Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week, with a legal battle in the UK involving public sector interpreting and the classification of interpreters as freelancers or workers, which could significantly impact the business models of language service providers (LSPs).

The duo explores Google Translate's recent expansion to support over 200 languages, adding 110 new ones using their large language model, Palm 2.

Florian talks about the insolvency of Landexx, a German LSP, following a pattern of recent bankruptcies in the language service industry in Europe.

Meanwhile, Keywords Studios, a major player in game localization, is set to be acquired by the private equity firm EQT, valuing the LSP at approximately USD 2.2 billion.

Esther gives an M&A corner, including Translate.One's acquisition of Enable2 in the UK, Valorem Group's purchase of Ireland-based TRANSLIT, and difuze's acquisition of the accessibility division of Blackstone Sight and Sound in Canada. Additionally, Esther covers a pre-seed funding round by Dubme.io, a Spanish startup specializing in AI-powered dubbing.

The podcast concludes with a discussion on the Interpreting SAFE AI Task Force, which has released guidelines for the ethical use of AI in interpreting, emphasizing the importance of maintaining quality, accountability, and transparency in the industry.

Josh Goldsmith, Geek-In-Chief of techforward, joins SlatorPod to talk about his multiple roles as a linguist, conference interpreter, and educator.

Josh shares his multifaceted background in linguistics and language teaching, highlighting his passion for language and education, which led him to co-found techforward.

Josh explains the current landscape of conference interpreting, noting a shift back to on-site interpreting post-COVID, which he prefers due to better sound quality, easier access to documents, and the human connection it offers.

He touches on the importance of personal branding for translators and interpreters, suggesting practical steps like professional email addresses, good headshots, and a strong LinkedIn presence.

Josh delves into the practical applications of AI in interpreting, with AI tools for glossary management, terminology extraction, and preparation for interpreting assignments. He also stresses the ethical concerns of AI and the need for human interpreters to navigate cultural differences and ensure accurate communication.

Josh discusses his various projects, including the AI Language Club, which offers tutorials on using AI for language learning. Looking ahead, Josh plans to focus on the AI in Translation Summit and the AI in Translation Bootcamp, which offer hands-on experiences with the latest AI tools.

Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week, giving a recap of SlatorCon London and exploring some use cases from the Slator Pro Guide: Language AI for Consumers.

Florian talks about Andrew Ng's recent project on agentic machine translation, which involves using large language models (LLMs) to create a virtual language service provider (LSP).

The duo touch on Apple's recent Worldwide Developer Conference, where Apple Watch is set to get a translation widget and also recently announced a new translation API.

Florian shares RWS's half-year financial results, where despite declines in revenue, the company's stock rose by 20%, likely due to investor perception of AI-enabled services and new product offerings like Evolve and HAI gaining traction.

Esther talks about DeepL's USD 300m funding round, which valued the company at USD 2bn, a testament to the growing interest in AI models. She also covers Unbabel's launch of TowerLLM, which claims to outperform competitors like Google Translate and DeepL.

In Esther’s M&A corner, Keywords Studios eyes a GBP 2.2bn deal from Swedish private equity firm EQT, Melbourne LSP Ethnolink buys Sydney-based competitor Language Professionals, and ZOO Digital acquires Italian dubbing partner LogoSound.

Esther gives a nod to the positive financial performances of companies like ZOO Digital and AMN's language services division, with more mixed results for Straker.

Marina Ilari, CEO of Terra Translations and Terra Localizations, joins SlatorPod to talk about her professional journey and the world of game localization.

The CEO shares the strategic decision to create Terra Localizations in 2008 to cater specifically to the gaming industry's requirements. She attributes the company's growth to the ability to offer boutique-level services while scaling efficiently to handle larger projects.

Marina discusses the complexities of game localization, which requires specialized project managers, linguists, and QA teams. She explains that clients range from indie game developers, who might have budget constraints but are deeply invested in quality, to large publishers who finance and market games globally.

The podcast also touches on the challenges of marketing and competing in the game localization industry against both small and large players.

Addressing the impact of AI and other technologies, Marina acknowledges their role in creating efficiencies and advancing tasks within the localization process. However, she underscores the importance of ethical and responsible use of AI, particularly in a creative and culturally sensitive field like game localization.

Marina also talks about Terra's new HR service offering, Terra Team Up, which emerged from a client demand for recruiting and consulting services, primarily targeting the Latin American talent.

Marina concludes by reflecting on the importance of staying true to the company's values and culture, which she believes has been key to their sustained growth and success.

Georg Ell, CEO of Phrase, returns to SlatorPod for round 2 to talk about the accelerating adoption of generative technologies and AI.

Discussing the broader implications of AI, Georg notes that business leaders are increasingly focused on language technology for its cost, return on investment, and time-to-value benefits.

Georg points out that these technologies are not just about improving translation quality but also about enabling hyperautomation, hyperpersonalization, and ultimately, hyperscale.

The CEO shares that enterprise-grade technology for generating multilingual content at scale is still in demand, underscoring the need for robust, enterprise-quality solutions.

The podcast explores new product launches from Phrase, including the introduction of Next GenMT, which combines GPT 4o with Phrase's own MT engine to enhance translation quality and efficiency.

Georg also discusses Auto LQA (Language Quality Assessment), an AI-driven solution designed to assist linguists, not replace them, and significantly reduce costs and time spent on quality assessment.

The CEO highlights Phrase's strategic shift towards being a platform rather than a product-centric company with an updated pricing model that allows customers to access a comprehensive suite of capabilities.

Georg concludes by discussing Phrase's strategic partnerships with major LSPs and the company's ecosystem-first approach.

Mary Kazamias, CEO of TRSB, joins SlatorPod to talk about her journey starting as a translator and transitioning through various roles to leading Canada's largest language service provider (LSP).

The podcast explores the balance between government and private sector clients in Canada, with Mary noting that while the government produces more content, TRSB serves more customers in the private sector.

Mary highlights the importance of understanding cultural nuances in translation, particularly in bilingual regions like Quebec. She also touches on the impact of regulatory requirements on language services demand in Canada, such as the Official Languages Act, Bill 96, and provincial laws.

The podcast shifts to talent challenges in the language industry, with Mary highlighting the launch of TRSB Academy which offers a structured mentoring program to equip new translators with the practical skills needed to excel alongside technological advancements.

Mary acknowledges the hype surrounding AI, but sees the role of LSPs as system integrators, adapting to incorporate AI technologies while maintaining a human-centric approach to providing language services.

When it comes to M&A strategy, Mary stresses the significance of cultural fit and careful post-merger integration for successful acquisitions.

Looking ahead, Mary underscores the need for the industry to recognize and promote its diverse capabilities beyond traditional translation, embracing innovation and evolving business processes.

Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week, with the US Bureau of Labor Statistics sharing their projections for growth in translation and interpreting jobs between 2022-2032.

The duo delves into Reddit's earnings call, where machine translation is emphasized as a key driver for international growth and content accessibility.

Florian touches on recent AI dubbing developments, such as Adobe's upcoming generative audio and video tools, and Microsoft Edge's feature to overlay AI-generated dubbing on videos.

Esther gives an M&A corner, including Argo Translations' acquisition of Global Accent Translation Services, LanguageWire's acquisition of WhP International, TransPerfect's acquisition of Content Lab, and Supertext USA's spinoff from its Swiss parent company.

Esther also discusses RWS' trading update, where the Super Agency announced plans to sell its interest in PatBase, a patent search database, for GBP 30m.

Charles Campbell joins SlatorPod to talk about the evolution of tbo. from a translation company to a diversified business, exploring challenges, strategies, and the impact of industry changes.

The President and Founder discusses the talent landscape, mentioning challenges such as layoffs, hiring fluctuations, and the impact of political changes in Argentina. He shares insights on the local economy, the government's actions, and the business outlook amidst these changes.

Charles emphasizes the importance of adaptability and flexibility in today's job market, particularly as AI integration reshapes traditional roles. He mentions the need for workers to be open to evolving job descriptions and not overly resistant to incorporating AI into their roles.

In discussing the changing role of project managers, Charles highlights the shift towards automation and the need for language service providers to embrace technology while maintaining a human touch.

While tbo. embraces technological advancements, Charles acknowledges he passed on opportunities such as data annotation, highlighting the challenges of aligning business strategies with emerging trends.

The podcast touches on the rebranding process undertaken by tbo. and establishing business units like tbotalent, tbodev, and tbolab. Charles highlights the importance of a meaningful, simplified brand name that aligns with the company's diverse service offerings.

Daniel Wilson, Founder and CEO of XRI Global, joins SlatorPod to talk about the company's focus on low-resource languages and its efforts to bring digital equality to communities lacking online language support.

With a background in linguistics and research on endangered languages in the Caucasus Mountains, Wilson's journey led him to establish XRI Global to address the challenge of building AI tools for languages with limited data availability.

The CEO highlights the importance of domain-specific data collection and the need to tailor solutions based on the specific needs of each community, ranging from humanitarian organizations to governments and religious groups.

The company's approach includes leveraging large language models and machine translation to provide conversational AI capabilities even for offline communities or areas where internet access is limited.

Wilson also touches on the legal and ethical considerations involved in data collection, emphasizing the importance of complying with data laws and obtaining proper consent.

Looking ahead, XRI Global plans to expand its language support to over 50 languages in 2024 and continues to explore advancements in on-device AI capabilities for broader accessibility.

Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week, with SlatorCon London, scheduled for May 23rd, announcing the speaker lineup, including a Keynote presentation from Iris Orriss of Meta.

They then discuss how enterprises are becoming increasingly comfortable launching fully automated language AI features, labeling it the “normalization of language AI”.

The duo talk about the unprecedented merger of Swiss-based SuperText and Textshuttle, signaling a shift towards more integrated, technology-driven solutions.

Other M&A activity includes Deluxe's strategic investment in AppTek, TransPerfect's acquisition of TheSpeech, Diuna Group acquiring Yellow, and Cloudbreak Health’s sale.

Esther provides an update on financial results, with Straker anticipating a revenue decline while Keywords experienced growth in its top line but a decrease in its globalization division. Meanwhile, Appen faced a failed takeover bid after the bid was leaked, impacting the acquisition of the company.

The podcast also touches on Google Translate’s controversial decision to shelve its human feedback tool, Contribute, which allowed users to suggest translations for improvement. In other AI news, researchers from the Earth Species Project are exploring the possibility of translating animal communication using advanced AI models.

Florian wraps up the pod with the European Commission's recent tender award, TRAD23, which sparked concerns among individual translators regarding pricing and quality standards.

Dr. B.J. Woodstein, Professor, Translator, and Writer, joins SlatorPod to talk about translation theory and its implications for literary translators, while also shedding light on the professional challenges, nuances, and ethical considerations.

B.J. discusses her upcoming book, “Translation Theory for Literary Translators”, where she aims to demystify translation theory and make it accessible to translators. She highlights the need for translators to understand and engage with translation theory to enhance their work and make informed decisions in their practice.

The author shares insights on the market dynamics of literary translation, including how translators are selected, rates are set, and the challenges faced in the industry.

She highlights the importance of human intervention in translation, especially in handling linguistic nuances, cultural concepts, and editorial decisions that go beyond what AI or machine translation can achieve.

B.J. reflects on the linguistic and cultural challenges in translating from Swedish to English, such as dealing with different language structures and cultural nuances that may not easily be translated. She also explores the complexities of translating sensitive or explicit content, where decisions need to be made to maintain cultural authenticity while adapting for the target market.

The podcast concludes with B.J. sharing her current research projects on equality, diversity, and inclusion in higher education, as well as her interest in translating queer literature.

Mihai Vlad, the Founder of Video Highlight and former General Manager of Language Weaver, joins SlatorPod to talk about his entrepreneurial journey and insights into the language AI startup landscape.

Mihai discusses his latest venture, Video Highlight, which aims to solve the inefficiency of extracting valuable information from lengthy videos by providing automatic transcription, timestamped summaries, key highlights, and interactive chats.

By enabling summaries in multiple languages, Video Highlight gained unexpected traction from non-English speakers in Latin America, Europe, and Asia, indicating a global demand for efficient video consumption tools.

Mihai talks about the utility of leveraging AI-powered models, particularly LLMs, in various content creation and processing tasks, such as summarizing podcasts, generating derivative content, and aiding in machine translation.

Mihai reflects on the entrepreneurial journey in AI, emphasizing the importance of timing, innovation, and adaptability. He discusses the challenges of balancing cost-effectiveness while scaling up operations and the significance of making strategic decisions regarding API usage and infrastructure.

Chris Reynolds, the EVP and General Manager of Worldwide Localization and Fulfillment at Deluxe, joins SlatorPod to talk about the complexities of dubbing and the potential impact of AI on the industry.

Chris discusses the different elements in the dubbing process, including voice casting, script adaptation, and post-production, as well as the challenges of tight timelines, particularly with the rise of streaming services demanding simultaneous releases in multiple languages.

The Deluxe executive also highlights the technical challenges associated with distributing large, uncompressed master files, especially for major Hollywood studios. He underscores the critical role of automation in managing the workflow and ensuring timely delivery of content.

Chris shares how Deluxe plans to use AppTek’s expertise in language AI to enhance the quality and efficiency of dubbing workflows, while maintaining the artistic integrity and emotional resonance of the original content.

Chris also touches upon the recent agreement by SAG-AFTRA and its implications for voice actors' rights and compensation in the era of AI dubbing.

While there is an increasing amount of AI tools for lip-syncing and dubbing, Chris emphasizes the continued importance of human voice actors for conveying emotion and nuance.

Looking ahead, Deluxe is focused on integrating tools more securely, improving dubbing workflows, and exploring hyper-localization to cater to different languages and dialects.

Jordan Evans, the CEO of Language Network, joins SlatorPod to talk about the evolution of his family-founded language service provider (LSP) and his sales-focused growth strategy.

Jordan's professional trajectory began with a blend of sales, tech startups, and a stint as a linguist and translator, before acquiring Language Network and achieving significant growth.

Regarding growth strategies, Jordan discusses the challenges and benefits of acquisitions, emphasizing the importance of finding the right fit and maintaining stability during integration. He advises starting with acquisitions within one's core expertise before branching out into new areas.

The conversation shifts to sales and marketing in the language industry, with Jordan highlighting the need to cut through the noise and engage customers effectively, whether through traditional methods like cold calling or newer digital channels.

When it comes to the role of AI in language services, Jordan advocates for adopting off-the-shelf technologies to meet customer needs efficiently while allowing for scalability and adaptability.

The CEO attributes the growth of interpreting in the US to increased awareness of language accessibility issues and funding initiatives, especially in sectors like healthcare and immigration.

Jordan advises that LSPs should capitalize on their unique strengths and niches, enabling them to differentiate themselves from larger competitors and maximize value for clients.

Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week, with Head of Research Anna Wyndham joining to give a breakdown of the 2024 Slator Language AI 50 Under 50, a list highlighting 50 of the newest and most notable language AI companies.

The list focuses on 50 language AI companies under 50 months old, showcasing their innovations in speech-to-text, machine translation, speech synthesis, and more.

Esther talks about Disney's Accelerator Program, which invested in two language AI startups: ElevenLabs and AudioShake. AudioShake uses AI to parse audio tracks for mixing or dubbing and ElevenLabs, a multilingual AI voice startup, recently raised USD 80m.

Florian mentions AnthropicAI's new language model, Claude 3 Opus, and shared a user's experience testing it for translating a low-resource language (Circassian) with impressive results. (note: a few hours after the podcast production was finished, the user gave an update that the model was trained on Circassian).

Florian briefly touches on Elon Musk's lawsuit against OpenAI, with translation getting a shoutout as a key early use case for large language models.

Esther provides an overview of Honyaku Center's financial results for Q3 2024, where overall revenues saw a 3% growth and translation remained the primary revenue driver.

Esther shares news about recent layoffs at Sega of America, affecting 61 temp workers from quality assurance and localization.

Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week, with Women in Localization opening a new chapter in Switzerland and SlatorCon coming to Silicon Valley on September 5th.

Florian shares insights from RWS’ Annual General Meeting, where under the new leadership of Chairman Julie Southern, the language service provider (LSP) highlighted its resilience amid global uncertainty.

Esther gives an overview of the financial results for AMN Language Services and Ai-Media, with the former reporting strong performance for its language services and the latter attributing its revenue increase to an ongoing shift to its SaaS offering.

Versacom, a prominent Canadian LSP, announces a minority investment from Norea Capital, with plans to focus on AI-enhanced solutions. Meanwhile, an investment banking industry insider revealed Iyuno may go public, targeting a valuation range between USD 2.25 bn and USD 3 bn.

Over in the US, Boostlingo recorded a 60% year-over-year increase in annual recurring revenue in 2023, highlighting the thriving demand for interpreting services.

The podcast concludes with the recent launch of Green Terp Unveils GT Enhancer, a tool designed to assist human interpreters by removing background noises such as dog barks and baby cries.

Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week with a first look at the newly released 2024 Slator Language Service Provider Index (LSPI) where they unpack the key findings from over 250 LSPs on the ranking.

Leading the 2024 LSPI is Super Agency TransPerfect, who recently appointed Jin Lee as the new Co-CEO. Lee began as a project manager at the Super Agency before working through various production roles and rising through the ranks.

Slator recently launched the first edition of its Language AI Briefing, a summary of the top AI stories, language AI startups, and notable AI developments. One such story covered real-time multilingual lip-sync provider Sync Labs’ open-source which shows users how to deploy and monetize their own lip-sync applications in a couple of hours.

In M&A news, 2024 began strong with French LSP Powerling acquiring troubled WCS Group which recently filed for bankruptcy. Meanwhile, Belgium-based Jonckers and US-based Acclaro have merged, becoming a cross-Atlantic Leader LSP.

In Israel, BLEND has bought local rival Manpower Language Solutions, citing a growing global interest in the Israeli market.

In the landmark 200th episode of the SlatorPod, we are joined by Anja Jones, Managing Director of AJT, to talk about the language service provider’s (LSP’s) journey to becoming a B Corp, a certification for businesses balancing profit with social and environmental responsibility.

Anja touches upon the impact of large language models (LLMs), expressing concerns about ethical implications, copyright issues, and the environmental footprint associated with LLMs. She also discusses how a focus on the intricacies of European culture became their USP.

When it comes to using AI in translation, Anja highlights that certain content types, such as marketing texts and transcreation, are still best handled by human translators due to the need for creativity and cultural sensitivity.

The podcast shifts towards the need for regulation in the language AI industry. Anja points out the ethical implications of AI-generated content, particularly in scenarios like voice synthesis and deep fake technologies.

Anja also talks about winning the 2023 ATC Ethical Business award, attributing it to their commitment to fair pay, transparent communication, and creating opportunities for new translators.

Anja shares the LSP's plans for 2024, which include focusing on collaborations with value-aligned businesses, including sustainable fashion brands and companies leveraging AI for personalized Google Ads.

In this week’s SlatorPod, we are joined by Bart Maczynski, the VP of Machine Learning at Language Weaver, the translation tech brand of Super Agency RWS, to talk about the challenges and advancements in enterprise-grade machine translation (MT).

The discussion delves into the distinctions between enterprise and consumer-grade MT, with challenges including data security, scalability, adaptability, user experience, and risk mitigation.

Bart touches on the impact of large language models (LLMs) on the landscape, noting potential risks, such as deceptive fluency, and the need for control in enterprise settings.

The VP discusses the recent launch of Evolve, an automated post-editing solution that combines auto-adaptive neural MT, machine translation quality estimation, and a secure, private LLM.

Bart talks about the evolving landscape of language AI and the integration of MT into broader workflows, driven by innovations in orchestration and automation platforms.

Bart shares insights into the future plans of Language Weaver, with a primary focus on bringing Evolve to the market and broadening its applications, supporting more languages, and exploring improvements and adaptations in various components.

John Tinsley, the VP of AI Solutions at language AI agency Translated, joins SlatorPod to talk about the challenges, advancements, and future directions of AI in the language industry.

John shares his journey from founding machine translation (MT) pioneer ICONIC, selling it during the height of the pandemic to RWS, and now his current role focusing on connecting technology and capabilities with customer needs at Translated.

He touches on the challenges of managing the noise around AI and the excitement and potential of generative AI, particularly in the context of language. He discusses the impact of large language models on translation and the challenges of multilingual content generation.

John mentions the importance of having the right data for AI and highlights a new product initiative called Human-in-the-Loop. This initiative focuses on automating the process of improving MT by constantly fine-tuning it based on user feedback and human data.

He also explores the dynamic landscape of innovation in the AI field, discussing the sources of innovation, the role of big tech companies, and the challenges of keeping up with the rapidly evolving research landscape.

Looking ahead, John underscores the importance of ensuring enterprise readiness in MT, considering factors beyond just good output, such as fitting into existing workflows, cost-effectiveness, and scalability.

Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week, with Super Early Bird ending soon for SlatorCon Remote March and a save-the-date announcement for SlatorCon London, scheduled in person for May 23, 2024.

Florian talks about how translation GPTs are becoming increasingly available on OpenAI’s GPT store, highlighting the ease of building these models and the payment model for creators.

The duo touches on the topic of AI-generated lip-synced translations, using the example of a machine-translated speech by Argentina’s new president at the World Economic Forum and debating its ethical implications.

Esther’s M&A and funding corner features the acquisition of Systran by ChapsVision, the sale of Balthasar Ltd. to Translate.One, and the USD 18 million Series B funding round by Contents.com.

Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week, with OpenAI recently launching its GPT store, allowing users to create their own GPT chat interfaces without the need for coding.

One move that underscores OpenAI's influence in the language space is Albania's consideration of using ChatGPT for translating documents related to its EU accession bid. Duolingo is also reported to be laying off human translators in favor of relying more on AI for content curation and translation, which has seen significant user backlash.

The duo talk about the challenges publicly traded LSPs faced in 2023, with none outperforming the MSCI world average. LSP stocks, including Honyaku Center, RWS, and Appen, experienced significant declines, while Duolingo's stock doubled despite its shift to AI.

Esther covered key mergers and acquisitions in 2023. Lastly, the podcast highlighted leadership changes at Argos Multilingual, with Alexander Ulichnowski taking over as CEO and Joanna Weitz promoted to COO.

Vasco Pedro, Co-founder and CEO of language operations platform Unbabel, joins SlatorPod to talk about the transformative year of 2023 and its impact on the language technology landscape.

Vasco discusses the AI boom in 2023, emphasizing the importance of recognizing AI as what he calls a cognitive prosthetic rather than a human replacement. He highlights the need for a new pricing model in translation and localization that accommodates AI solutions and allows for transparency, predictability, and agency for LangOps professionals.

Touching on multilingual content generation, Vasco believes that while AI is making content creation easier, there is still a gap in quality between content creation and translation.

Vasco emphasizes the importance of owning the entire value chain and reducing the complexity of translation processes to provide efficient solutions. He touches on some of Unbabel's features, including UnbabelMT for comparing machine translation options.

The CEO outlines Unbabel's strategic acquisitions of EVS and Bablic, with the goal of expanding into new markets, acquiring clients, and integrating Unbabel's technology effectively.

Vasco talks about taking part in the AI consortium in Portugal's Recovery and Resilience Plan, and how Unbabel is involved in projects such as Project Halo, which aims to develop a brain-to-computer interface for text-based communication with practical implications for conditions like ALS.

When looking towards the future, Vasco emphasizes the importance of focusing on growth and continually improving the product's quality, speed, and cost-effectiveness.

Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week, with the release of Slator’s Pro Guide: Solution Sales for Language Service Providers and more exciting research to come.

The duo talk about the latest in language AI, with OpenAI gaining traction as a potential default for machine translation, and the firing and rehiring of CEO Sam Altman. Meanwhile, the European Patent Office has denied Google's patent application for neural machine translation.

The podcast explores the emergence of speech translation as a key focus for major technology companies, with Google launching Translatotron 3 and Gemini, while Meta introduces Seamless.

Over in Europe, the EU Parliament announced an open competition for the recruitment of intercultural and language professionals. Paris invests EUR 2m on a speech-to-speech translation app called Tradivia to assist communications during the 2024 Olympics.

Meanwhile, the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) plans to release an RFP for language services worth an estimated USD 100m.

In M&A news, Esther covers notable deals, including Cloudbreak Health's sale to GTCR for USD 180m, ElaN’s acquisition of AVB Vertalingen, TransPerfect's purchase of WordBee, and XTM's acquisition of Rigi.

Jonas Ryberg, Chief Globalization Officer of Centific, joins SlatorPod to talk about the evolving language services landscape and Centific's approach to navigating the changes brought about by generative AI and large language models (LLMs).

Jonas looks back on the opportunities and challenges of 2023, with the impact of ChatGPT triggering clients, who are facing budget constraints, to redefine translation quality metrics and optimize processes.

Jonas sheds light on Centific's proprietary platform, Honeybee, an accelerator that integrates into clients' localization workflows through APIs. This platform harnesses generative AI to streamline processes such as content creation, assessment of style, and even provides a bot for translators to interact with instead of navigating through style guides.

Jonas explores the growing trend of multilingual content generation with the advent of LLMs. He believes while the output from LLMs is promising, there is still a need for human expertise to review and refine the generated content.

Looking ahead to 2024, Jonas reveals Centific's plan to bring Honeybee and JourneyMate, a customer experience tracking platform, into a SaaS-based platform, targeting both individual users with lower-cost access and custom enterprise clients.

Diego Antista, Co-Founder and CEO of GetGloby, joins SlatorPod to talk about the complexity of translating and transcreating digital ad campaigns.

Diego shares a pivotal moment when he discovered that the cost of translating campaigns for multicultural audiences was a significant barrier for advertisers, leading to the creation of GetGloby with fellow former Googler, Juan Fusoni.

Diego shares insights into the advertising industry, such as the role of agencies in global campaigns and the metrics advertisers prioritize to measure campaign success.

Diego sheds light on the challenges of localizing keywords, particularly in languages with character limitations, and discusses how GetGloby addresses the need for consistent brand voice across various languages.

Diego discusses the platform's current target segment, primarily large clients and global agencies, and outlines their plans to launch an online product for smaller advertisers.

Diego explores the tech stack behind GetGloby, focusing on the use of AI, machine translation, and the development of their proprietary model called Jaga. He also highlights the importance of incorporating native reviewers for certain clients, especially in the luxury brand sector.

Looking ahead, Diego shares how clients will soon be able to activate a new campaign for a flat fee of 10 dollars per month, with a credit-based model replacing the traditional cost-per-word approach.

Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week, with the release of Slator’s new Pro Guide: Scaling an LSP Key Account.

The duo analyzed the job requirements and responsibilities for an AI Localization Analyst at Chubb, an insurance company.

Florian discusses when he, for the first time, realized he briefly fell for a third-party-created video. A speech by Joana Cotar, a member of Germany’s lower house of parliament, was translated and lip-synced into English using AI.

Far from being critical of her voice being cloned and her speech being machine translated without any edits, Cotar gushed about how “wonderful” it is that her speeches are now accessible in “English, Portuguese, Spanish, French, Indonesian, and even Chinese”.

Florian touches on a study by Microsoft Azure researchers evaluating the performance of GPT-4 in post-editing machine translation.

Esther provides updates on recent M&A and funding activities in the language industry. difuze, a Canadian media localization company, acquired WANTED!, a post-production studio, while The Translation People secured GBP 10.5 million in debt financing. Additionally, she gives a mixed financial update on ZOO Digital, Ai-Media, and AMN Healthcare.

Florian concludes the episode by discussing OpenAI's release of GPT capabilities for customization. He shares his experience building a chatbot using the new feature and emphasizes the potential for creating customized language models for niche applications.

Gabriel Fairman, Founder and CEO of Bureau Works, joins SlatorPod to talk about the potential of generative AI in translation management.

Gabriel shares the origin story of Bureau Works, where over the years his perspective shifted towards viewing translation as an information management challenge, leading Bureau Works to transition into a tech-enabled business.

Gabriel discusses the challenges and opportunities presented by large language models, touching on issues of cost, workflow integration, and the potential for a more interactive and fluid translator-computer relationship.

Gabriel rejects the idea of comparing language models like GPT to human translators, viewing them as aids to improve the human experience rather than alternatives.

Gabriel Fairman explains the flexibility of Bureau Works' UI, which aims to optimize productivity and a sense of authorship, in contrast to the repetitive and frustrating nature of traditional machine translation post-editing.

BWX is concentrating on simplification in 2024, introducing features like the learning terms tool, and aiming to integrate translation seamlessly into various tools and simplify project creation and management.

Pablo Navascués, Managing Director of global content and SEO agency Key Content, joins SlatorPod to discuss the impact of generative AI on content creation and SEO.

Pablo explains how content strategy and SEO strategy have become more interconnected, emphasizing the need for high-quality, user-oriented content. He acknowledges that AI can be valuable for scaling content production. However, he highlights the need for human expertise in certain cases, as AI-generated content may not always meet quality and accuracy standards.

When it comes to Google's approach to ranking AI-generated content, Pablo suggests that Google values content based on how helpful it is to users rather than focusing on whether it is created by humans or AI.

Pablo talks about the challenges of prompt engineering in working with large language models and how it can be utilized for A/B testing and data analysis.

He shares insights from their research on AI content tools, which revealed that there is no one-size-fits-all solution, and different tools perform better depending on the type of content, audience, and language.

Pablo predicts that content workflows will become more sophisticated and personalized, and the role of content strategists within organizations will become more critical.

Bryan Murphy, CEO of Smartling, joins SlatorPod to share insights into the language technology leader’s position as a turnkey cloud-based language AI solution.

Bryan talks about his background in software and e-commerce and how he joined Smartling to leverage technology in the translation and localization business.

Bryan expands on how Smartling has built a sophisticated translation and localization management platform and expert-in-the-loop productivity technology. The CEO explains Smartling’s decision to leverage its technology to gain an edge in the language services market.

He highlights the impact of large language models and generative AI in enhancing productivity, improving translation quality, and reducing costs. Bryan also touches on recent product launches like Smartling Translate, which targets the individual contributor within the enterprise.

Bryan discusses the impact of AI in the industry and its transformative potential, likening it to the advent of the commercial internet. He elaborates on the role of human language experts in the industry, emphasizing that AI enhances their productivity rather than replacing them.

Looking ahead to 2024, Smartling aims to improve the quality for customers, simplify processes, and further boost translator productivity.

Jakub Absolon, CEO of ASAP-translation.com, joins SlatorPod to share insights into the evolving landscape of AI in the language industry and the role of post-editing in the translation process.

Jakub acknowledged the success of the past two years but noted that this year has brought new challenges. To stay competitive, the LSP plans to expand its B2B client base beyond the Slovak and Czech markets and explore languages in Central and Eastern Europe.

The podcast delves into the concept of full post-editing, which Jakub criticizes, believing it often results in a near-human translation, making it difficult for translators to justify their role and potentially leading to a decline in the quality of work and a loss of skilled translators.

Jakub expresses skepticism about the complete replacement of human project management with AI, as project managers serve as crucial connectors between clients and translators.

Regarding the use of large language models like ChatGPT, Jakub mentions that he uses them for content creation, but it requires a good understanding of the topic to avoid hallucinations.

Jakub anticipates that the industry will continue to grow, with a greater emphasis on post-edited machine translation and content creation rather than traditional translation.

Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week, where they reflect on SlatorCon Zurich 2023, which saw a growing interest in AI-driven translation technologies and the industry's efforts to position itself as experts in the enterprise content lifecycle.

Esther discusses ZOO Digital's financial struggles due to strikes in Hollywood, which have affected their performance, leading to a significant EBITDA loss in the first half of the year. Despite this, they are continuing to expand their presence in various markets.

Florian touches on the viral moment translation AI is currently experiencing, with various tools gaining popularity on social media, such as HeyGen's lip-sync dubbing experiment. The duo also talk about the challenges of VC funding slowing down in the industry.

XL8, whose CEO joined the podcast a year ago, recently secured a USD 7.5 million Series A round of funding. The funds will be used to enhance product offerings, including leveraging generative AI, and expand further internationally.

Adobe's "Sneaks” showcase revealed a new project called Dub Dub Dub which automates video dubbing, highlighting the increasing integration of AI-driven language technologies by tech giants.

Sebastien Pare, CEO of VIQ Solutions, joins SlatorPod to discuss the evolution of transcription for multi-speaker content in challenging legal and regulatory settings.

Sebastien explained that VIQ initially started in Canada and expanded to other Commonwealth countries, focusing on courts thanks to their need for advanced audio and video solutions.

The conversation delved into the challenges of working with multi-speaker content and Sebastien highlighted the importance of AI in enhancing transcription accuracy, especially in industries where the quality of the source material varies widely.

Sebastien addressed linguistic challenges in the transcription industry, including dealing with varying speech quality, jargon, local dialects, and slang. He highlighted VIQ's flexibility in working seamlessly with third-party technologies and its commitment to offering various pricing models.

Sebastien also discusses the challenges of operating a public listing (the company on September 30, 2023, announced it will stop its dual listing on Nasdaq but remain listed in Toronto). He also touched upon the impact of the AI hype, buyer expectations, and the macroeconomic environment on VIQ's operations.

The discussion shifted to the shortage of court reporters and transcriptionists, where Sebastien explained how VIQ is attracting younger talent from diverse backgrounds and leveraging AI to increase productivity.

Sebastien shared some developments in VIQ's roadmap as they plan to enhance their summarization capabilities, and further localize their platform for different regions and languages.

Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week, where Spotify launched AI-powered voice translation for podcast creators.

Esther gives a recap of the ALC 21st Annual Summit in Portland, where she presented key findings from the 2023 ALC Survey.

The duo discussed the addition of Basque, Catalan, and Galician as official languages in the Spanish Congress. However, Spain's efforts to make these languages official at the European Union level were put on hold.

In the UK, a language services tender worth potentially GBP 400 million was announced, primarily focused on interpreting services for healthcare and other public sector entities.

The board of language service provider Straker announced a share buyback, stating that their current share price doesn't reflect the company's value, intending to repurchase up to 3.5 million shares.

Writer, Inc., an AI-based writing assistance tool, raised a significant USD 100 million in its Series B funding round, capitalizing on the growing interest in this emerging category.

Google made subtle changes in its ranking guidelines for AI-generated content, shifting from "written by people for people" to "helpful content created for people."

Mark Shriner, Strategic Sales Director of memoQ, and now CEO of memoQ RFP, joins the podcast to discuss the challenges and opportunities of request for proposals (RFPs) in the language industry.

Mark explains that enterprise language services RFPs tend to focus on language pairs and pricing, while language technology RFPs delve deep into product features, integrations, and security.

Mark talks about the complexities when responding to RFPs as different departments within an organization may need to provide answers, making coordination challenging.

Mark highlights the advantage of size in the language industry, particularly as larger companies often have specialized RFP writers who craft polished responses, contributing to their success.

He shares some memorable experiences, including successfully handling a multilingual RFP from a Finnish government entity, which required linguistic proficiency and accuracy.

Mark unveils memoQ RFP, Inc., a new solution to streamline the RFP response process, initially targeting small to medium-sized businesses. It aims to leverage technology, including translation memory and AGT, to make RFP responses more efficient and plans to follow a startup trajectory for growth.

In the coming months, memoQ RFP will focus on finalizing its minimum viable product, recruiting beta customers, and gathering feedback.

“The face is the uncanny valley. The nuance and detail in the face and the way it moves is a very difficult thing to animate,” Jonathan Bronfman, CEO of MARZ explains on SlatorPod.

Canada-based MARZ, which stands for Monsters Aliens Robots Zombies, was founded in 2018 to leverage AI and bring quantifiable metrics like time and cost to the business of visual effects (VFX).

Bronfman recounts how their research for Vanity AI, a solution that creates effects such as de-aging, cosmetic, wig, and prosthetic fixes, led to them becoming an “expert at the face” and launching LipDub AI, a solution to solve the “mismatch between spoken word and visuals for viewers”.

According to Bronfman, users can take an audio stem (the dialogue track), the original piece of footage, and push both through LipDub and have a lip-synced visual in 30 seconds. Bronfman also explains that their USP is that LipDub is Hollywood-grade and works on 4K and ProRes files.

The two also discuss how actors feel about the emergence of lip-syncing visual effects and why Bronfman does not think an expansion into the creator market is on the cards for MARZ.

Florian shares that as a life-long consumer of dubbed content he sees the massive potential in a solution that improves the viewer experience and makes it more natural.

Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week, where amid ChatGPT's new enterprise launch, Florian tested ChatGPT's translation quality and came across mistranslations and awkward phrasing.

Florian highlights the launch of the Slator Pro Guide: Subtitling and Captioning, providing an overview of its content and use cases. The discussion shifted to Meta's latest release SeamlessM4T which handles various translation-related tasks, including speech recognition, speech-to-speech translation, and more, across 100+ languages.

Meanwhile, Appen shares price dropped considerably, so they aim to reposition themselves more toward generative AI but may face stiff competition from companies like Scale AI which recently announced a strategic partnership with OpenAI.

The duo give their view on a Twitter post by a freelancer who was asked to provide discounts for typos by an LSP. When posed this question in Slator’s newsletter, the community's response was divided, with the majority opposing discounts for typos.

Georg Ell, CEO of Phrase, joins SlatorPod to talk about key moments since he joined the localization platform in May 2022, merging Memsource into the Phrase brand, and the opportunities of AI-driven growth of content requiring localization.

Georg discusses Phrase’s product offering, which includes machine translation (MT) aggregator Phrase Translate and proprietary MT engine Phrase NextMT, where they provide customers with flexibility, neutrality, and solutions that align with their localization needs and varying maturity levels.

Georg unveils Phrase's upcoming pricing structure revamp, set to launch in September, which aims to provide customers with streamlined access to the entire suite of capabilities across Phrase TMS, Phrase Strings, Phrase Orchestrator, and other features.

Georg shares a perspective on the future of a hyper-personalized internet enabled by generative AI. He discusses the importance of AI-driven workflows, complex custom configurations, and dynamically evaluated machine learning models.

Georg advises on how LSPs should embrace AI and MT. He also touches on funding in the language technology sector, and how they intend to invest in areas that align with the company's growth strategy.

Joining SlatorPod this week is Longyue Wang, a Research Scientist at Tencent AI Lab, where he is involved in the research and practical applications of machine translation (MT) and natural language processing (NLP).

Longyue expands on Tencent’s approach to language technology where they integrate MT with WeChat, China’s leading everything app. He highlights how Chinese-to-English MT has made significant advancements, thanks to improvements in technology and data size. However, translating Chinese to non-English languages has been more challenging.

Recent research by Longyue explores large language models’ (LLMs) impact on MT, demonstrating their superiority in tasks like document-level translation. He emphasized that GPT-4 outperformed traditional MT engines in translating literary texts like web novels.

Longyue discusses various promising research directions for MT using LLMs, including stylized MT, interactive MT, translation memory-based MT, and a new evaluation paradigm. His research suggests LLMs can enhance personalized MT, adapting translations to users' preferences.

Longyue also sheds light on how Chinese researchers are focusing on building Chinese-centric MT engines, directly translating from Chinese to other languages. There's an effort to reduce reliance on English as a pivot language.

Looking ahead, Longyue's research will address challenges related to LLMs, including handling hallucination and timeless information issues.

Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news from over the past month, where NWN Carousel, a Massachusetts-based cloud communications company, secured a USD 6.5 million contract with Baltimore, Maryland, to provide AI-powered multilingual emergency 9-1-1 services.

Meta has unveiled Llama 2, its latest large language model, trained on 40% more data. Despite its extensive training, the model's focus on English data and limited coverage of other languages might restrict its suitability for non-English language applications.

In a financial results round-up, Straker Translations reported a 2% revenue growth with increased revenues from IBM and strong demand in Europe. After a successful 2022, ZOO Digital is now facing headwinds from Hollywood’s writers and actors strike. The pod also checks in on Keywords Studios’ and Honyaku Center’s financials.

Esther’s M&A corner features Belgian LSP ElaN Languages acquiring Lingua-World, expanding into the German market. Further north, LanguageWire, one of the largest LSPs in the Nordics, acquired Finnish LSP Delingua to further strengthen its position in the region.

Meanwhile, in funding, Phrase raised EUR 12m in debt financing from CIBC Innovation Banking, to support further development of the Phrase Localization Suite. Over in Wyoming, Language I/O has secured USD 8m in a Series A1 funding round to enhance its platform with generative AI technology and for hiring.

In this week’s SlatorPod, we are joined by Florian Stègre, Founder of Checksub, to discuss how the SaaS platform powers subtitling and dubbing for SMEs and enterprise clients.

Florian's entrepreneurial journey began after graduating from business school and founding video production company, ROOM Agency, which laid the foundation for Checksub.

Checksub primarily serves SMEs and enterprises, where they have the option to work with external providers in the video editor.

Florian expands on the platform's unique features, including animated subtitles and voice cloning, which analyzes the emotion and type of voice and provides a better match for the original speaker.

Florian shares why he took a bootstrapping approach to company building, focusing on achieving product market fit with an eye on long-term sustainability rather than rapid scaling.

When it comes to building tech in the fast-evolving age of AI, Florian keeps up to date with recent research, attends conferences and workshops, and collaborates with industry professionals.

Checksub ensures they remain ahead in the competitive AI market by focusing on skills development in their team. On the roadmap, Florian plans to enhance user experience, improve the translation editor, and add more capabilities to their AI dubbing platform.

Rocio Martinez, VP of Language Services at Jellyfish, joins SlatorPod to talk about the role of creative content localization at the digital marketing agency.

Rocio explains that while the language services team at Jellyfish function as an LSP, their positioning in the market is broader, and they act as an internal solution provider that supports the various divisions within Jellyfish. She emphasizes the importance of connecting every part of the creative process, from creation to adaptation, and monitoring performance and optimization.

Rocio provides an overview of J+ Creative, a proprietary set of tools that assist their teams in the production and localization process, including workflow management, deliveries, approvals, and version control.

Rocio talks about the use of back translations in transcreation, primarily for creative content that requires significant adaptation from the source material. Rocio shares how finding the right copywriting talent and linguists can be a challenge, especially for rare languages or specific sectors.

Rocio discusses the potential of large language models and generative AI tools for content generation and localization. She mentions that Jellyfish is actively testing and integrating AI tools, focusing on improving workflows, and considering prompt engineering to enhance content generation.

Regarding the future, Jellyfish's initiatives revolve around AI, with specialist teams being trained to identify opportunities and implement them across marketing capabilities. Rocio also mentions the potential of Pencil, a generative AI tool for content and asset creation.

In this week’s SlatorPod, we are joined by Graham Neubig, Associate Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, to discuss his research on multilingual natural language processing (NLP) and machine translation (MT).

Graham discusses the research at Neulab, where they focus on various areas of NLP, including incorporating broad knowledge bases into NLP models and code generation.

Graham expands on his Zeno GPT-MT Report comparing large language models (LLMs) with special-purpose machine translation models like Google Translate, Microsoft Translate, and DeepL. He revealed that GPT-4 was competitive from English to other languages, but struggled with very long sentences.

When it comes to cost comparison, Graham highlights that GPT-3.5 Turbo (the model behind the free version of ChatGPT) is significantly cheaper than Google Translate and Microsoft Translator, but GPT-4 (available via OpenAI’s subscription) is more expensive.

Graham predicts that companies will likely move towards using general-purpose LLMs and fine-tuning them for specific tasks like translation. The discussion also covers the recent flurry of speech-to-speech machine translation system releases.

Graham talks about his startup, Inspired Cognition, which aims to provide tools for building and improving AI systems, particularly in text and code generation. Graham concludes the pod with advice for new graduates in the NLP field and his plans for Zeno and the Zeno report.

Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news over the past month, with ChatGPT traffic hitting its peak in May 2023 and large language models being released left, right, and center.

The EU Commission (EC) unveiled the launch of a pilot program that will see the EC use its own machine translation tool to translate certain press releases. In mid-June, media localization company Dotsub announced it had ceased operations, due to its current liquidity situation.

In more positive news, Microsoft's beloved Language Portal has made a comeback after the company announced that it would be shut down at the end of June.

Over in M&A, XL8 has acquired AHT to diversify and grow its customer base to US government agencies. Also branching out is RWS as it bought legal and legislative content management system Propylon for a total purchase price of USD 47.3m.

Meanwhile, in funding, Czech localization startup Localazy announced at the end of June that they raised EUR 1m. Voice generation platform, Eleven Labs, announced it had raised USD 19m in a Series A round.

Deepdub Co-founder and CEO, Ofir Krakowski, joins SlatorPod to talk about the AI dubbing platform’s goal to make content more accessible through automation and human collaboration.

Ofir’s experience in the Israeli Air Force's machine learning and innovation department led him to use his knowledge in deep learning and generative AI to co-found Deepdub with his brother, Nir.

The CEO outlines the importance of human creativity in translation and how they have built a platform that incorporates both AI solutions and human curation. When it comes to AI dubbing, Deepdub prioritizes authentic and natural-sounding voices and incorporates domain-specific technologies to improve translation accuracy.

Ofir recognizes the impact of generative AI, exemplified by ChatGPT, and emphasizes the importance of building a product rather than just a technology. The company actively engages with organizations such as the BFFS, a union for artists, to find ways to combine human talent with technology.

While Deepdub serves enterprise customers in the entertainment industry, they also cater to professional audiovisual creators by making the dubbing process more readily accessible through their recently launched SaaS product Deepdub GO.

Looking ahead, Deepdub plans further language expansion, with a focus on addressing the diverse linguistic landscape of countries like India.

ICON’s Senior Vice President of Commercialisations & Outcomes, Brian Mallon, joins SlatorPod to shed light on the crucial role of language services within clinical research organizations (CROs).

Brian recounts ICON's growth journey, from a team of five in Dublin back in 1990 to its present-day workforce of over 41,000 across 50 countries. Brian outlines the clinical cycle for drugs or medical treatments, which consists of several phases aimed at evaluating safety, efficacy, dosage, and potential side effects before making them available to the public.

Brian reveals how language services play a vital role in improving clinical trials by enhancing the quality of data, reaching a more diverse patient population, and increasing retention and access to trials. He shares how medical translation and linguistic validation in clinical research require expertise in medical terminology and cultural nuances of the target language.

Brian talks about how ICON led an industry-wide shift towards insourcing language services instead of relying on external language service providers. Key motivators include cost savings, increased efficiency, faster turnaround times, and the importance of data security and confidentiality.

Brian explains how the cost of failure in translations is high, as errors can impact patient safety, regulatory compliance, and the overall success of the research. To manage these risks, ICON’s Language Services team implements stringent quality assurance processes, audits, and ongoing training.

When it comes to the EU Clinical Trial Regulation and Clinical Trial Information System, Brian believes it has not had a major impact on language services in terms of volumes. However, the expectation is that over time, these regulations will improve the efficiency of conducting trials in Europe and make the EU more attractive for large-scale clinical trials.

The pod rounds off with Brian’s view on the role of AI in the life sciences market and ICON’s "string of pearls" approach when it comes to broadening its capability in line with industry trends in the life sciences sector.

Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week, covering key takeaways from SlatorCon Remote such as lip sync AI dubbing demos from NeuralGarage and how FIFA and DeepL tackle sports localization.

After unveiling its first-half results for 2023, RWS CEO Ian El-Mokadem emphasized the advantages of utilizing AI and large language models (LLMs) to enhance existing products. In M&A, Unbabel has completed its second acquisition of 2023 by acquiring Bablic, to expand its website and marketing localization solutions.

AI video generation platform, Synthesia, has secured USD 90m in funding at a billion-dollar valuation for its multilingual avatars. One other unicorn, Cohere, has raised USD 270m in a Series C funding round, bringing the total raised amount to USD 445m.

The duo do a SWOT analysis of what LLM capabilities mean for the language industry, specifically for LSPs, TMS providers, machine translation providers, and linguists.

Unilingo Founder and CEO, Farbod Mansorian, joins SlatorPod to talk about launching the leading dubbing provider for Youtube creators, enabling them to get billions of additional views.

As a regular consumer of YouTube, Farbod came across TED Talks, and after translating a talk for his mother, the idea to bring this to other non-English speaking communities was born. This idea evolved into Unilingo, where Farbod formed a team to work on dubbing YouTube videos so content creators can reach fans across the world.

Farbod reveals how he develops the business by connecting with popular creators in person at YouTube conferences around the world and scaling through word of mouth.

Asked about AI dubbing Farbod emphasizes that AI has not yet been able to capture emotions and intonations effectively, which is evidenced by lower average viewing retention rates than human-dubbed content.

Farbod discusses the pros and cons of YouTube’s multitrack audio feature, with multiple language options increasing engagement and showing dedication to the audience. However, text on screen, thumbnails, and comments pose challenges as they are not currently translated into multiple languages.

The CEO addresses the challenges faced by voice actors and how Unilingo pays their talent within hours instead of weeks. The pod rounds off with Unilingo's roadmap, where they will continue their human-first AI-assisted approach to developing software tools that enable more voice actors to enter the dubbing space.

Nic McMahon, CEO of United Language Group (ULG), joins SlatorPod to talk about the language service provider’s (LSP) mission in connecting language and culture to create meaningful outcomes.

Nic recounts his journey in the language industry, from junior project manager at SDL to ascending to the role of CEO of ULG. He highlights ULG’s goal to go beyond translation services and prioritizing outcomes, cultural connectivity, and bridging gaps for better accessibility and engagement.

The CEO explains that one specific area driving demand for ULG is the welfare cycle of non-English speaking communities, where the LSP aims to ensure access, equality, transparency, safety, and privacy in their language services.

When working with municipalities and private sector healthcare providers in the US, Nic emphasizes the importance of understanding cultural influences within the target audience's network. Nic shares that HIPAA is a significant factor in the healthcare industry, particularly in relation to translation services, and is intertwined with transparency and patient safety.

Nic discusses how ULG uses workflow automation, translation memory, and call management technology to help remove manual processes and improves the efficiency of translation and interpreting cycles. AI and machine translation have seen rapid adoption in recent years, with AI-driven neural machine translation (NMT) being used in 60% of projects at ULG.

The pod rounds off with ULG’s outlook, where they are particularly interested in leveraging AI, such as optical character recognition, language recognition, and NMT to enhance outcomes and engagement.

This week Diego Bartolome, Founder of sintetic.ai, joined us on SlatoPod to talk about empowering companies to achieve more with generative artificial intelligence, including Slator with Slator Answers.

Diego discusses how he collaborated with Slator to create a chat interface that allows Slator subscribers to question an AI model specifically trained on our research, podcast transcripts, and thousands of articles. Florian gives a brief demonstration of Slator Answers’ natural language querying abilities and puts the model on the spot by asking a question in German.

Esther takes a look at a graphic from Slator’s 2023 Language Industry Report on company names in the language industry and reveals top terms, trends, and themes. The article concluded that the top three terms are language, translations, and services.

Florian touches on Google's recent focus on large language models (LLMs) and their efforts to compete with OpenAI. In a research paper, Google claims that the PaLM 2 model outperforms their own Google Translate in machine translation across all locales.

Google's chatbot, Bard, was released in February and is expanding to 180 countries, aiming to support 40 languages. When testing Bard, the LLM declined to translate from Japanese to English, stating that it is still learning. Additionally, Bard provided slightly different responses when asked about its abilities, such as generating subtitles.

K-pop star, Lee Hyun, used YouTube’s early access multi-track audio feature to release his song in six languages simultaneously. The singer performed in all six languages, with AI used to correct pronunciation and ensure a smooth and accent-free result.

US-based media localization company, Visual Data, has acquired Eva Localisation, a France-based dubbing and accessibility provider. The acquisition expands Visual Data's global presence, as Eva brings dubbing studios in France, Germany, and Spain, along with expertise in audiobooks and podcasts.

Joining SlatorPod this week is Steven Piantadosi, Associate Professor of Psychology at UC Berkeley. Steven also runs the computation and language lab (colala) at UC Berkeley, which studies the basic computational processes involved in human language and cognition.

Steven talks about the emergence of large language models (LLMs) and how it has reshaped our understanding of language processing and language acquisition.

Steven breaks down his March 2023 paper, "Modern language models refute Chomsky’s approach to language”. He argues that LLMs demonstrate a wide range of powerful language abilities and disprove foundational assumptions underpinning Noam Chomsky's theories and, as a consequence, negate parts of modern Linguistics.

Steven shares how he prompted ChatGPT to generate coherent and sensible responses that go beyond its training data, showcasing its ability to produce creative outputs. While critics argue that it is merely an endless sequence of predicting the next token, Steven explains how the process allows the models to discover insights about language and potentially the world itself.

Steven acknowledges that LLMs operate differently from humans, as models excel at language generation but lack certain human modes of reasoning when it comes to complex questions or scenarios. He unpacks the BabyLM Challenge which explores whether models can be trained on human-sized amounts of data and still learn syntax or other linguistic aspects effectively.

Despite industry advancements and the trillion-dollar market opportunity, Steven agrees with Chomsky's ethical concerns, including issues such as the presence of harmful content, misinformation, and the potential impact on job displacement.

Steven remains enthusiastic about the potential of LLMs and believes the recent advancements are a step forward to achieving artificial general intelligence, but refrains from making any concrete predictions.

Florian and Esther discuss the launch of Slator’s flagship 2023 Language Industry Market Report. The 140-page report provides a comprehensive view of the global language services and language technology industry, which Slator estimates grew over 4% to nearly USD 28bn in 2022 on the back of a strong first half.

The duo talk about OpenAI’s new endeavor to enforce its branding guidelines to prevent companies from using GPT in their names or products. OpenAI believes that using GPT in branding confuses end-users, as it may imply a partnership or endorsement where there isn't one.

Esther examines Appen’s financial update, where they reported a decline in revenue and gross profit in the first third of 2023. She expects that the data-for-AI provider will continue to face headwinds from the broader technology market slowdown, impacting revenues for FY23.

In a roundup of Swiss-centered NLP news, Florian discussed how researchers at the University of Zurich have created SwissBERT, a pre-trained language model specifically for processing Switzerland-related text. The model was trained on over 21 million Swiss news articles in German, French, Italian, and Romansh, and outperformed previous models on natural language understanding tasks related to Switzerland.

The Swiss Parliament has rejected a proposal to allow Swiss-German to be used in official federal political debates alongside the country's four official languages. Opponents argued that it would pose translation challenges and lead to gaps between what is spoken and written.

Meanwhile, Zurich-based machine translation (MT) company Textshuttle has launched a free MT service for the general public covering all four national languages, including Swiss-German.

Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week, covering the latest in large language models with Custom.MT’s Chat GPT in Localization Part II, SlatorPod’s The Great ChatGPT and Translation Debate, and Hugging Face’s launch of HuggingChat.

Belgium-based language service provider (LSP) Jonckers sells a majority stake to investment firm Mayfair Equity Partners, following strong organic growth of 75% in 2022. The sale will enable Jonckers to continue its growth trajectory, with plans to invest in technology, expand into new markets and pursue bolt-on M&A opportunities.

Super Agencies Welocalize and Lionbridge have announced new C-level appointments and partnerships. Paul Carr has been named as the new CEO of Welocalize, succeeding co-founder Smith Yewell, who has held the role since 1997.

Menaka Thillaiampalam has been appointed as the new CMO of Lionbridge, bringing over 20 years of experience in technology firms to the role. Additionally, Lionbridge has signed a multi-year contract with Phrase, a translation management system company, to integrate its computer-assisted translation tool into the LSP's workflow.

Over in the UK, RWS released a trading update for the first half of the financial year 2023. While revenues grew by 2.5%, sales declined by 6.8%. The market responded with shares in RWS plunging over 16% in one day.

Media localization provider, ZOO Digital, has raised USD 15.5m in a share placement, with the aim of using the proceeds to acquire a “media localization subsidiary of a leading Japanese technology company.” ZOO Digital's rationale behind the proposed acquisition was to deliver Japanese language services in-house to achieve better margins.

In this week’s SlatorPod, Fireflies.ai CEO Krish Ramineni joins us to talk about scaling the AI meeting assistant and building on the latest advances in large language models.

Krish starts with his journey to co-founding Fireflies, which began as a drone delivery service and as a result of conversations with customers and investors, evolved into an AI meeting assistant to solve their own pain point.

The CEO shares how they found their product-market fit after focusing on automated transcripts over human-assisted note-taking. He discusses the early days of AI investment and how with the rise of APIs and large language models (LLMs), you no longer need multiple PhDs to attract investors.

Krish explains how Fireflies leverages technologies like Whisper to improve their language transcription, allowing them to be more accessible to global companies. He talks about their decision to improve their Super Summaries feature through GPT technology.

The CEO shares his excitement about the potential for LLMs and how Fireflies are building a Chrome extension that uses LLMs to summarize any article or video on the internet. He advises that simply building a wrapper on top of OpenAI is not a defensible moat for companies, but rather you should build a unique platform with a unique angle into the industry you’re selling to.

Kirsh talks about the current fundraising environment where there is a lot of money being thrown around for generative AI companies, but only a few will weather the storm. When it comes to hiring machine learning talent, Krish doesn't believe in prompt engineering and also holds the view that machine learning companies may no longer need to hire large cohorts of ML PhDs to scale.

The pod rounds off with the company’s roadmap for 2023, which includes creating an ecosystem of extensions on top of Fireflies. These extensions will offer powerful functionalities to users in different sectors like healthcare and recruiting.

Tony Abrahams, CEO and Co-founder of Ai-Media, joins SlatorPod to talk about the journey to building a market leader in multilingual live captioning.

Tony discusses his transition from working in finance to co-founding Ai-Media with Alex Jones and introducing large-scale captioning to Australian Pay TV. He gives an overview of Ai-Media’s technology stack, which delivers high-quality automatic captioning through three key elements: encoding, the iCap network, and LEXI.

The CEO talks about the use of respeaking versus LEXI in settings where captioning accuracy is critical, and where there are multiple speakers, mixed-quality audio, or background noise. He discusses how Ai-Media measures live-captioning quality using the NER model, which weights the types of errors as editing errors or recognition errors.

Touching on the multilingual component of Ai-Media, Tony explores the possibility of using AI instead of respeakers and having a fully-automated translation product in the near future. He believes that large language models are an opportunity as the technology has enabled them to interpret sentences more accurately, resulting in a better outcome with LEXI 3.0.

Tony gives his thoughts on growing through M&A and the strategy behind acquiring EEG to gain a competitive advantage in terms of its technology and product suite. He shares his rationale for taking AI-Media public.

The CEO reveals Ai-Media’s roadmap for 2023, such as improving the iCap network and launching the LEXI Library, which allows customers to search their media library by captions.

This week, SlatorPod hosts its very first panel debate with guests Adam Bittlingmayer, CEO of ModelFront, Varshul Gupta, Co-founder of Dubverse, and Mihai Vlad, General Manager of Language Weaver.

To start off, the panel participants reflect on their recent experience with ChatGPT since its launch in November 2022 and how this shapes their views on large language models (LLMs). Varshul and Adam talk about how clients view ChatGPT.

Mihai agrees with the idea that the language services industry is exceptionally well-prepared for the launch of ChatGPT due to its experience with human-machine interaction. Varshul discusses how LLMs have influenced startups like Dubverse to build prototypes that can handle edge cases.

Mihai shares the challenges of deploying LLMs in large enterprises. Adam and Varshul highlight how parameters such as security, data privacy, latency, throughput, and cost are essential to consider in an enterprise setting.

Varshul and Mihai talk about the potential of multilingual content generation from scratch and how it will affect production costs. Varshul shares how they continue to attract users throughout this AI hype and the importance of adding a UX on top of LLMs.

Adam discusses the potential for LLMs to assist translators in their work, although the implementation of this tech may take some time to become the new normal. Varshul and Mihai debate how services-focused companies should react to the rapid advancements in LLMs, whether you wait to see how things pan out or go all in to stay ahead of the curve.

The panel rounds off with emerging use cases for LLMs, from building prompt-based systems for more concise translations to addressing long-tail languages that are often overlooked by machine learning due to the fragmentation of the language industry.

In this week’s SlatorPod, we are joined by Christian Federmann, Principal Research Manager at Microsoft, where he works on machine translation (MT) evaluation and language expansion.

Christian recounts his journey from working at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence under the guidance of AI pioneer Hans Uszkoreit to joining Microsoft and building out Microsoft Translator.

He shares how Microsoft Translator evolved from using statistical MT to neural MT and why they opted for the Marian framework.

Christian expands on Microsoft’s push into large language models (LLMs) and how his team is now experimenting with NMT and LLM machine translation systems. He then explores how LLMs translate and the role of various prompts in the process.

Christian discusses the key metrics historically and currently used to evaluate machine translation. He also unpacks the findings from a recent research paper he co-authored investigating the applicability of LLMs for automated assessment of translation quality.

Christian describes how Microsoft’s custom translator fine-tunes and improves the user’s MT model through customer-specific data, which degrades more general domain performance.

He shares Microsoft’s approach to expanding its support for languages with the recent addition of 13 African languages. Collaboration with language communities is an integral step in improving the quality of the translation models

To round off, Christian believes that the hype around LLMs may hit a wall within the next six months, as people realize the limitations of what they can achieve. However, in a year or two, there will be better solutions available, including LLM-enhanced machine translation.

In this week’s SlatorPod, we are joined by Nikola Nikolov, an experienced researcher, engineer, YouTuber, and consultant in natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning.

Nikola talks about the evolution of large language models (LLMs), where the core technology remains the same, but the number of parameters has grown exponentially and the capacity to fine-tune models on human data via reinforcement learning from human feedback has turbocharged the models’ capabilities.

Nikola unpacks the rapid increase in front-end use cases with companies like Google and Microsoft already integrating LLMs into their products. At the same time, he speculates about what will happen to the hundreds of startups that are using APIs to build similar tools like writing assistance or summarization.

Nikola shares the limitations of an API-only approach, which include using a model limited in data it has collected from the internet and that is not fine-tuned to a domain or specific use case.

He discusses how LLMs perform when it comes to machine translation (MT). Although GPT is trained on large amounts of multilingual data, it’s not specialized in translation, so machine translation providers will retain their edge over ChatGPT for now.

Nikola predicts two different scenarios when it comes to the future of LLMs: the first is where large corporations quickly integrate LLMs into their products, competing with startups and putting many of them out of business. The second scenario is where startups will create novel use cases and integrate multimodal technology to build something completely new and different from big companies.

Florian and Esther are back for a packed news pod. The two catch up with OpenAI announcing the release of its much anticipated GPT-4 large language model. They unpack OpenAI’s research on GPT or GPT-powered systems’ impact on the labor force, including specifics around how exposed translators and interpreters are to large language models.

Over at the University of Edinburgh, researchers looked at hallucinations in large multilingual translation models. The research looked at hallucinations across models of different scale, translation directions, and data conditions.

Lilt announced the launch of Contextual AI Engine, a new GPT-style model which Lilt claims has higher accuracy than Google Translate and GPT-4 for many enterprise contexts. Esther talks about Acolad appointing Bertrand Gstalder as the Super Agency’s new CEO.

At the Google for Games Developer Summit 2023, the Tech Giant announced that developers now have access to free machine translation (MT) for their Android apps. Keynote Speaker, Greg Hartrell, also revealed an early access program for machine translation in the Play Console.

Meanwhile, Disney lawyers have filed a subpoena request to force Reddit to identify the person or people responsible for leaking a movie dialogue transcript. It was revealed that a Reddit community shared a Google Doc transcript in Portuguese of the film “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” weeks before it was released.

Voiseed CEO and Co-founder Andrea Ballista joins SlatorPod to discuss the machine dubbing startup’s approach to operating and developing their AI-based virtual voice engine, Revoiceit.

Andrea talks about how his passion for music as a child led him to founding audio localization studio Binari Sonori, which he sold to Keywords Studios in 2014, and why he is now launching Voiseed.

He shares his impressions from this year’s Game Developers Conference where there was a lot of interest in new technologies, voice cloning solutions, and the development of emotional synthetic voices.

Andrea unpacks Revoiceit’s ability to understand the voice and emotional profile of the user and transfer both profiles into the target language. Voiseed has been profiling vocal delivery and creating a data set, so the system can have a wider knowledge of human emotion in terms of voice and language.

On the topic of large language models (LLMs), Andrea is not worried about the implications of LLMs like ChatGPT as they have had two years to build a dataset on vast amounts of voice content. He talks about Voiseed’s early financial backers and shares the story behind applying for blended finance (grants and equity) from the European Innovation Council Fund and LIFTT.

Andrea shares his experience hiring during the lockdown and their approach to investing in ‘cool’ people and helping them grow through their incentive plan. The pod wraps up with Voiseed’s product roadmap, where they aim to improve features with more emotion control and work on how to create new voices that can be used in multiple projects.

Liane Kirsch, CEO of Cinescript, joins SlatorPod to talk about specializing in the audiovisual industry and working with global TV and film productions.

Liane discusses her route into the language industry, from studying philology and translating contracts to working as an on-set interpreter and dialogue coach for international productions. Throughout this journey she founded Cinescript and for five years she built her client base parallel to her other work.

Liane shares her experience as a polyglot fluent in six languages and how she uses the melodies of languages in her learning process. She talks about the complexities behind translating screenplays, where the process involves one translator and one proofreader each for the source and target language.

She reveals how they supported the production of Netflix’s series 1899 by translating the synopsis, polishing 8 different screenplays, dialogue coaching for Cantonese, and working on additional dialogue recording in post-production.

The pod rounds off with Liane’s initiatives for 2023, including offering internships for international students and strengthening their main team in the office.

Mark Howorth, CEO of VSI, joins SlatorPod to talk about his plans for leading and scaling the media localization provider.

Mark discusses his route into the media and entertainment (M&E) and language space as well as his path to joining VSI. Mark took up his role at the leading media localization provider in January 2023 after spending five years as the CEO of SDI Media including overseeing the company’s sale to Iyuno in 2021. He outlines how the media localization industry has evolved with the streaming boom impacting turnaround times.

Mark also shares some of the challenges of hiring and retaining media localization talent internally and externally post-Covid. He offers his thoughts on the use of machine translation (MT) and automatic speech recognition (ASR) as productivity enhancers, rather than a replacement for human subtitling.

Mark talks about VSI’s historically self-funded growth and highlights the company’s plans to scale further in 2023 and beyond. Mark shares some of the growth drivers behind VSI on the back of +20% growth in 2022.

The CEO reveals key initiatives for VSI in 2023, such as building dubbing capacity, widening its customer base, and geographical expansion. The pod rounds off with Mark’s 2-3 year outlook on the media localization market in terms of customer demands.

In this week’s SlatorPod, we are joined by David Orrego-Carmona, Assistant Professor at the University of Warwick to discuss his research on language technologies, audiovisual translation, and users of translation.

David shares his background studying translation in Colombia and how it led to the formation of a research group focusing on audiovisual translation and subtitling. He outlines how he is developing Translation Studies at Warwick, not only to teach students about translation and culture, but so they can have a direct link to the industry.

David reveals the key findings from his PhD on the production of interlingual subtitles, where he used eye-tracking to track reading behaviors of non-professional and professional subtitles. He talks about how multilingual content like Netflix’s Sense8 and 1899 is changing the perception of subtitling.

David challenges the idea of the invisibility of subtitles as users between the age of 18 and 24 in the UK are more likely to use intralingual subtitles in English.

David gives his thoughts on the age-old debate of subtitling versus dubbing, where there is no right answer as both modes of translation are efficient and can convey meaning. He talks about how non-professional translators are implementing machine translation in a more informed and educated way through pre-editing.

David discusses why it’s important for students to learn about the requirements of different media in subtitling, including short-form content like YouTube and TikTok. He touches on the impact of ChatGPT on academia, from plagiarism to integrating large language models into the curriculum.

The pod rounds off with David’s current research projects, the first on understanding how people watch subtitles and the second on how machine translation is used by local authorities, NGOs, and charities in the UK.

Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week, with the world’s most popular YouTuber, MrBeast, launching a dubbing services company called Creator Global. MrBeast’s latest entrepreneurial move comes as YouTube confirmed it will roll out its multi-track audio to thousands more users.

Over in Australia, Ai-Media shared its financial results for the first half of 2023, with revenues remaining flat and EBITDA edging up a bit. When asked about ChatGPT, Ai-Media CEO Tony Abrahams said that it did not pose a threat to the access service provider.

Data-for-AI provider Appen released “far from satisfactory” results for full-year 2022 as revenues decreased 13% to USD 388.5m. Appen’s results may puzzle some as AI is undergoing perhaps the greatest hype cycle ever.

Researchers at Microsoft have been conducting experiments comparing large language model GPT to other machine translation (MT) systems. The results concluded that GPT models achieved competitive MT quality for high-resource languages, but did not perform well for low-resource languages.

AMN Healthcare revealed in a February 2023 earnings call that in-house Language Services has reportedly doubled its revenues since the 2020 acquisition of Stratus Video. Overall, AMN revenues were up 32% in 2022 to more than USD 5.2m, but declined by 17% in Q4.

The duo talk about the Slator 2023 Language Service Provider Index, which features nearly 350 companies in total, with a combined US-dollar revenue of nearly USD 10.4bn. Esther highlights the fastest growing LSPs and breaks down growth among Super Agencies, Leaders, Challengers, and Boutiques.

In this week’s SlatorPod, we are joined by Gráinne Maycock, to discuss her role as Chief Revenue Officer at Super Agency Acolad.

Gráinne begins with her journey studying translation and interpreting to working in various sales and account management roles, before the LSP she worked for was acquired by Acolad. She then talks about how her role as Chief Revenue Officer goes beyond sales, specifically collaborating with marketing, solutions, support, and operations to improve customer experience and growth.

Gráinne highlights the importance of creating a sense of team through a common vision, communication, shared tech stack, and Acolad’s sales playbook. She discusses the Super Agency’s approach to managing clashing sales territories and verticals.

When it comes to incentivizing top performing salespeople, Gráinne shares why they use best-in-breed compensation and best practices from parallel industries.

She believes that the language industry will evolve to embrace technologies like ChatGPT and large language models if they’re clever. The pod rounds off with Gráinne’s initiatives for the next year as she continues to evolve the solutions playbook, solidify and expand talent, and support salespeople with their sales academy.

Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week, kicking off with highlights from Slator’s latest Game Localization Report. The 100-page report outlines the role that localization plays in bringing games to life and onto the market.

In funding news, former Keywords Studios’ Exec, Andrea Ballista, raised EUR 1m in a seed round for his new machine dubbing venture, Voiseed. The funds will go towards Voiseed’s voice platform, Revoiceit, by improving its patented AI core technology and proprietary emotional multilingual dataset.

Former SlatorPod guest and ADAPT Centre’s MT researcher Yasmin Moslem co-authored a paper recently on whether GPT-3 — the large language model behind ChatGPT — is capable of enhancing “adaptive MT."

The European Commission are putting out a EUR 20m tender for Natural Language Understanding and Interaction in Advanced Language Technologies. The RFP will be open until 29 March 2023 and currently has 37 applicants offering their expertise.

Over in North America, Public Services and Procurement Canada were required to report on the steps that they were taking to protect the health and safety of federal interpreters. The order came from Canada’s Labor Program following an increase in incidents linked to sound quality, including an October 2022 injury that sent an interpreter to the hospital.

Ramsri Goutham Golla joins SlatorPod to talk about his creator journey in AI SaaS (software-as-a-service), AI consulting, and AI courses.

Ramsri discusses his shift from software engineer in Silicon Valley to entrepreneur in India with AI SaaS apps Questgen.ai, Supermeme.ai, and Supertranslate.ai. He shares how a “build in public” strategy can help inspire people to follow your journey.

Ramsri talks about his blended approach to building products, marketing, and driving his social media channels. He touches on his most recent project, Supertranslate, which is powered by OpenAI's Whisper for its one-click subtitle generation.

Ramsri shares how to build quickly on large language models like Whisper on a serverless GPU infrastructure and by partnering with developers who can build the front end. He gives his thoughts on the impact of ChatGPT on micro SaaS businesses and companies that have built on GPT-3.

Ramsri outlines some of the movers in the data science space that have propelled innovation, from serverless GPUs and open-source machine learning to vector search companies. He talks about how to form a startup in India, including tips on logistics, operations, hiring, and whether to raise funding or not.

The pod rounds off with Ramsri’s plans for the future, where he aims to eventually settle on one project full-time and sell off the others.

Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week, with TransPerfect sharing its financial results for 2022. The Super Agency grew by 4.6% to USD 1.16bn in 2022. CEO, Phil Shawe, disclosed that half the growth was organic and the other half was attributed to M&A.

Natural language processing startup, Cohere, is reportedly raising hundreds of millions of dollars at a valuation of more than six billion dollars. Alongside ChatGPT and Anthropic, this funding is the latest nod to the ongoing hype in all things AI.

In the UK, a report was released revealing how much the Nation Health Service (NHS) spent on interpreting services over three years. The NHS' spending came under scrutiny from the Taxpayers’ Alliance, which lobbies to “cut waste [and] reform taxes and public services”.

Esther talks about Iyuno’s recent strategic investment in Turkish subtitling and dubbing provider, Ak’la Kara International. This move strengthens the US-headquartered media localizer’s presence in the EMEA region and expands its capacity for Turkish dubbing.

At the end of January, the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Translation announced a forthcoming call for tenders for TRAD23. TRAD23 is a contract for the translation of EU documents from and into EU official languages and will cover more than one million pages per year.

Florian discusses some of the announcements made at Google’s Live From Paris event (including additions to Google Translate), which saw Google Bard’s AI chatbot give the wrong answer at its launch, impacting Alphabet’s share price.

Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week, kicking off with a sneak peek into the brand new Slator 2022 Language Industry M&A and Funding Report. Spanning 44 pages, the report covers 62 M&A transactions and 18 startup and tech funding rounds.

Following the latest research in ChatGPT, Intento published an article comparing ChatGPT translations to translations done by other stock MT engines. Florian discusses the results with ChatGPT performing well for English to Spanish but found lacking for English to German.

The Committee for Organizing the Olympic and Paralympic Games is looking for an interpreting technology provider who can offer a platform for remote simultaneous interpreting (RSI). The winning candidate will supply an RSI platform for more than 60 interpreters working in 11 languages before and during the Games.

Esther shares her experience watching Netflix’s 1899, which brought together nine source languages, and a number of translated versions: 14 dubbed languages and 32 subtitle options. The one-season series was distributed in 58 countries and was made up of an international cast and crew.

Over in Ireland and London, Keywords Studios are seeing a healthy demand for game localization after posting 22% organic growth in the second half of 2022. The gaming services giant expects full-year revenue and profits to slightly exceed previous guidance.

Tanya Bogin, Managing Director of Craft London, joins SlatorPod to talk about the company’s end-to-end creative production services across all media channels and languages.

Tanya discusses her route into the language industry; from working as a radio station manager to entering the transcreation industry with Craft. She talks about how the company brings creative ideas to life through cultural adaptation, translation, and transcreation.

Tanya outlines the rigorous testing process behind recruiting transcreation specialists and how their bespoke workflow yields successful results with clients. She touches on the role of language technology at Craft with a combination of best-of-breed cloud-based CAT tools and human-driven translation.

Tanya talks about the impact of AI and how they have implemented features like SEO, dynamic content optimization, and virtual production to improve workflow. She shares how they partnered with AI video generation platform Synthesia to transcreate JustEat’s Snoop Dogg advertisement for the global market.

The pod rounds off with Craft’s initiatives for 2023, including continuing to pay translators fairly and using AI to increase the sustainability of their productions.

In this week’s SlatorPod, LXT Chief Growth Officer Phil Hall joins us to talk about the company’s journey, from providing high-quality Arabic data for a Big Tech company to expanding into 750 languages.

Phil shares his background teaching linguistics and leading business development for Appen before joining LXT. He discusses the key findings from The Path to AI Majority report, from the maturity levels among 200 executives surveyed to which industries are trailblazers in AI adoption.

Phil touches on search relevance ranking as a method to retrain machine learning and give more relevant results. He gives his thoughts on ChatGPT and why he considers it a step change in AI.

Phil talks about LXT’s growth strategy, with M&A a potential avenue to acquire new customers and improve the technology stack. He goes over some of the legal and security considerations when it comes to data, with permission and secure facilities taking priority.

The pod rounds off with Phil’s take on where the AI industry is heading, with quite a long way to go before it becomes stable, low risk, and deployed with absolute confidence.

Google’s Head of Product, Translation AI, Mallika Iyer, joins SlatorPod to talk all about the company’s new Translation Hub.

Mallika begins with her journey from software engineer to leading all of the translation products for Google Cloud, most recently Translation Hub. She shares the motivation behind launching the hub, where they saw that overall demand for translation had increased, but budgets necessarily hadn’t.

Mallika discusses the basic and advanced tiers the hub offers, with the latter including domain-specific translation, translation memory, and translation quality prediction. She explains how the hub has gained traction early on with languages of lesser diffusion in addition to the major FIGS or CCJK combinations.

Mallika talks about a case study with Avery Dennison and how they rolled out Translation Hub to all their employees to improve language communication and promote an inclusive workplace culture. She expands on the different sectors the hub serves, from those with limited budgets in the public sector to those on the opposite side in retail and manufacturing.

The pod rounds off with Mallika laying out the Hub’s roadmap for 2023, with plans to add more document types, improve user experience, and integrate with third-party products. Translation Hub’s ultimate goal is to make the hub more accessible with new features while keeping its simplicity.

Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week, with the hype surrounding ChatGPT. Slator joined in by prompting ChatGPT to answer questions as if it were a translation manager.

After reports back in November 2022 stated that DeepL was in the final stretch of closing a major investment round, DeepL has finally confirmed that it raised funds from VCs at a billion-dollar valuation.

Translator Scammers Directory shared their annual report of scammer activities in 2022. Last year saw the first dip in new scammer IDs since 2018, signaling lower payoffs for imposters involved in the CV scam.

Florian and Esther then talk about the best and worst-performing listed language service providers (LSPs) in 2022. Out of the 12 LSPs, only Zoo Digital and Honyaku Centre delivered a positive performance, while Appen’s stock continued to plunge.

A large Amazon study titled “Large Scale Study of Human Localization With Insights for Automatic Dubbing” reviewed hundreds of hours of Prime Video content. The researchers found that human dubbers prioritize translation quality and speech naturalness over timing and lip sync.

Slator waved goodbye to the Language Industry Job Index after four years as a result of changes to the availability of the underlying data.

In this week’s SlatorPod, Happy Scribe CEO André Bastié joins us to talk about building a unified platform for transcription and subtitling.

André discusses the journey to co-founding Happy Scribe during his studies where he accidentally came across the challenge of transcription and built a first prototype with his flatmate and now CTO, Marc Assens Reina.

The CEO shares how their product development has evolved, from initially deploying the Google Speech API to connecting to various off-the-shelf systems to, now, building their own custom models. He talks about how being a bootstrapped company forces them to focus on producing results with limited resources.

André touches on the different customized features that allow users to create a vocabulary list, build their own dictionary, and adjust the number of characters per line for subtitling projects.

He gives his take on what’s driving the popularity of subtitles in short-form content and how subtitling differs between TikTok and long-form entertainment.

The CEO talks about the positives and negatives of Whisper, OpenAI’s open-source ASR model, and its impact on the AI space. The pod rounds off with Happy Scribe’s roadmap for 2023, including some interesting changes to pricing.

In the final SlatorPod episode of 2022, we are joined by Marco Trombetti, cofounder and CEO of Italy-based LSP Translated. Marco joins us two years on from our episode with Translated’s other cofounder, Isabelle Andrieu.

Marco breaks down the LSP’s Singularity in AI research project and defines what singularity means in translation. He walks us through the process and the vast data collection effort behind the research, with “time to edit” emerging as the key performance indicator for machine translation quality.

He talks about whether Translated has reached a plateau of productivity in postediting and the challenges of building a user interface for interacting with natural language. He also gives his take on the importance of owning an adaptive solution for machine translation like ModernMT.

Marco shares Translated’s approach to working with some of the world’s biggest companies such as Airbnb. He explains how they see financing as a requirement to reach their goals — which eventually fuelled their decision to secure USD 25m in growth equity.

The CEO shares his thoughts on ChatGPT. He thinks big language models will be the future of search and natural language will become the primary way of interacting.

Initiatives such as participating in the Ocean Globe Race 2023, the Imminent research center, and Pi Campus are all central to spreading their values and creating an innovative community, Marco concludes.

In this week’s SlatorPod, we are joined by Mark Lawyer, General Manager of Trados, the key technology product line of UK-based Super Agency RWS.

Trados is a translation technology adopted by hundreds of thousands of freelance translators, LSPs, and enterprise customers — the three main market segments of the localization supply chain.

Mark begins with his journey to joining the localization industry straight out of university, with roles spanning business development, solution architecture, and global customer experience management. He shares some of Trados’ milestones starting with its creation in 1984.

Mark talks about the flexibility of the Trados platform and why they offer cloud capabilities with the desktop app to provide a hybrid working environment for translators. He discusses how user feedback allows them to release hundreds of best-in-class features each year.

Mark highlights how user experience and accessibility are critical to Trados, where there are multiple configurations available to users based on their role. For example, a post-editor will have the Track Changes feature and fuzzy-match repair available to them. With more than 270,000 linguists using the platform, Mark shares how they strike the right balance between functionality and features without overwhelming those users.

Mark shares his views on Google’s Translation Hub and how it can bring awareness to the industry, which he sees as still being very fragmented. The pod rounds off with Trados’ roadmap for 2023, plans to invest money in security, AI-driven features, the modern user experience, continuous localization, and building out that ecosystem.

DeepL launches then pulls new AI-based writing tool, translator and interpreter employment declines in Germany, job index dips for fourth time in 2022, Blu Digital Group expands further into media localization, and Deluxe buys Post Haste Digital.

Joining SlatorPod this week is Ev Fedorenko, Associate Professor of Neuroscience at the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, MIT. Ev also runs EvLab, an MIT language lab that discovers how the human brain creates language.

Ev talks about the different hypotheses concerning the origin of language and how it has likely been a gradual evolution. She shares a number of intriguing research findings on the relationship between language and abstract representations of structure (i.e., complex thought).

Ev discusses how language processing takes place and how we can use brain imaging to compare language with other non-linguistic tasks, such as solving math problems and composing music. She questions whether specific languages can be objectively easy or difficult to learn as an adult.

She also considers what sets polyglots apart when it comes to learning languages and some of the generalizations made in research. Ev talks about how language processing in machines like GPT-3 compares to that in humans. She argues that it would be more fruitful to build language systems that are structured similar to the human brain.

Ev concludes with the collaboration between academia and the booming field of applied AI, despite different goals. She touches on the MIT Quest for Intelligence, which brings together scientists and engineers to build better human-like models for the benefit of society.

In this week’s episode, Florian is joined by Anna Wyndham, Senior Research Analyst at Slator. The two discuss the language industry news of the week, with a recap of the Nordic Translation Industry Forum held in Sweden last week. The NTIF covered a broad range of presentations, including a talk from Ikea about how they are building a custom machine translation (MT) engine from scratch.

In startup funding, AI dubbing startup, NeuralGarage, raised USD 1.45m in a seed round led by Exfinity Ventures. While this is the latest in a series of Indian machine dubbing startups to have raised funds, NeuralGarage focuses on visuals. This includes changing the lip and jaw movements of the person on the screen to match the target speech.

In other AI dubbing news, Papercup won a two-year translation and dubbing contract with Bloomberg, signaling greater interest in synthetic voices. The deal will see Papercup mainly localizing Spanish global news coverage, financial market analysis, and documentaries for Latin American and US audiences.

The duo talk about the latest machine translation research carried out by Google examining the sentence-level translation capabilities of their Pathways Language Model (PaLM). The researchers found the translations via PaLM, a large language model, to be more creative and very fluent — but still lagging behind state-of-the-art, supervised MT.

In Belgium, two associations have released a best practices guide for translation services procurement in the public sector. The Belgian Quality Translation Association and the Belgian Chamber of Translators and Interpreters delve into the tasks and tools used during a typical translation production cycle, among other things.

Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week, with German machine translation (MT) company DeepL said to be in the final stretch of closing a major investment round led by Silicon Valley venture firm, IVP. This will allow DeepL to expand further into the enterprise, as it ramps up hiring of customer success, account management, and related enterprise-focused roles.

The duo talk about how BNP Paribas, Europe’s second-largest bank, has been building its MT engine in-house over the past five years — instead of using publicly available MT tools, such as Google Translate or DeepL.

In M&A news, LanguageLine, the language services sub-unit of French call center giant Teleperformance, acquired UK-based LSP Capita Translation and Interpreting (Capita TI) for an undisclosed amount. Capita TI’s parent company, Capita plc., has been trying to sell off the language services unit and eight other non-core businesses since early 2020.

Down Under, Straker Translations has announced the renewal of its contract with IBM for another three years. The New Zealand-based LSP originally won the two-year contract in 2020, which has already contributed USD 14.8m to its FY 2022 revenue. IBM previously had to use over 100 LSPs to fulfill its translation needs.

The pod rounds off with news of Descript raising a USD 50m series C round led by the OpenAI Startup Fund, following a series B round in January 2021. The audio and video editing platform has raised USD 100m to date.

Konstantin Savenkov, CEO and co-founder of Intento, joins SlatorPod to discuss how they enable enterprise clients to choose best-fit machine translation (MT) services and technology.

Konstantin outlines Intento’s services and product offerings, which include an MT Hub for localization and office productivity, an MT studio, as well as MT evaluation and maintenance. He talks about why there is a lack of consolidation when it comes to MT providers, translation management systems (TMS), and translation productivity technology (aka CAT).

The CEO discusses the highlights from Intento’s State of Machine Translation 2022 report, which evaluates 31 MT engines, their best-performing language pairs, and pricing comparison. He shares his views on Google’s Translation Hub and how it raises more interest from investors evaluating the language industry.

Konstantin gives his take on generative AI — such as Stability AI’s Stable Diffusion and Open AI’s Whisper — and how this will not only impact the content generation and authoring industry but the machine translation space as well. He presents the idea of source quality improvement, where the source text is generalized before machine translation to make it a much more post-editable text.

Konstantin concludes the podcast with Intento’s roadmap for 2023, which includes connecting to more enterprises and adding more automated post-editing features.

Scott Stephenson, CEO of Deepgram, joins SlatorPod to talk about his unique journey to co-founding the deep tech, automatic speech recognition (ASR) company and raising over USD 50m in funding.

Scott recalls how his experience working with dark matter detectors as a particle physicist in China led to him becoming a deep-learning entrepreneur. He discusses some challenges in solving ASR; from labeling data for machine learning to formulating and executing an effective go-to-market strategy.

The CEO gives his thoughts on Whisper, OpenAI’s open-source ASR model, and how it may actually grow the total addressable market for voice AI companies. He shares the difficulties when it comes to translating a transcript versus translating straight from audio into another language.

Scott gives his advice on how to build a successful AI company and appeal to investors. The pod rounds off with Deepgram’s roadmap for the next year, with text to speech, voice cloning, real-time translation, and sentiment analysis being potential step changes in their growth trajectory.

First up, Florian and Esther catch up on the language industry news from the past month, with Google announcing the launch of Translation Hub, its enterprise-scale document translation service.

Esther discusses some of the language highlights from Netflix’s third-quarter earnings call, including the titles of some of the best-performing non-English content. Meanwhile, Zoo Digital’s share price was at a near all-time high as they weighed in at an almost USD 170m market cap.

The duo also talk about funding, where multilingual AI writer Jasper announced it had raised USD 125m in its unicorn-making series A, which valued the startup at USD 1.5bn. And, after a dip in the Slator Language Industry Job Index in September, the LIJI defied expectations of a slowdown as it reached an all-time high in November.

In this week’s SlatorPod, we are joined by Virpal Singh, CEO and co-founder of DigitalTolk, an interpreting services provider that uses technology and automation to help match interpreters to clients.

Virpal begins with his journey to setting up DigitalTolk; from studying computer engineering and electronics to entering the language industry with co-founder Leyla Sarac. The duo saw a gap in the Swedish market to meet the increasing language demand during the refugee crisis of 2015.

The CEO talks about the fragmentation of the interpreting market in Europe compared to the US because of the different laws and language barriers across national borders. He shares some of the technical challenges they have been solving with virtual remote interpreting (VRI) and helping customers identify use cases for VRI versus OPI.

Virpal discusses how they match supply and demand by having a stable back end, a user-friendly interface, and state-of-the-art technology, especially with emergency bookings. He gives his take on the competitive landscape when it comes to Microsoft’s recently released interpreting feature for Teams Meetings and new speech AI technology.

The pod rounds off with DigitalTolks’ plans for international growth in 2023. Virpal also unveils a pilot initiative targeted toward the healthcare sector, which will allow clinics to more efficiently manage canceled patient appointments.

The co-founder of Cohere, Nick Frosst, joins SlatorPod to talk about rapidly scaling one of the most exciting natural language processing (NLP) startups. Nick shares his journey to establishing Cohere alongside Aidan Gomez and Ivan Zhang with Aidan’s seminal paper, Attention Is All You Need, serving as an inspiration to the startup.

He reflects back on his experience at the Google Brain team in Toronto, where he worked on neural network research with Geoffrey Hinton, and breaks down the evolution of neural networks to the current state-of-the-art large language models.

Nick touches on the level of machine learning experience needed to deploy on Cohere’s NLP platform — and how it is Cohere’s goal to eventually become the default NLP toolkit for all types of developers.

Nick gives his thoughts on generative AI, such as Dall-E and Stable Diffusion, and the possible business applications for them. He shares the rationale behind partnering with Google Cloud to cater to Cohere’s huge demand for raw computing power.

The pod rounds off with the startup’s future plans to integrate a multilingual offering; specifically multilingual embedding.

The co-founder of Cohere, Nick Frosst, joins SlatorPod to talk about rapidly scaling one of the most exciting natural language processing (NLP) startups. Nick shares his journey to establishing Cohere alongside Aidan Gomez and Ivan Zhang with Aidan’s seminal paper, Attention Is All You Need, serving as an inspiration to the startup.

He reflects back on his experience at the Google Brain team in Toronto, where he worked on neural network research with Geoffrey Hinton, and breaks down the evolution of neural networks to the current state-of-the-art large language models.

Nick touches on the level of machine learning experience needed to deploy on Cohere’s NLP platform — and how it is Cohere’s goal to eventually become the default NLP toolkit for all types of developers.

Nick gives his thoughts on generative AI, such as Dall-E and Stable Diffusion, and the possible business applications for them. He shares the rationale behind partnering with Google Cloud to cater to Cohere’s huge demand for raw computing power.

The pod rounds off with the startup’s future plans to integrate a multilingual offering; specifically multilingual embedding.

Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week and announce the launch of Slator’s Interpreting Services and Technology Report. The 60-page report provides a 360-degree view on the growth industry of interpreting. The report features analysis by mode, setting, geo, buyers, use cases, and more.

Florian touches on a new interpreting feature released by Microsoft, which allows simultaneous unidirectional interpretation in 16 language pairs in Teams Meetings. In addition, Microsoft will finish rolling out its multilingual live captioning functionality for Teams in early October 2022.

Big Language Solutions has announced the appointment of Dick Surdykowski as CEO. He takes over from Jeff Brink, who has moved into the Chairmanship and is focusing on strategic initiatives.

Esther talks about DeepLs’ hiring patterns based on 300+ LinkedIn profiles of people associated with the machine translation (MT) company. The results indicate what the MT giant will focus on moving forward.

Esther also shares a one-year update on the Spanish government’s plan to make Spain the audiovisual hub of Europe. The initiative gained momentum in 2022 with increased foreign investment, revamped visa laws, as well as new audiovisual production and training facilities.

Meanwhile, in the UK, Zoo Digital’s first-half 2023 performance beats expectations, with revenues increasing 89% year over year. The media localization, subtitling, and dubbing provider plans to invest in all kinds of growth plans and initiatives, including Zoo Academy.

In funding news, Indian machine dubbing startup, Dubdub, announced it had raised USD 1m in seed funding. Co-founder Anubhav Singh disclosed their vision: To “bridge this language gap with state-of-the-art AI in speech synthesis and generative modeling.”

In this week’s episode, Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week, with various natural language generation (NLG) startups gaining traction of late. Esther covers whether these NLG startups, which can help content creators write copy in multiple languages, are a threat or an opportunity for LSPs.

Over in Europe, the strike at the European Parliament among interpreters continues, as they decline to interpret for those that dial-in remotely. Among the complaints, poor sound quality and a heavier workload. As negotiations between European Parliament staff interpreters and the administration collapse, efforts have been made to get European Parliament President, Roberta Mesilla, involved.

In M&A news, Lionbridge is set to acquire Game Tester, a game-testing platform based in Australia and South Africa. This will be the third games-related acquisition for the Super Agency in three years and will allow them to add community-based testing capabilities to the Lionbridge Games division.

Meanwhile, Airbnb becomes even more multilingual as it expands its machine translation capabilities to translate reviews. This move comes after the company successfully launched its messaging feature this summer. Airbnb currently runs on ModernMT, the Translated-led, open-source project, co-founded by Fondazione Bruno Kessler and the European Commission.

Tim Jung, CEO of XL8, joins SlatorPod to talk about the startup’s journey — from co-founding the media-focused machine translation company with former Apple Software Engineer, Jay Park, to raising a USD 3m bridge round in August 2022.

Tim discusses his experience working for Samsung and Google and how they have adopted an engineering-driven culture at XL8.

The CEO walks through their product MediaCAT, which allows users to streamline media localization workflows in three steps: sync, translate, and dub. XL8 also recently launched EventCAT, where users can interpret or add live subtitles for events through the power of AI.

Tim reveals some of the media-specific challenges of language automation, from speaker identification to generating subtitles by speech recognition. He tells us how the XL8 approach differs from big tech as it uses 100% human professional-curated data to train its MT engines.

The CEO talks about what they have gained from their partnership with Iyuno-SDI and the challenges of competing with big tech when hiring machine learning talent. The pod rounds off with XL8’s roadmap for 2023, including improving closed caption generation by working with companies that specialize in sound-effect recognition.

First up, Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week, with the launch of Slator’s monthly Language Industry Data and News Briefing available to all Starter, Growth, Pro, and Enterprise subscribers.

The duo then talk about the performance of a handful of publicly-listed language service providers, including Honyaku Center, Appen, ZOO Digital, Keywords Studios, and RWS. Over in Switzerland, SaaS translation platform, Neur.on, which offers custom MT for law firms, legal publishers, and public authorities has announced an investment round of USD 1.6m.

Esther gives an update on the Slator Language Industry Job Index, which dipped 4.5 points in September after the all-time high recorded in August. Meanwhile, video games service provider, Universally Speaking, appointed former Keywords Studios CMO, Andrew Brown, as CEO in July 2022, taking over from founder Vickie Peggs after 18 years.

Machine Translation (MT) Researcher, Yasmin Moslem, joins SlatorPod to talk about her research on Domain-Specific Text Generation for Machine Translation — a project she conducted with Rejwanul Haque, John D. Kelleher, and Andy Way at the Adapt Center in Dublin.

Yasmin shares her experience working as a translator, discovering translation productivity (CAT) tools, and experimenting with translation memory to improve MT. She breaks down the paper’s approach to domain-specific MT training using back-translation for data augmentation.

She discusses how some LSPs are already implementing this approach in real-life, customizing it for different use cases. She explains why they used a combination of BLEU, Comet, and other quality evaluation frameworks as well as human evaluation to rate machine translation quality.

Yasmin concludes the podcast with her advice for those in the core industry looking to enter the machine translation space, from the spiral learning process to reading research papers.

First up, Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week, including how a streaming platform used propriety machine dubbing technology for its film offerings in the first quarter of 2022.

Over in London, TransPerfect acquired a virtual data room (VDR) tech company to proactively address the VDR market. In transcription news, VIQ Solutions’ shares dipped by 20% despite reporting strong, half-year revenue growth of 45% year on year. Meanwhile, multilingual captioning provider Ai-Media turns EBITDA-profitable as a 2021 acquisition drives revenue growth.

Adrian Probst, German Language Specialist and Content Creator behind the YouTube channel Freelanceverse, joins the pod this week to talk about how he became arguably the most successful YouTuber in the language industry.

The YouTuber looks back on his journey; from commercial apprenticeship and studying translation at university to working as project manager and branching off on his own as a freelancer. He recalls how he began his YouTube channel as a way to challenge himself during the pandemic, and how consistency and authenticity has allowed his channel to grow to over 16,000 subscribers.

Adrian highlights the importance of online visibility and networking as a way to find and secure new clients directly. He reveals how he bases some of his videos on frequently asked questions from the community, such as pricing translation and the future of machine translation.

The pod rounds off with Adrian’s view on YouTube giving multilingual audio tracks to its top creators — and how his offering multilingual subtitles caused his videos to spike in views. He encourages students not to wait until they graduate to attend language industry events, do some voluntary translation, and build a network.

First up, Florian rehashes some of the biggest stories of the past four months as co-host Esther returns. Back in May 2022, RWS and Baring Private Equity Asia Fund VIII Limited confirmed that Baring would not proceed with a takeover bid for RWS.

Next, there was some major pushback against RSI over the summer as UN interpreters blamed technology for the decline in their working conditions; and EU interpreters voted unanimously to suspend remote interpreting services.

More recently, YouTube has been testing a new multi-language audio feature with a small group of popular creators. Esther breaks down the different language industry companies that made the Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing, US-based businesses in 2022.

Joseph Lambert (Lecturer in Translation Studies at Cardiff University) and Callum Walker (Lecturer in Translation Technology at the University of Leeds) join SlatorPod to talk about their paper Because We’re Worth It: Disentangling freelance translation, status, and rate-setting in the United Kingdom.

Joseph discusses the top three challenges for translators when it comes to pricing their services, including knowing how to calculate rates, client or LSP resistance to rate suggestions, and being willing to talk about rates in general. Callum shares the motivation behind writing the paper and how they aim to bridge the gap between academia and industry when it comes to pricing.

The duo talk about the lack of recognition of translation as a profession that requires a high degree of specialization and expertise — one of the central issues holding prices down. They address the difference in pay between working as a freelance translator for an LSPs versus acting independently and engaging directly with clients.

Joseph and Callum then unpack the positive and negative impact that machine translation and translation marketplaces have made on freelance translators over the past two decades. They reflect on the growing demand from translators for hourly pricing versus the per-word model, especially when it comes to post-editing.

They agree with the theory that as MT increases in quality, the level of expertise required of a professional linguist becomes ever higher and this should be reflected in teaching. Callum outlines the Leed’s approach to educating students through simulated projects to practice their negotiating skills.

The pod rounds off with advice for graduate students entering the industry — from networking and talking about rates to enhancing professional development with language and business skills.

In this week’s episode, Florian and Anna discuss the language industry news of the week, with RWS announcing the appointment of Julie Southern as Chairperson Designate.

Another leadership change saw Heith Mackay-Cruise replacing Phil Norman as Chairman of the Board at Straker Translations. Meanwhile, the UK Immigration Enforcement outlines exceptional cases in which staff might use a translation device instead of on-site or telephonic interpreting.

In Canada, the Board of Internal Economy (BOIE), has approved a six-month pilot project that allows the use of “external” and “remote” interpreters for parliamentary sessions. The duo talk about a EUR 42m contract that popped up in Slator’s own RFP Center from the French Office for the Protection of Refugees and Stateless Persons.

New guidance in Australia was published by the health department that clarified how medical professionals and GPs should bill interpreting services when they require an extended consultation. In an article, Haris Ghinos, Project Leader for ISO 23155, summarized what conference interpreting service providers need to know about the new ISO standard.

Dubverse co-founder, Anuja Dhawan, joins SlatorPod to talk about launching the machine dubbing startup and powering video content dubbing using the latest AI language models and tech.

Anuja starts with her journey to co-founding Dubverse with Varshul Gupta as a result of the rise of English speaking video-generated content during the pandemic. She goes through the company’s core team structure where the focus is on scaling through AI and technology.

She discusses how they tailor their product to language demand in India as roughly only 10% of the population understands or speaks English fluently. She talks about their approach to tackling technical challenges when producing highly natural, emotional AI voices.

Anuja notes the importance of dubbing short-form content from large social media and video networks like YouTube, TikTok and, specific to India, ShareChat. She unpacks a human-in-the-loop model where they onboarded a translator to improve linguistic nuances in their automated workflow.

She also shares the story behind connecting with Dubverse’s first investor, Kalaari Capital, and the lessons learned from the interview process. The pod rounds off with the startup’s future plans to make dubbing published content even simpler for creators, so they can break the language barrier.

In this week’s news episode, Florian and Anna catch up on a month’s worth of news, with RSI receiving a lot of opposition. First, there was a UN Today article where interpreters pushed back on poor sound quality and unreliable audio levels causing hearing problems. Then interpreters went on strike at the EU Parliament after negotiations seeking improved work conditions failed.

Anna talks about Meta AI’s “breakthrough” claim in machine translation with the release of the I/O model called No Language Left Behind (NLLB). NLLB is an open-source machine translation model with 54 billion parameters and focuses on 200 low-resource languages, specifically from Africa and Asia.

In media localization, ZOO Digital released full-year results for 2022 which saw revenue grow by 78% from the previous year, and growth into the current year driven by the ongoing territory launches of major streaming platforms.

Keywords Studios’ interest in the space has become more apparent as CFO, John Hauck, shares the game localization provider’s plans to expand into adjacent markets and move more heavily into film and TV.

The duo also discuss the launch of Zoom’s translation feature. Business users can now have their Zoom meetings translated in real-time into and out of English from any of 10 languages. Anna then covers Disney’s experimentation with synthesized voices. The company partnered with voice-cloning startup Respeecher to feature a synthetic voice in The Mandalorian miniseries.

In this week’s SlatorPod, we’re joined by Jan Rausch to discuss his experience in the interpreting industry as a freelance conference and business interpreter.

Jan talks about his background in teaching modern languages and how he transitioned to freelance interpreting, where he eased himself into a highly competitive market. He shares the range of scenarios he has worked in; from European Works Councils and clinical trials to sales meetings and political and diplomatic interpreting for German delegations.

Jan discusses the need to multitask and formulate good language that is easy to understand for the listeners when it comes to simultaneous interpreting. He also talks about how the pandemic has impacted interpreting with the explosion of remote and hybrid meetings.

Jan outlines the pros and cons of remote simultaneous interpreting (RSI) and the preventative measures interpreters can take to protect their hearing and general health. Jan touches on the challenge of staying fully up to date in one’s native language when living outside the country, especially with social linguistic development.

Jan unpacks the perception of on-site pricing versus remote interpreting, where clients can sometimes assume RSI is cheaper when, in fact, it can be more demanding for the interpreter. He concludes the podcast with tips for graduates who want to break into institutional or freelance interpreting, particularly when it comes to networking.

Theo Hoffenberg, Founder and CEO of Reverso, joins SlatorPod to talk about specializing in AI-based language tools and translation aids used by millions online.

Theo begins with his background in the software industry, where he helped launch tech companies in Europe and how he got into the language technology industry with Reverso. He discusses the evolution of the company, from a downloadable software to an online translation platform with millions of users including language professionals and enterprises.

The CEO talks us through the release of some of their AI-based language tools like Reverso Context, a bilingual dictionary tool based on big data and machine learning algorithms. He shares how they maintained and grew their user base by staying on top of SEO and leveraging the App Store.

Theo talks about acqui-hires and recruiting remote engineering and tech talent. He discusses how they stay ahead in a highly competitive space by deploying locally and online, offering secure SaaS for those in sensitive industries, and translating documents and websites while preserving their layout.

The pod rounds off with Reverso’s roadmap for 2022, including an all-in-one desktop app and an updated mobile app that will have even more learning capabilities. Theo also weighs in on the value of large language models when it comes to memory usage; because, as volumes grow, it becomes more critical to achieve high efficiency.

Mila Golovine, CEO and President of MasterWord, joins SlatorPod to talk about the important topic of stress and trauma that linguists may experience on the job.

Mila walks us through her journey in the language industry: immigrating from Russia, founding the Texas-based LSP straight out of university, and leading it to where it is today. She reflects on MasterWord’s diversification, expanding from oil and gas to healthcare, education, and government services.

The CEO talks about the strategy behind recruiting from refugee communities and using MasterWord Institute to train talent wanting to enter the language industry. She discusses how stress and vicarious trauma affect language professionals, as well as the specific training and tools that can help prevent this.

Mila gives her outlook on the dynamics of Language Access regulation in the US and how it differs state by state. The pod rounds off with Mila’s approach to balancing growth across all verticals having thrived through a number of recessions.

First up, Florian and Anna discuss the language industry news of the week, with an interesting debrief from Florian about the Machine Translation Meetup hosted by TextShuttle in Zurich.

In the UK, the University of Roehampton proposed staff cuts that directly affect the university’s 20-year-old Audiovisual Translation program — a move that caused the UK’s Subtitlers Association (SUBTLE) to launch a protest on social media. RWS released its H1 2022 results with new SaaS clients contributing to the 20% growth in profits; but the Super Agency’s IP Services division saw –8% growth.

Meanwhile, the dubbing space heats up as India-based startup Dubverse raised USD 0.8m in a seed round led by Kalaari Capital. AI dubbing startup, Papercup, raised USD 20m in an oversubscribed series A round, bringing funds raised to date to USD 34m.

TransPerfect Senior Vice President in charge of technology, Matt Hauser, joins SlatorPod to share his experience in building the technology division at what is now the world’s largest language service provider.

Hauser explains why they bet early on the cloud when building their translation management system, Global Link, and how the TMS is deployed across much of production at TransPerfect and across hundreds of enterprise clients.

He discusses the importance of connectors and building and maintaining that content on-ramp to clients. Matt agrees with Florian that post-editing MT as a process is beginning to reach maturity — and is now standard operating procedure in most areas where it makes sense.

The discussion then touches on how TransPerfect is taking a deliberate and client-centric approach in the tech integration of Semantix, TransPerfect’s largest acquisition to date.

Finally, Matt shares his views on how to hire and motivate an effective technology sales force.

We are joined by Avi Staiman, CEO of Academic Language Experts (ALE) to discuss translation for the academic publishing sector.

Avi shares his background studying and working in the education sector and how this led to him founding ALE. He delves into ALE’s services, which range from editing and translating materials for scholars before they pitch their book or article to big research institutions and funding agencies.

The CEO talks about the role of English as lingua franca in academia and how non-native English scholars are at a disadvantage as a result. He runs through the typical workflow between authors, linguists, and editors, as well as how ALE’s thorough reviewing process helps retain clients.

Avi comments on the use of technology in academic translation, where the lack of repetition in research can hinder the benefits of translation memory tools. He talks about how ALE is raising awareness around the issue of visibility when it comes to giving translators credit in academic work.

First up, Florian and Anna discuss the language industry news of the week, with Lionbridge AI buyer, Telus, putting forth and then pulling back its bid for Australian data annotation provider, Appen.

In M&A, France-based media localization provider, Dubbing Brothers, expands into the Nordics with the acquisition of Eurotroll, a Scandinavian dubbing and subtitling company. Meanwhile, on Twitter, #TranslatorsInTheCredits gains traction as translators exchange experiences of being excluded from the credits of localized video games.

The Slator duo also talk about recent studies that examine data privacy risks associated with large pretrained language models, such as memorization and association of personal information. A study by Inbox Translation examined the annual spend on language services at the UK’s NHS, where 40 times more is spent on interpreting than translation.

In this week’s SlatorPod, we are joined by Maria Schnell to discuss her recent appointment as Chief Language Officer at RWS — pointing to the Super Agency’s investment in linguistic expertise.

Maria begins with her journey as a trained translator and how she worked her way through commercial and operational roles at SDL, before the company was acquired by RWS. She then talks about what the new role of Chief Language Officer entails, specifically leading the Language eXperience Delivery (LXD) platform.

She breaks down the role of the LXD platform, where a large, linguistic network supports clients looking to venture into more remote markets and long-tail languages. She also shares the importance of technology in optimizing operations, from translation productivity to quality assurance.

Maria discusses RWS’ approach to machine translation, where human post-editing is necessary if clients want true engagement with their end customers. She also talks about plans to simplify the technological complexity the Super Agency inherited as a result of past acquisitions.

The pod rounds off with Maria’s initiatives for the next year as she continues to nurture localization talent at RWS Campus and analyze language trends in their language labs.

Smith Yewell, Co-founder and CEO of Welocalize, joins SlatorPod to talk about how the team built the company from the first order, translating a single word 25 years ago, into what is now a global Super Agency.

Smith talks about co-founding Welocalize with wife Julia Yewell in 1997, and how they did not have a common language when they first met. He recalls how he navigated the many complex end-client industries and enterprise functions, especially with the maturation of technology.

The CEO shares the impact private equity investors have had on Welocalize and on the language industry — where roughly a third of the leading 100 LSPs are now PE-backed. He also reflects on the M&A space and shares the strategy behind expanding into digital marketing services as well as tech and patent translation.

Smith concludes with Welocalize’s plans for 2022: strengthening relationships and growth opportunities. He believes innovation around natural language processing (NLP) will change the way we communicate; from chatbots and digital assistance to automobiles and appliances.

First up, Florian and Anna discuss the language industry news of the week, with Google Translate adding 24 languages using zero-shot machine translation. At the Google I/O conference, the search giant also unveiled a smart-glasses prototype that can transcribe, translate, and display what the user is saying on the lenses in real time.

Having previously released a statement in April, saying it was in the “preliminary stages of considering a possible offer,” Baring confirmed they will not proceed with a takeover bid for RWS. Meanwhile, in Australia, the Supreme Court of Victoria has voided the sale of ezispeak to Technologie Fluenti, citing anti-phoenixing laws.

In this week’s SlatorPod, we are joined by Kirsten Brecht Baker, Co-founder and CEO of Jeenie, an on-demand healthcare interpreting platform that recently raised USD 9.3m in Series A funding.

Kirsten begins with her journey as a daughter of linguists and how she transitioned from working in international education to co-founding Jeenie. She tells us about the pivot to servicing healthcare in the US and how they grew in one of the most competitive spaces in the industry.

The CEO shares her experience partnering with Transformation Capital, a growth equity fund focused on innovative healthcare IT and services companies, in order to scale through hiring and innovate through technology. She talks about the advantages of working remotely versus a hybrid model, such as direct connections from clients to interpreters in as little as 15 seconds.

The pod rounds off with Jeenie’s technology plans for the future with intentional partnerships and integrations with electronic medical records and electronic health records. Kirsten gives her outlook, where she sees a transition from OPI to VRI, and increased communication due to rising migrant trends around the world.

First up, Florian and Anna discuss the language industry news of the week, with two airports in Canada being ordered to pay CAD 20,000 to serial complainant Michel Thibodeau.

In M&A news, Toppan Digital Language, the LSP subsidiary of Singapore-based Toppan Leefung, expanded its London presence with the acquisition of TranslateMedia. Meanwhile, Down Under, the Australian Judicial Council on Cultural Diversity launched the second edition of its national standards for legal interpreting.

Florian talks about Amazon Transcribe’s no-code workflow, which enables video subtitle creation directly within the service.

In this week’s SlatorPod, we are joined by Genoveva Ruiz Calavera, Head of the Directorate-General for Interpretation (SCIC) at the European Commission, the world’s largest employer of conference interpreters.

Genoveva reflects back on her 30-year journey working for the European Commission in an array of different roles; and what led her to switch to leading SCIC. She shares SCIC’s mission to provide high-quality conference interpretation to institutions and organize corporate conferences.

The Director-General relays the main challenges she overcame as she stepped into the role in the middle of the pandemic, with Covid disrupting in-person interpretation. Along with a dramatic drop in demand, SCIC had to adjust to a hybrid culture and develop new video-conferencing tools to provide interpreting services during the global crisis.

Genoveva also talks about working with the European Parliament and Court of Justice to pilot a new accreditation testing platform for freelance interpreters. She shines a light on the BeHeard Campaign, an initiative created by the European Parliament, to increase awareness about meeting etiquette when it comes to connecting online.

She touches on how SCIC partners with non-EU countries to share expertise in interpretation, ensuring the EU remains a global player in the world. The pod rounds off with SCIC’s support for Ukraine and how interpreters play an important role in facilitating the EU’s democratic decision-making process.

In this week’s episode, Slator’s very own Andrew Smart joins us from sunny San Diego for a report on what took place at GALA 2022 and to discuss the language industry news of the week.

Florian talks about how RWS’ shares jumped after Baring Private Equity Asia confirmed that it is in the “preliminary stages of considering a possible offer” to take over the Super Agency. This announcement comes a month after RWS unveiled its new strategy at the LSP’s Capital Markets Event.

Meanwhile, ZOO Digital beats its full-year guidance. The media localization provider now expects FY22 revenues to be at least USD 70m, up USD 5m from the previous estimate, and an increase of 78% compared to the prior year. This announcement comes as streaming providers compete with each other for subscriptions, launching in new territories around the world.

Andrew shares his impressions after he and Slator Staff Writer, Seyma Albarino, attended GALA 2022, one of the first, bigger, in-person language industry events this year. He highlights the tech-focused agenda, with a presentation from Interprefy on how lower price points can open up new markets for interpreting. Also in the lineup: remote simultaneous interpreting (RSI), integrating automation, and big data in machine translation.

In this week’s episode, Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week, with shares in Netflix taking a 35% dive after the streaming giant lost 200,000 subscribers. The company continues to push international content and is currently building capacity in gaming faster than when they entered film.

Amazon announces the release of 51 language datasets, which will help Alexa add more low-resource languages to their current 8 languages. They created this 100-million-utterances-per-language dataset by tasking professional translators with translating the English dataset into 50 typologically diverse languages.

On the M&A front, BIG has acquired Lawlinguists, a legal translation specialist founded by three attorneys and whose entire linguist network is made up of lawyers. This is BIG’s second acquisition in the regulated industry space in Europe after they acquired Dora Wirth Languages a year ago.

Meanwhile, SeproTec has bought Cologne-based LSP tsd as part of their expansion into the German-speaking DACH region. This is the first acquisition for tsd since private equity firm, Nazca Capital, acquired a majority stake in the company in 2021.

Over in California, software localization company, Transifex, announced its sale to PARC Partners, a search fund backed by investors. PARC’s managing partners, Chris Reese and Tony Pilnik, are going to take over the management of Transifex as CEO and President, respectively.

This is a special episode for Esther as it is her last time co-hosting before she goes on maternity leave. But don’t worry. SlatorPod will continue to broadcast with an exciting array of guests until Esther returns.

Slator’s very own Anna Wyndham joins the pod to share key insights from our flagship Slator 2022 Language Industry Market Report.

Totalling 100 pages, the report covers language industry growth, the LSP competitive landscape, core language industry technologies, and market outlook. Anna starts off by breaking down market size by vertical, geographic region, and buyer intention. She also touches on spotlight topics, such as remote interpreting, media localization, and expert-in-the-loop.

Anna reviews frontier language technologies, with speech-to-speech translation, synthetically dubbed media, and synthetically generated content marketing having the potential to disrupt and expand the market. Florian gives his outlook on the market and projected growth to 2026 based on conservative, base, and optimistic growth scenarios.

Next up, Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week, which saw Lilt raise USD 55m in series C funding led by Four Rivers. Also in the US, on-demand healthcare interpreting platform, Jeenie, announced a USD 9.3m series A funding round led by Transformation Capital.

Augustin Prot, Co-founder and CEO of Weglot, joins SlatorPod to talk about the startup’s journey as a no-code website localization technology provider.

Augustin discusses his not-so-typical professional background in M&A and how he got into the language services and tech industry. He talks us through the transformation of their client segments, from self-service SMBs to large enterprises, and how Weglot aligns its product with these sectors.

The CEO talks about raising EUR 45m with partner Partech Growth to scale product development and expand their 30-person team. He shares how no-code tech has evolved since Weglot was founded, with digitalization and Covid-19 accelerating the trend.

Augustin shares the complexities behind website localization and how they tackle SEO challenges — such as getting Google to recognize the translated version of a website. The pod rounds off with Weglot’s roadmap for 2022, including a new integration with Squarespace and the ability to translate variables from within a platform.

First up, Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week, unpacking Google’s huge new language model with 540 billion parameters.

In the anime-translation world, the English release of the Japanese fantasy manga, Ranking of Kings, was suspended due to “typographical and translation issues.” (Previous SlatorPod guest, Katrina Leonoudakis, analyzed the English translation and tweeted how it was partly copied from a fan-made translation.)

Esther talks about Iyuno-SDI’s strategic investment in UK-based technology provider, Ortana Media Group. (Florian points out how Iyuno-SDI’s German press release was lightly post-edited using, most likely, DeepL.)

In this week’s SlatorPod, we are joined by Bryan Forrester, Co-founder and CEO of Boostlingo, a Texas-based interpreting software and technology provider.

Bryan begins with his journey to co-founding Boostlingo; from selling his first tech startup, Anchor Software, to entering the interpreting space. The CEO shares his experience partnering with growth equity firm Mainsail Partners in order to scale the business through hiring and M&A.

He addresses the VoiceBoxer and Interpreter Intelligence acquisitions as part of a strategy to expand into remote simultaneous interpreting (RSI) and on-demand scheduling. He talks about some of the technical challenges with VRI and OPI when it comes to bandwidth.

Bryan gives his take on the US interpreting market and how Covid-19 affected the structure of on-site, remote, and hybrid interpreting in healthcare. The pod rounds off with Boostlingo’s plans for 2022 with a build instead of buy approach.

First up, Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week, with Microsoft giving early access for select users to their re-engineered multilingual machine translation system.

Florian talks about the Japanese Government’s claim that their machine translation engine has reached the level of professional translators in the financial sector. In media localization, Esther shares Keywords Studios’ full-year 2021 results, which saw revenues grow by more than a third from 2020.

Esther gives an update on the Slator Language Industry Job Index, which is up by six points since the beginning of 2022, only two points lower than the all-time high in December 2021.

Nico Herbig and Josef van Genabith join SlatorPod to talk all about their project, called MMPE, a multi-modal interface for post-editing machine translation.

Nico shares the motivation behind starting MMPE and how they aim to improve the collaboration between human translators and language technology. Josef explains how they geared the project toward a human-in-the-loop model.

The duo reflect on the early research behind the project, where they gathered input from professional translators to narrow down the design and handwriting interaction. They discuss the hardware technology and their approach when it comes to measuring cognitive load.

The segment rounds off with the next steps for MMPE now that the project is complete — from the potential commercialization of certain aspects to further research in eye-tracking.

First up, Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week, with RWS announcing the acquisition of Liones and analyst projections of USD 1 billion in FY 2022 revenue.

In the US, Boostlingo has bought two tech-focused providers, Voiceboxer and Interpreter Intelligence, expanding their offering to VRI, OPI, RSI, and on-demand interpreting. Meanwhile, Google gives YouTubers early access to free machine dubbing with Aloud, the Google-grown dubbing solution that debuted in March 2022.

Florian talks about the StartSummit conference, which kicked off with Jaroslaw Kutylowski, Founder and CEO of DeepL, highlighting the company’s strong growth despite zero marketing.

In other news, France-based Weglot, a website localization provider powered by machine translation, secured a EUR 45m investment from tech-focused investor Partech Growth. And two of the largest French LSPs have come together as Super Agency Acolad acquired top-10 Leader Ubiqus.

In a guest solo, Meta’s VP of Internationalization, Product Quality, and Product Experience, Iris Orriss, joins SlatorPod to talk about the company’s mission to give people the power to build communities, bringing the world closer together.

Iris recounts her journey to joining the language industry, from training as a geologist to working in big tech, from Microsoft to Meta. She also reveals her motivations for working in the field of internationalization.

The VP shares Meta’s strategy to remove language and cultural barriers through technology and the localization of major languages not well-represented on the Internet, such as Amharic, Khmer, and Sinhala. She discusses the scale of internationalization operations at Meta with more than 100 languages on the platform and millions of words translated every week.

Iris announces the end of their Community Translation program, where translators helped Meta make the Internet’s major languages available on the platform. The shift comes as Meta plans to migrate to a supplier source process, where they will work with single-language vendors (SLVs), specifically in African and Southeast Asian countries, to build Meta’s translation infrastructure.

The Meta VP rounds out the episode with what internationalization looks like in the Metaverse. This includes the shift from text to audio, personalizing avatars, and creating your own home.

Felix Laumann, CEO of NeuralSpace, joins SlatorPod to talk all about the no-code, low-code natural language processing (NLP) platform for low-resource languages.

Felix recalls his journey to startup CEO in the NLP milieu after coming from a computer and mechanical engineering background; plus the origin story of NeuralSpace. He discusses the difficulty behind building models for low-resource languages when faced with less than 1% of data available.

The CEO recounts his experience connecting with investors to raise a USD 1.7m seed round. He explains how machine translation fits into their framework, with the main use-case being building chatbots.

Felix reveals how they collect data and their plans to work directly with linguistic professionals to cover different pronunciations, tones, and emotions. He shares plans to add more speech capabilities and cover nearly any fundamental NLP project or problem.

First up, Florian and Esther talk about the language industry news of the week, with the final agenda for SlatorCon Remote complete.

Esther talks about Transline Gruppe swapping majority owners as former backer LEAD Equities exits via sale to investment firm Blue Cap. Florian then reviews Slator’s coverage of the skills required as a post-editor, MT engineer, and PE consultant.

In M&A, ZOO Digital announces the launch of ZOO Korea, alongside the acquisition of a 51% stake in Seoul-based subtitling and dubbing provider, WhatSub Pro. Meanwhile, US-based Verbit expanded its transcription services in the UK with the acquisition of market research specialist Take Note.

Brigham Tomco, CEO of Emmersion, joins SlatorPod to talk all about automating language evaluation and the underlying tech behind it.

Brigham begins with his journey into the language education and tech industry, where he started two venture-backed companies. He recounts the early days of Emmersion, where they offered language tutoring and how they evolved into building language assessment tech.

The CEO shares the importance of language learning in the age of AI with language tech like machine translation and speech-to-speech. He identifies the different key client segments, from call centers and BPOs to academia and LSPs.

Brigham unpacks the language tech and patenting process behind language testing products, such as TrueNorth Speaking Test and WebCAPE. He outlines how they handled the rapid demand for remote hiring as a result of Covid and Emmersion’s roadmap for the future.

First up, Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week, with Simon Lee, CEO of language data platform Flitto, sharing how the company has integrated the metaverse into their everyday work.

The duo talk about the state of the data-for-AI market as Appen’s share price fell by 28% after releasing full-year 2021 results. Meanwhile, in Australia, captioning and translation provider Ai-Media grew 29% to AUD 29.6m in the first half of 2022.

Esther then gives an update on the Language Industry Job Index, which climbed three points to 176.6 in March 2022.

In this week’s episode, Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week, kicking off with some key stats from the Slator 2022 Language Service Provider Index (LSPI).

Florian talks about the latest in M&A news, where the low-resource language API platform NeuralSpace raised USD 1.7m in a seed round led by Merus Capital.

To cap off the episode, the duo unpacks a recent post from Meta titled, “Teaching AI to translate 100s of spoken and written languages in real time”, where the company announced two new projects.

In this week’s SlatorPod, we’re joined by Marco Assis, CEO of Propio Language Services (Propio), a US-based interpreting and language technology company.

Marco begins with his unusual route into the language industry where he spent most of his career in finance and M&A before taking over Propio from its long-term owners in 2017. He talks about Propio’s highly specialized healthcare domain and outlines the similarities and differences between servicing public vs. private sector clients.

The CEO shares his experience teaming up with private equity and what Triple Tree Capital Partners brings to the table in terms of operations. He also gives listeners a behind-the-scenes glimpse at recruiting, training, and working with translators and interpreters. Marco gives his take on the competition from in-house services at major hospital systems and insurance companies.

He then talks about the motivation behind building proprietary technology and launching the mobile app platform Propio ONE. The pod rounds off with Propio’s plans for 2022 with Marco announcing the launch of the company’s first international operations hub in Mexico.

First up, Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week, with machine dubbing startup Deepdub raising USD 20m in a series A round. Meanwhile, Florian unpacks a CNET article on the “dying art of subtitling,” where he points out that subtitling is actually thriving despite subtitlers being hard to source.

Esther talks about “Why Eye-Tracking Matters in Machine Translation Post-Editing,” where eye-tracking has been found to be a promising tool for MT error identification and fair post-editing pricing models. Florian shares the latest on SlatorCon Remote March 2022 with Deluxe CEO Cyril Drabinsky and Straker CEO Grant Straker joining the 20 speaker lineup.

Alessandra Vincenzi, Head of Audio Localization at Keywords Studios, joins SlatorPod to talk about the ins and outs of audio localization in the video game industry.

Alessandra starts with her route into the audio localization space with Binari Sonori and her transition to Keywords Studios. She shares the differences between localizing for mobile versus Triple-A games.

She also talks about casting, onboarding, and categorizing voice-acting talent and how actors are matched to different clients. She goes into possible use cases for artificial voices in video games and the migration to remote recording solutions.

Alessandra gives her outlook on game localization with a growing amount of titles coming from Asia and the continuing convergence of game and media localization.

First up, Florian and Esther review the poll results from February, where the hottest localization trend of 2022 divided opinions.

On Slator’s job ad platform LocJobs, DeepL posted their first job for a Localization and Language Specialist – Turkish, perhaps signaling the company’s intention to add Turkish to the 26 languages it currently offers.

To cap off the episode, Esther shares the latest numbers from Slator’s Language Industry Job Index for February, which climbed 0.65 points following a seasonal dip in January 2022.

In this week’s SlatorPod, we are joined by Lynne Bowker, Professor at the University of Ottawa to discuss the Machine Translation Literacy Project, whose eye-catching infographics have proven very popular on Twitter.

Lynne shares her background working in higher education and how this led to her running the MT Literacy Project. She talks about the evolution of machine translation (MT) systems and how this inspired her to teach users in the wider population about the dos and don'ts of using MT output.

Lynne talks about the different use cases of free online MT systems, highlighting her research on how international students use MT as an aid for scholarly writing in English. She mentions the importance of confidentiality and privacy when using programs such as DeepL and Google Translate.

The pod rounds off with Lynne’s plans to train teachers in MT Literacy and introduce the project to thousands of secondary school students as part of enhancing their digital literacy skills.

First up, Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week, with TransPerfect becoming the first language service provider (LSP) to report annual revenues of over USD 1bn. Another company to clear the billionaire-dollar mark was Iyuno-SDI, as the media localization provider was valued at USD 1.2bn in its latest round of investment.

Over in Europe, the “Irish derogation” has ended — meaning that every piece of EU legislation must be published in Irish. Florian talks about a mistranslation by the Scottish Government that saw “Happy Burns Night” being mistaken for “heat burns” in Scottish Gaelic.

Meanwhile, Esther covers Straker Translations’ Q3 FY22 financial update, with the LSP recording a 99% increase from the Q3 FY21 and a 26% increase from Q2 FY22.

Björn Lifvergren, Executive Chairman of LinQ Media Group, joins SlatorPod to talk about dubbing, subtitling, and the media localization industry.

Björn starts with his route into the media & entertainment and language space; where, after two decades of leading (and eventually selling) BTI Studios, he founded LinQ Media. He gives his take on delivering localized content at scale and reacts to Netflix revealing its subtitling and dubbing stats for the first time.

Björn talks us through LinQ Media’s geographic market focus and experience in retaining dubbing and subtitling talent in the Nordics. He delves into dubbing services and the dynamics between owning a physical studio, using the cloud, and running a hybrid model.

Björn reflects on his experience working with private equity and gives insights on how language service providers can work with investors. He shares his outlook on the media localization market and how linear TV and cinema will evolve in the next decade.

Finally, he outlines how the strong demand for Nordic-language subtitling has allowed them to avoid post-editing machine-translation workflows for now and offer subtitlers a more traditional approach to their craft.

First up, Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week, with an update on the lawsuit between Super Agencies Lionbridge and TransPerfect.

Esther talks about Netflix’s surprising revelation from the COO, who disclosed that the streaming service subtitled seven million and dubbed five million run-time minutes in 2021. She also touches on the website OpenSubtitles.org, which announced that a hacker had gained access to nearly seven million users’ personal data in August 2021.

Florian shares Meta’s latest unveiling of an AI supercomputer, which will be fully built out by mid-2022 to develop advanced AI for computer vision, NLP, speech recognition, and power translation in the metaverse.

Katrina Leonoudakis joins SlatorPod to discuss her experience as a Japanese-to-English Localization Specialist in the world of anime, manga, and video games.

Katrina recounts her early years as a freelance translator and her experience breaking into the entertainment and media space. She shares the main cultural and linguistic challenges when localizing a Japanese game to adapt to a Western English-speaking culture.

Katrina talks about how she deals with balancing the needs and preferences of the original scriptwriter, target audience, and client. She also reflects on the use of machine translation by indie versus Triple-A game studios and the negative impact of cost-cutting measures on freelancers.

The Pod concludes with Katrina’s views on the highly skilled pool of media translators in film, animation, and gaming, as well as the recent hype around metaverse and virtual reality.

First up, Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week, with SwissPost reversing its decision to block DeepL in the workplace after internal backlash. Meanwhile, in New Zealand, some interpreters who worked for ezispeak are complaining that their invoices have gone unpaid.

Meanwhile, Germany-based LSP t’works Group announced the acquisition of Portugal’s Traductanet to expand into Iberia and South America. And Esther shares key data points from Slator’s newly-launched M&A and Funding Report.

In SlatorPod’s 100th episode, Andrew Bredenkamp, CEO of CLEAR Tech, joins the Pod to talk about the evolution of CLEAR Global, formerly known as Translators without Borders (TWB).

Andrew recalls his path to joining CLEAR Global, with leadership roles at content governance platform Acrolinx and TWB, and why he stepped in to drive the tech piece of the puzzle with CLEAR Tech. He also defines how CLEAR Tech works with TWB and CLEAR Insights, the research and data branch of the organization.

The CEO talks about the use of multilingual chatbots for two-way interactions in marginalized languages, and their plan to train chatbots in code-switching. He also shares how they collaborate with both Big Tech and local talent to build tech for low-resource languages in South Asia, South and Central America, Sub-Saharan Africa, and elsewhere.

The Pod rounds off with Andrew outlining the organization’s current initiatives and what the language industry can do to support the group’s humanitarian efforts, from donating to volunteering language expertise.

First up, Florian and Esther discuss the past three weeks of language industry news, with a recap of the best and worst-performing listed LSPs of 2021.

In M&A and Funding news, Florian covers Unbabel’s surprising acquisition of Lingo24, which brings the AI agency deeper into conventional language services. Esther talks about machine translation startup Language I/O’s latest USD 6.5m funding round.

Starting 2022 off, New Zealand-based Straker Translations expanded into Europe with the acquisition of Brussels-based LSP IDEST. This week, GLOBO strengthened its healthcare offering as it secured growth investment from VSS Capital Partners.

In SlatorPod’s final episode for 2021, Florian and Esther are joined by Slator’s very own Andrew Smart to share the top industry highlights over the past year.

Florian looks back on 2021, which saw approximately 60 M&A transactions and 25 funding rounds announced this year, with big moves such as TransPerfect acquiring Semantix. For 2022, Florian predicts additional competition as the likes of DeepL engage in a direct battle for enterprise account ownership, with tech continuing to develop in the core localization and TMS area.

With it being a great year of recovery for the industry, Andrew reflects on the commercial highlights, with Slator hosting three SlatorCon Remote events. Andrew points out that technology opened up new types of markets and new ways of connecting with one's audience, with Slator hosting free online digital marketing events.

Esther talks about an increase in hiring announcements and senior appointments, as Slator’s Language Job Index climbed more than 72 points in 2021. Esther also discusses the broad range of research, from Transcreation and Video Localization to Language Operations and Pricing and Procurement.

In language industry news this week, Lokalise announced that it had raised USD 50m in a series B round led by VC firm CRV. A year on from their series A round, the translation and localization management provider has more than tripled their USD 4m ARR.

John Fennelly, CEO of Lionbridge, joins SlatorPod to talk about the Super Agency’s journey over the past 25 years since its founding by Rory Cowan.

Fennelly recalls his path to joining Lionbridge in mid-2017 after leadership roles at Thomson Reuters and Hireright — and why he stressed the theme of simplification and relentless customer focus in his first years as Lionbridge CEO. He discusses how the 6,000-person company adapted quickly to a remote-first world.

The CEO shares his views on the dynamics of competing with rival Super Agencies, as well as emerging tech-enabled, VC-funded players. He also shares Lionbridge’s motivation for selling its data annotation business, Lionbridge AI, to (again) become a core language and tech-services player.

Fennelly talks about the various considerations when it comes to building, buying, licensing, and owning localization and translation management workflows and machine translation engines. He concludes with Lionbridge’s plans for 2022 in regards to M&A and strengthening growth verticals.

First up, Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week, which saw AI video-generation provider Synthesia raise USD 50m in series B funding.

Esther talks about Manchester-based DA Languages switching ownership from previous investor, Foresight Group, to IK Partners. In M&A news, UK-based Take1 acquired transcription and captioning company Verb8tm to strengthen its position in the US.

Luis Miguel, CEO of Avantpage Translations, joins SlatorPod to talk about the LSP’s mission over the past 25 years of helping immigrants and other limited-English-proficient (LEP) populations.

Luis walks us through his journey in the language industry, from immigrating from Mexico to founding and leading a California-based LSP. He introduces Avantpage’s leadership team and highlights the importance of developing talent within the company as it grows.

The CEO discusses the key differences between servicing government clients versus the private sector. He reflects on the dynamics of Language Access regulation as Biden’s new administration and the pandemic affected the regulated industry in the past year.

Luis shares his approach behind building a proprietary technology stack, explains his attitude toward prioritizing organic growth over M&A, and shares his outlook for the future.

First up, Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week — and the launch of the Slator Transcreation and Multilingual Content Origination Report.

Florian shares key takeaways from SlatorCon Remote, which featured 13 guest speakers, drew in over 300 attendees, and facilitated around 300 individual networking sessions. Esther covers the latest funding news as language services and technology provider Smartling raised USD 160m in growth investment from Battery Ventures.

Rik Grant, Transcreation Partner at London-based Tag Collective Arts, joins SlatorPod to talk about all things transcreation as well as multi-language content creation.

Rik discusses his route into the language industry; from working as a Lead Account Manager to entering the creative industry. He outlines the careful process behind recruiting transcreation talent and their varied copywriting, agency, or client-side background.

Rik shares the challenges involved in localizing for different markets, especially when technical, linguistic, and cultural barriers are prevalent in certain locales. He also advises on how to help clients appreciate the value of transcreation.

Rik touches on the role of language technology in Tag’s workflow and pricing models for transcreation versus translation. He rounds things off with his industry outlook as digital content continues to grow and customers seek personalized experiences.

First up, Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week, with a funding round that shocked the language industry as multilingual transcription company Verbit.ai raised USD 250m in a series E.

Florian talks about the recent acquisition of Ireland-based LSP LocalEyes, a localization provider to Apple, by Star Group company STAR7. Esther then touches on 10 different language jobs Big Tech companies like Apple, Meta, Amazon, Google, and Tencent are hiring for.

Natalia Levitina and Karen Combe, Members of the GILT Leaders’ Forum, talk about GILT’s Globalization Strategy Playbook, arguably the industry’s most comprehensive, open-source guide to globalization, internalization, and localization yet.

The co-authors recall the various stages of their career in the localization industry and their journey to becoming part of the GILT Leaders Forum. They reflect on their experience writing the 30,000+-word, six-chapter playbook with 10 co-authors from the localization buy-side, and how they drew on key learnings from their professional backgrounds.

The duo discuss the role of primary and secondary stakeholders, from end-users and management chains to procurement and vendors. They advise what language tech tools buyers should choose and prioritize when it comes to the translation management system (TMS), translation productivity (CAT), and machine translation stack.

Natalia and Karen round off with the playbook’s potential for people in the language industry to learn from and build on top of, given that it is open source and on GitHub.

First up, Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week, with Meta’s (formerly Facebook) CTO Mike Schroepfer tweeting about machine translation as their team won in 10 out of 14 language pairs at the WMT 2021.

Esther talks about French investment firm Amethis acquiring a minority stake in UAE-headquartered Tarjama. Meanwhile, Airbnb announced it had launched Translation Engine, which allows users to automatically read translations of reviews and descriptions.

Florian then touches on the implications of a formal opinion issued by the American Bar Association, entitled Language Access in the Client-Lawyer Relationship.

Diego Cresceri, CEO of Creative Words, joins SlatorPod to talk about his journey in the language industry, from founding the language service provider (LSP) to becoming President of Elia.

Diego recounts his beginnings as a Translator, Project Manager, and eventually branching off on his own to create Creative Words. He also shares the motivation behind the founding of Creative AI for multilingual data services and how it functions alongside Creative Words.

The CEO discusses the evolution of post-editing machine translation (PEMT) and the LSP’s approach to pricing PEMT by the word. He also shares their marketing strategy through social media, Google SEO, and partnerships with associations such as GALA, ATC, and Elia.

Diego talks about his new role at Elia and their aim for members to actively grow through visibility and engagement. He reflects on the uncertain future of the language industry but says he expects it to remain fertile with innovation.

First up, Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week, with popular American YouTuber MrBeast tweeting about the success of his dubbed videos and foreign language channels.

Esther talks about EGA’s latest research project on the impact of media and entertainment localization on consumers in France, Italy, Germany, and Spain. Meanwhile, KUDO announces an integration with Microsoft Teams, where users will be able to access on-demand multilingual interpretation from their current platform.

Florian gives an update on AMN Healthcare’s Q3 2021 results, which saw revenues surpassing expectations at USD 878m, 59% more than Q3 2020.

Véronique Özkaya, CEO of Argos Multilingual, joins SlatorPod to talk about the recent acquisition and integration of language service provider (LSP) Venga Global.

Véronique Özkaya walks us through her extensive career in the language industry and taking up her new role as CEO at Argos amid the pandemic. She also shares insights into the acquisition of Venga merely three months after announcing the acquisition of linguistic quality assurance provider Chillistore.

The CEO discusses meeting Venga CEO Kåre Lindahl at SlatorCon Francisco in 2019 and plans for integrating the core team and sectors. As a result of growth post-acquisition, Véronique gives her thoughts on build versus buy in language tech, integrating a sales force, and the future direction of the company.

First up, Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week, with a bizarre case in Sweden where a British parent was trying to apply for child care leave when several mistranslations were discovered on the government’s website.

Florian talks about the US House Committee passing a bill called the TRANSLATE Act that would require multilingual signage in major American airports. Esther then gives an update on the Language Industry Job Index, which climbed 3.4 points in November.

Esther also gives a quick financial update from Down Under, where Ai-Media generated revenues of USD 11.2m for Q1 FY22. A quarter ahead, Straker Translations reported unaudited Q2 FY22 revenues of USD 8.6m.

In this week’s SlatorPod, we’re joined by Kenneth Heafield, Reader in Machine Translation (MT) at the University of Edinburgh. We originally connected with Kenneth on Twitter in a discussion about Slator’s coverage of a research paper on Carbon Emissions in MT.

Kenneth talks about his experience going back and forth between academia and industry, reflecting on the pros and cons of working for Big Tech. He discusses his recent research with efficient translation and language modelling as well as other MT topics that are undervalued by the industry.

Kenneth shares his thoughts on the popular preprint platform arXiv and how news outlets should cover research that hasn’t been peer-reviewed. He gives tips for those interested in attending natural language processing (NLP) conferences, particularly on how to navigate the complex system.

Kenneth concludes the podcast with an exciting demo of Translate Locally, an MT app that runs locally on a desktop or laptop CPU, allowing cloud-like translation speed without sacrificing privacy and browsing habits.

First up, Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week, with Argos Multilingual acquiring rival Venga Global and roughly doubling its size to become one of the top 25 LSPs in the world. One LSP that missed the top spot by a hair is RWS, whose full-year revenue is exceeding expectations, with consensus placing the figure around USD 965m.

Meanwhile, Slator’s very own Anna Wyndham joins the Pod to talk about our highly popular article, “10 Areas Where Translators Are (and Will Remain) Essential Experts in the Loop,” published last week. She highlights a selection of mission-critical scenarios in which translators are the true experts in the loop, despite the advancement of tech.

In this week’s episode, Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week, with continued disruption to subtitling, caption and audio description on UK’s Channel 4, after water damage at Red Bee Media’s broadcast center ruined a large number of hard disks.

In media localization news, Esther talks about Spain’s plans to invest EUR 1.6bn into the audiovisual sector from now through 2025, with the aim of expanding the industry by 30%.

Meanwhile, Florian shares key findings from Memsource and Charles University’s latest research, which delved into the impact of machine translation quality on post-editing speed.

Florian discusses TransPerfect’s financial results, as they close in on their billion-dollar target after Q3 revenues grew 31% to USD 279m from the previous year. He also touches on a ruling in the US, where a judge called Google Translate a useful tool, but inadequate for soliciting consent.

To round off the episode, Esther highlights key takeaways from the new Slator Pro Guide: Becoming an Effective Localization Buyer. The report dives deep into the localization buyers’ mindset and features key milestones in localization operations.

Andrzej Nedoma, Co-founder and CEO of XTRF, joins SlatorPod to discuss the journey of the translation management system (TMS).

Andrzej begins with XTRF’s early days as a spin-off of family-owned LSP Lidolang and building the company with Co-founder, Dominik Radziszowski. He talks about the rationale behind pivoting from licenses to SaaS in 2014 and the funding decisions with Experior Venture Fund.

The XTRF CEO unpacks the process behind investment firm K1 acquiring a majority stake in the company and their relationship with sister company XTM going forward. He talks about the similarities and differences between LSP and enterprise clients.

Andrej shares the key shifts in the TMS landscape over the past decade and XTRF’s most important innovations in the last five years, including building their Business Barometer. He rounds off with XTRF’s roadmap over the midterm.

First up, Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week, with two UK-based life sciences companies teaming up, as LSP Conversis acquires local rival Zebra Translations.

Esther reviews Slator’s latest Language Industry Job Index, which climbed by 3.8 points in October. Florian touches on Slator’s Language Industry Buyer Tracker, which includes a new Localization Producer for Games at Netflix.

Netflix also got called out for botched Korean into English subtitle translations for the TV drama Squid Game, which is on track to become the streaming giant’s most-watched show of all time — indicating the rising demand for English-dubbed content.

In this week’s SlatorPod, we’re joined by Anja Peschel, Managing Director of Peschel Communications, a Germany-based boutique languages service provider (LSP) that offers translation and interpreting.

From the perspective of a practicing interpreter, Anja discusses her initial experience of providing consecutive interpreting via Zoom when the pandemic first prevented in-person meetings and conferences from taking place. She also talks about the learning curve with remote simultaneous interpreting (RSI), its pros and cons, and shares her views on automated tools for interpreters.

First up, Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week, carbon emitting machine translation, how DeepL integrates with startups, Keywords' new CEO goes on record, and TransPerfect's new M&A point man, and Google Meet adding live translated captions.

Simon Constable, Global Language Services SVP of Visual Data Media Services (VDMS), joins SlatorPod to talk about dubbing, subtitling, and the pandemic-induced transformation of media localization.

Simon starts with his route into the media & entertainment and languages space, where his international experience spans 25 years. He delves into VDMS’ localization services and the dynamics between owning a studio versus working with the best fit for a specific project.

The SVP discusses the combination of language technologies and automation workflows used for subtitling and dubbing. He reflects back on VDMS’s learnings in the last year and how the pandemic affected demand and production for content owners.

Simon explores the different types of content, from recording voice-overs for cartoons to dealing with unscripted reality TV shows. He briefly touches on the challenges of remote dubbing and the level of demand for English as a target language.

The Pod rounds off with VDMS’ growth plans over the next couple of years, after securing investment from Endeavour Capital in 2020, and Simon’s industry outlook.

First up, Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week, with translation management system provider XTRF receiving an investment from K1, only nine months after K1 acquired a majority stake in XTM.

Still in the investment space, Florian talks about LSP Seprotec, which sold a majority stake to Nazca Capital, a Spanish private equity firm. Meanwhile, Esther shares some highlights from ZOO Digital’s AGM and trading update.

In media localization, Keywords Studios has appointed Bertrand Bodson, has a 23-year career in international business, as its new CEO. Florian also briefly touches on the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, which will be held in the Dominican Republic.

Olga Beregovaya, AI Innovation VP of Welocalize, joins SlatorPod to talk about all things AI, natural language processing (NLP), machine learning (ML), and machine translation (MT) related.

Olga begins with her journey into the language services and technology industry, where she currently leads AI innovation for Welocalize. She unpacks some of the broader applications of AI, ML, and NLP outside the language industry.

The AI Innovation VP recounts the early days of implementing NLP algorithms and the evolution of the computer-assisted translation environment. She shares the role of humans in MT workflows and injecting AI into the global content transformation ecosystem.

Olga shares her thoughts on text-generative models, such as GPT-3 and BERT, and the importance of synthetic data. She identifies the under-utilized NLP applications in the language industry.

She outlines key AI language trends in light of increasing translator productivity, advancing neural machine translation, and integrating dynamically trained MT.

First up, Florian and Esther take a deep dive into DeepL, as they discuss the leading MT company’s approach to neural networks, quality performance, enterprise solutions, new features, users, and growth.

Esther shares highlights from AI Media’s ASX Small and Mid-Cap Conference Presentation about multilingual access services. Esther then covers Keywords Studios’ H1 results, which saw their Audio, Localization, and Localization Testing units contribute 27% to total group revenues.

Florian talks about Zoom’s plans for live, multi-language transcription and translation features, which comes as no surprise after they acquired German simultaneous speech translation provider Kites this year.

First up, Florian and Esther share key takeaways from SlatorCon Remote, which hosted 13 guest speakers and drew in over 300 attendees.

Esther talks about the Video Localization panel, where Chris Reynolds, Tom Livne, and Fardad Zabetian explored the similarities and differences between speech and text outputs. Next, Florian follows up on the Content in the Age of AI panel, where Konstantin Savenkov, Jochen Hummel, and Michel Lopez covered the landscape of AI-generated content.

Speaking about this week in language industry news, Florian recounts his experience with LinkedIn spam; the likes of weekly fake profile requests from Chinese LSP CCJK. Florian then discusses Apostroph Group’s new CEO Philipp Meier, who previously held the position of CEO of Apostrophe Switzerland.

The duo also talk about Cohere, an AI startup co-founded by University of Toronto alumni and which raised USD 40m to develop natural language software.

In UK news, Esther shares how a woman was made to complete a rehabilitation course by UK Police after she presented a fake document in an attempt to be registered as an interpreter. Meanwhile, Southampton-based LSP Parallel Translations will be closing its doors at the end of September after nearly 25 years of trading.

Rebecca Petras, Spokesperson for non-profit Red T, joins SlatorPod to bring awareness to their advocacy for the protection of translators and interpreters in high-risk settings.

Rebecca shares details of her professional background in journalism and discusses how she began her journey in the language industry through the humanitarian sector. She talks about the current situation of interpreters in Afghanistan and explains how the rising danger for linguists over the past few months led to her becoming involved with Red T and its Founder Maya Hess.

Rebecca explores the role of linguists in conflict zones and explains who they typically work with. She discusses the lack of official status for interpreters (unlike, say, journalists) and highlights Red T’s efforts to ensure protection for these linguists by speaking at the UN, working to change policy, and issuing a conflict-zone field guide for linguists.

The Pod rounds off with Rebecca outlining Red T’s current initiatives and what the language industry can do to support this cause. In particular, she draws attention to Red T’s Open Letter Project, which involves sending letters of appeal to governments or intergovernmental agencies to implement change for these embattled linguists.

First up, Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week, starting off with the sudden growth of ‘scanlation,’ where fans post their own translations of webcomics without the consent of the copyright holder.

Florian then shares the news of TransPerfect’s debt refinancing with a new lower-interest term loan and revolving credit line amounting to USD 500m.

Meanwhile, Esther goes extraterrestrial as she talks about NASA awarding a translation contract worth up to USD 59m to TechTrans International. She also reviews Slator’s latest Language Industry Job Index, which continued to climb for the seventh month in a row.

Slator’s very own Senior Research Analyst Anna Wyndham joins the Pod to give a sneak peek into the latest Slator Pro Guide: Language Operations. The 40-page guide is packed with data from public and proprietary sources, including 11 interviews with language service providers (LSPs) at different stages of growth across Europe, Asia, and North America.

Anna unpacks the five key areas of the report that cover how LSPs structure operations, linguist supply chain models, an analysis of the global footprint of LSPs, program management, and payment risks. She concludes with a one-page operational milestone roadmap that lays out the key milestones LSPs hit as they grow from Boutique to Super Agency.

First up, Esther and Florian catch up on three weeks’ worth of the language industry news, beginning with TransPerfect’s largest M&A deal to date as they bought Semantix, Sweden’s largest LSP.

Esther shares news of clinical research specialist WCG’s acquisition of e-clinical software and translation provider VeraSci for USD 330m back in July. thebigword Group announced that investment firm Susquehanna Private Capital had acquired a majority stake in the UK-based LSP.

Florian talks about CataCap selling its majority stake in LanguageWire to Bridgepoint Development Capital. Meanwhile, interpreting SaaS startup Boostlingo secured investment from growth equity firm Mainsail Partners after experiencing over 130% growth in 2020.

In a guest-centered episode, Ivan Smolnikov, CEO and Founder of Smartcat, joins SlatorPod to talk about the company’s journey as a tech-powered SaaS platform.

Ivan discusses his not-so-typical professional background and how he got into the language services and tech industry. Since 2016, he has been focused on building Smartcat into an accessible SaaS platform with a marketplace of suppliers.

The CEO talks about the complex ecosystem that comes with servicing three different client segments — enterprises, LSPs and freelancers — and how Smartcat aligns its interests with them.

Ivan also discusses how they use multi-layered technology to find qualified suppliers and match them with buyers by analyzing terminology and collecting customer feedback. Although buyers increasingly directly edit MT output in Smartcat, he still sees a bright future for specialist and tech-enabled LSPs.

The Pod rounds off with Ivan’s views on raising funds in the language industry, especially throughout the pandemic, as they closed a Series B round worth USD 14.6m.

Elizabeth Compton, CEO of LanguageLoop, and Claire Mullins, National Translations Manager at the Australian language service provider (LSP), join SlatorPod to talk about the company’s digital and organizational transformation.

Elizabeth recalls the LSP’s early days from 1978, and the decision to rebrand to LanguageLoop. She touches on the role of the Victorian State Government as shareholder.

She shares the impact of the pandemic as they saw an immediate shift from on-site to remote interpreting, as well as accelerating the digital delivery of language services. Claire talks about how Covid drove the conversation around multilingual engagement.

Claire also weighs in on the impact of immigration and the resulting increase in demand for rare and emerging languages, as well as multilingual consumer behaviors in Australia. The pod ends with their collective outlook, as the LSP plans to leverage tech and build deeper customer engagement with the launch of multilingual SMS campaigns.

Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week, with TikTok being issued a USD 0.88m fine by the Dutch Data Protection Authority.

Florian shares results from the European SME survey, which gathered the opinions of over 1,000 SMEs on website localization and machine translation use. Esther talks about the recent launch of an estimated USD 47m interpreting framework agreement by Norway’s Labor and Welfare Authority (NAV).

The duo share news from outside Europe as social distancing requirements in Los Angeles County end and court interpreters are recalled to on-site work.

In this week’s solo episode, Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week, kicking off with a sneak peek into the brand new Slator 2021 Video Localization Report. Months in the making, the report provides an innovative look at the high-growth medium of video.

Florian shares news of TransPerfect’s best quarter ever (Q2 FY21), which saw the US-based Super Agency reel in an extra USD 70m in revenues compared to the same period in 2020.

The duo also unpack the acquisition by language service provider Welocalize of Germany- and Greece-based life sciences specialist NLG (or Next Level Globalization). NLG focuses primarily on the medical devices sub-sector. The deal saw Welocalize double the size of its life sciences division — Welocalize Life Sciences — to around USD 50m in annual revenues.

Marko Hozjan, CEO and Co-founder of translation startup TAIA, joins SlatorPod to talk about his company’s journey from launch to their recent series A.

Marko discusses what brought him into the world of translation from a background that spans everything from economics and leadership, to language teaching and…sailing. He talks about automation and machine translation and the need to remain focused and disciplined when developing translation products.

First up, Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week — which saw three M&A and Funding announcements. The two talk about Rome-based Translated’s USD 25m investment, Argos Multilingual’s acquisition of Chillistore, and Big Language Solutions’ acquisition of UK-based Dora Wirth Languages (DWL).

Esther talks about media localization provider ZOO Digital’s 2021 annual report, which detailed a shift in their service mix toward Media Services (media packaging, content preparation, etc.).

Florian also muses about the minefield of intellectual property rights and licensing when it comes to voices, after Vice covered the case of a voice actor suing social media giant TikTok, which allegedly acquired and replicated via AI the actor’s voice without her knowledge.

Cecilia Maldonado, Director of Strategic Accounts at Latamways, joins SlatorPod to talk about the language industry landscape in Latin America and her term as President of Women in Localization.

Cecilia recounts her path to joining the language industry and the many hats she wore over the past 20 years. She touches on the two-year process of merging SpeakLatam and Two Ways Translation Services, and how they managed to double in size in a highly fragmented, competitive industry.

She shares her perspective on how business is centered around Argentina and Brazil in the Latin American language industry, and LSPs competing for talent with global Super Agencies operating local production hubs.

Cecilia also talks about Women in Localization and navigating the challenges of leading a not-for-profit organization. She closes with a market outlook on multimedia and as well as the potential for growth of machine translation post-editing (MTPE).

First up, Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week — where DeepL met its match in a Bloomberg crypto article. The duo talk about RWS’ latest acquisition of Japanese patent translation agency, Horn & Uchida, for a cash consideration of GBP 2.3m. Before news of the acquisition broke, Berenberg released a report that noted how RWS shares took a dip the day Richard Thompson stepped down as CEO.

Meanwhile, Nicolas McMahon stepped up from COO to CEO at United Language Group, which saw previous CEO Kristen Giovanis return to her role as President. Esther also reviews Lionbridge and its acquisition of Rocket Sound, a company that provides audio and voice-over localization services for gaming.

Christophe Djaouani, President of newly launched Toppan Digital Language, joins SlatorPod to discuss the Japanese corporate giant’s plans to become a leader in translation for regulated industries.

Christophe shares his career journey; from his days as project manager at RR Donnelley to how he worked his way up to Executive Vice President at SDL. He introduces the members of the Toppan Digital Language executive team.

In an exclusive, Christophe announces that Toppan Printing will be renamed Toppan Inc. to reflect the transformation of the company. He goes over the benefits of having existing pockets of translation and localization within the organization.

He talks about the challenges of the regulated space and points out the value of security and quality when creating, managing, and delivering multilingual content at speed and at scale. He also gives tips on RFP procurement; having the right tools, team, and approach.

Christophe ends with the company’s vision to become the market leader in language solutions for regulated and business-critical content within five years.

First up, Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week — with Zoom’s acquisition of German speech translation provider, Kites.

Esther talks about another company that was popular throughout the pandemic, Netflix, which recently announced the arrival of Timed Text Authoring Lineage (TTAL).

Florian delves into an interesting sub-sphere of translation, Japanese gaming, where he goes through a series of tweets from popular Japanese game translators.

Esther closes with the Slator Language Industry Job Index (LIJI), which surged by 9.9 points in July, after a four-point dip in June interrupted the LIJI’s consistent climb since January 2021.

Synthesia CEO and Co-founder Victor Riparbelli joins SlatorPod to discuss the company’s approach to operating and developing the world’s first and largest platform for video AI generation.

Victor talks about Synthesia’s journey and the rapid progression of media technology. He unpacks the role of academia in the company, where PhDs and professors make up nearly 50% of staff.

The CEO goes over the evolution of text-to-speech in the last decade. He also discusses the difficulty of extending voice into multiple languages when there is no data to support the neural network.

Victor reviews the success of video content over text and how this ties into working with global companies. He shares how he sees the localization and translation industries as partners and an integral part of creating multilingual content.

Victor talks about Synthesia’s funding rounds and shares the story behind connecting with their first investor Mark Cuban. The podcast wraps up with Victor’s view on deepfakes and the company’s vision of creating more storytelling rather than informative content.

First up, Florian and Esther go through the poll results from May 21, where respondents weighed in on Translation as a Subscription, with only 12% thinking of it as “the future.”

Florian talks about KUDO’s latest public relations win as billionaire investor Bill Ackman tweeted about using the multilingual conferencing platform for an investor presentation.

For the third week in a row, RWS pops up in language industry news as it partners with speech recognition system CEDAT85 to launch a live subtitling and captioning solution for online meetings and events.

Florian discusses SwissText’s 2021 conference competition, which saw Microsoft’s winning approach toward the recognition and translation of the Swiss-German dialect into standard German text.

In this week’s SlatorPod, Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week, with BLEND’s acquisition of GM Voices, a voice and audio localization provider known for producing the original Siri for Apple.

Following RWS’ appointment of a new CEO, Keywords Studios announced the retirement of CEO Andrew Day, with Jon Hauck (CFO) and Sonia Sedler (COO) stepping up as interim CEOs while Keywords searches for its new leader.

In healthcare interpreting news, Esther talks about Propio Language Services’ growth equity investment from Triple Tree Capital Partners (TTCP) — which sees TTCP expand its portfolio into language services for the first time.

Meanwhile, Florian discusses the completion of video remote interpreting (VRI) provider Cloudbreak Health’s SPAC transaction following its merger with digital healthcare provider UpHealth.

Armand Brevig, Managing Director of Procurement Cube, joins the pod to discuss how language service providers (LSPs) can work with Procurement at large enterprises.

Armand touches on the rationale behind a consultancy firm like Procurement Cube. He talks about how they find clients and goes through the typical company profiles they assist.

He then shares how translation services fit into the company's portfolio, both from a buyer and sales perspective. He briefly goes through the evolution of the procurement function, from being transactional to strategic.

Armand mentions some of the common misconceptions that service vendors may have about procurement and tackles the perception of translation services as a commodity.

After delving into the importance of category management, Armand explores the preference for single-vendor strategies over multi-vendor. The pod closes with Armand’s outlook on the future and how Covid has re-orientated procurement spend.

First up, Florian and Esther discuss RWS’ appointment of Ian El-Mokadem as the new Group CEO. El-Mokadem. They also unpack RWS’ half-year report, which put revenues at USD 461.8m, with USD 6.2m contributed by Webdunia and Iconic Translation Machines.

Esther talks about subtitle, translation, and automatic transcription startup Subly’s USD 1m seed round. The company was founded in 2018 by Holly Stephens and reportedly started generating revenues from July 2020 in the middle of the pandemic.

Another transcription and captioning provider in the news this week was Verbit, which raised USD 157m in a Series D round, only weeks after acquiring VITAC.

On the tech side of things, Florian looks at a new offering in academia, with the University of Zurich’s Certificate in Advanced Studies in Translation Technology and AI. The duo also review a data anonymization project called MAPA (Multilingual Anonymization toolkit for Public Administrators).

Interactio Co-founder and Chief Business Development Officer Simona Andrijauskaitė joins SlatorPod to discuss the Lithuanian startup’s journey.

Simona talks about how the pandemic boosted demand and changed their primary market, with institutions needing technology for multilingual communication. She relates how it was all hands on deck at the remote simultaneous interpreting (RSI) platform, as years of development were compressed into weeks.

She also reflects back on their recent USD 30m round and how they managed to raise one of the biggest series As in the language industry. She closes with the company’s plans to improve quality on all levels, including hiring top talent.

First up, Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week, kicking off with Straker Translations’ announcement of a USD 15.5m capital raise.

Esther talks about the Language Industry Job Index (LIJI) that, after a five-month growth streak, shrank for the first time since January 2021.

Esther also unpacks the controversial new RFP for translation services released by the Dutch Ministry of Justice (est. contract value, USD 40m), which has drawn criticism from translators and interpreters.

Meanwhile, Florian reviews the continuing evacuation from Afghanistan of the US Department of Defense, a story picked up by this week’s SlatorSweep.

Samuel Läubli, Partner and CTO at TextShuttle, joins the pod to talk about the ins and outs of a language technology provider, and the current state of machine translation.

The CTO touches on his background in Computational Linguistics and decision to go back to the academe in 2016. He gives his take on the current state of machine translation, particularly weaknesses around sentence-by-sentence structure and limited control.

Samuel discusses his thesis, which tackles three key challenges in MT for professionals: quality, presentation, and adaptability. He debates whether machine translation can become truly creative without artificial general intelligence — or if it will always be considered imitation.

He then walks listeners through TextShuttle’s business model as well as the key problems the company solves for clients, ranging from producing MT systems to helping with configurations, workflows, and training translators.

First up, Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week, where RSI platform Interactio announced that it had raised USD 30m in series A funding, led by VCs Eight Roads Ventures and Storm Ventures.

Esther delves into Straker’s 100-page annual report, which showed the Australia-listed LSP’s 13% revenue growth to USD 22.6m for the 12 months to March 31, 2021.

The duo also discusses Akorbi, another fast-growing language service provider (LSP), which recently acquired the low-code process automation platform RunMyProcess from Fujitsu.

Heading to Japan, Florian goes over Honyaku Center’s 2020 financial results, which saw revenues decline 14% to USD 91m and operating income nearly halved to USD 3.8m.

Florian closes the Pod full circle with more machine translation news: a research paper presented by Bering Lab about IntelliCAT, an MT post-editing and interactive translation model; and, out of big tech, Microsoft Document Translation, a recent addition to their enterprise MT offerings.

Vistatec CEO Thomas Murray joins the pod to discuss the company’s international presence, the tech and business environment, and managing growing content volumes.

Thomas shares his insights on how geographic spread and the follow-the-sun model are important in serving clients. He explains why the language service provider (LSP) prefers organic growth over M&A, owing to the quality and longevity of customer relationships.

He also discusses how globalization has changed the way the LSP tackles “content explosion”; and how agility and speed of execution are crucial to scalability. The CEO also weighs in on ISO certification and how using it in the right way can lead to operational excellence.

Finally, Thomas reflects on the past year as Vistatec moved its operations online and kept staff safe through Covid.

First up, Florian and Esther share key takeaways from SlatorCon Remote, which drew in nearly 300 attendees and facilitated 200-300 individual networking sessions. This year’s SlatorCon Remote highlighted the message of growth with Iyuno-SDI CEO David Lee pointing out how 2020 was a peak year for OTT.

In the UK Esther touches on two healthcare translation and interpreting framework contracts that are valued at over USD 500m. Meanwhile, Florian goes over the top paying states and job prospects in the United States as presented in US BLS’ annual Occupational Outlook Handbook.

Vasco Pedro, CEO of Unbabel, joins SlatorPod to discuss the company’s growth journey — from identifying the initial use case to raising USD 60m in Series C funding in 2019, and beyond.

Vasco outlines Unbabel’s translation pipeline and underlying technology. He describes the importance of the human-in-the-loop model and the ability humans have to impact the output of machine learning (ML) models.

The CEO talks about the challenges of ‘going remote’ overnight in response to Covid. Vasco says culture plays an important role in attracting top talent globally in the highly-competitive AI / ML space.

Vasco also shares his experience with investors, such as Point72’s Sri Chandrasekar, lead investor in Unbabel’s Series C, who provide actionable insights on how to further scale the business.

First up, Florian and Esther discuss the launch of the flagship Slator 2021 Language Industry Market Report. The duo share highlights from the 80-page, newly-released Market Report, which features a wealth of insights and data.

They also tackle over a week’s worth of M&A, as Florian unpacks Big Language Solutions’ acquisition of US-based interpreting provider Language Link, and discusses the backstory to Big CEO Jeff Brink’s “tenacity, honesty, and desire” in closing the deal.

Esther talks about translation and interpreting provider Propio Language Services’s acquisition of Vocalink — also in the US — while in Germany, she highlights GEtraNet’s acquisition of Lingua-World. Florian closes by reviewing AI transcription agency Verbit’s acquisition of captioning provider VITAC.

On SlatorPod this week, Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week — and share the exciting agenda for SlatorCon Remote, which is just around the corner.

Florian briefly discusses the breaking news of Appen shares taking a beating, causing trading to halt. Esther talks about Canadian LSP TRSB’s acquisition of local rival Anglocom. According to TRSB CEO Mary Kazamias, Anglocom’s in-house linguists were central to the acquisition.

The two discuss Google’s latest research paper on machine translation. Conclusion: It is better to hire professional translators to train an advanced MT system than have amateur crowd workers do it manually.

Meanwhile, Esther shares details of a huge tender underway in Sweden as Stockholm began the hunt for a single vendor to supply interpretation services for the entire region.

Taking a step back from day-to-day translation and interpretation, the duo talk about LSP Translated’s announcement that it will take part in Ocean Globe Race 2023.

Esther shares the latest numbers from Slator’s Language Industry Job Index for May. The index has been on a four-month growth streak, climbing more than 30 points year to date.

Florian is starstruck this week as Rachel Carruthers (Head of Internationalization and Localization) and Michael Levot (Localization Program Lead) from his favorite SaaS tool, Canva, join SlatorPod.

Rachel and Michael join the Pod from Down Under to talk about Canva’s hub-and-spoke model for Localization, which enables them to run a “[expletive] massive” localization operation across no less than 104 languages.

They talk about deciding what to build and what to buy in the way of language technology, and discuss their language services vendor model, which currently involves a half a dozen LSPs.

First up, Florian and Esther discuss a Paris-based RSI study which concludes that interpreters find remote simultaneous interpreting (RSI) more difficult than onsite.

Meanwhile, Google Translate marked one billion installs by looking back on the language capabilities it has added since launching in 2010. The duo also talk about proposed regulation from the EU around AI systems.

Florian then talks about the latest set of financial results from Australia-listed LSP, Straker Translations, and Esther unpacks Ai-Media’s equity raise and upcoming acquisition of US-based captioning technology provider EEG.

Spence Green, CEO and co-founder of tech-enabled language service provider Lilt, joins SlatorPod to talk about the journey from research concept to enterprise-scale AI translation agency.

Having raised USD 25m in Series A funding in early 2020, Spence recalls hiring researchers, developers, and enterprise sales professionals, and the benefit of the monthly standups Lilt holds.

Spence touches on performance improvements in their interactive translation system and cites prediction scores as high as 78%.

He identifies key items on their roadmap, outlining Lilt’s connector-first approach, as well as enhancing the customer review cycle with in-built tools.

With Lilt’s investors backing an AI-agency thesis, Spence says there’s still more that can be done by the industry to further automate translation and localization.

First up, Florian and Esther review the possible impact on US-based linguists of America’s PRO Act, which passed in a Democrat-led House in early March.

The two talk about TransPerfect’s phenomenal Q1 2021, as the US-based Super Agency delivers 21% organic growth in the first three months of the year.

TransPerfect’s Q1 performance sees the company enter a two-horse race with UK-based RWS (post-SDL acquisition) for the title of world’s largest LSP, which looks set to be a close fight based on RWS’ latest trading update.

Florian discusses AI video generation and dubbing company Synthesia’s USD 12.5m funding round, while Esther talks about ZOO’s latest financials (SlatorPro).

Then there’s new kid on the media localization block LinQ, which made its official debut in March 2021, and was put up by none other than Björn Lifvergren, founder and former CEO of BTI Studios, which merged with Iyuno (now Iyuno-SDI Group) in 2019.

Papercup CEO Jesse Shemen and Science Advisor Simon King join the pod to discuss how they develop synthetic voices to make videos accessible in multiple languages.

The two talk about the underlying components of the Papercup workflow and outline the role that technology as well as humans play in the creation of multilingual videos.

Simon, a Professor of Speech Processing at the University of Edinburgh, discusses the evolution of text-to-speech technology, the main technical hurdles in producing highly natural, emotional voices, as well as the adoption and acceptance curve for synthetic voices.

Jesse shares some of Papercup’s company milestones, which include raising a total of ca. USD 14m in seed and series A rounds. He also explains why there is room for many different startups in the multilingual speech and video translation space.

While Papercup has an ambitious goal of making videos accessible in any language, Jesse says startups will likely expand the market rather than replace traditional dubbing, particularly for high-end production environments.

First up, Florian and Esther touch on NDVIA’s real-time MT offering, a mouse that transcribes and translates your voice at the press of a button, and Microsoft’s USD 19.7bn acquisition of AI speech technology firm Nuance.

In language industry-adjacent funding, the two discuss data-for-AI leader and Appen rival Scale, which doubled its valuation (to a whopping USD 7bn) after announcing they had raised a further USD 325m in funding.

They also talk about signs of a boom in the language industry, pointing to Super Agencies reporting strong results, anecdotal evidence from busier-than-ever LSP staff, a soaring Language Industry Job Index, and RWS shares (SlatorPro).

Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week, where they compare the stock performance of the handful of publicly-listed LSPs both year-to-date (Q1 2021) and from the start of 2020.

Florian calls out ZOO Digital and Keywords Studios — both of which are up more than 60% from January 2020 — and the two talk about Appen’s fall from the dizzying heights of mid-August 2020.

Florian shares news from the Sunshine State, where web localization platform MotionPoint secured a major investment from private equity firm Lightview Capital.

Esther talks about more M&A in media localization, as entertainment heavyweight Deluxe acquired a business unit from Sony Electronics.

The duo talk about an article in Bloomberg that highlighted the increasing demand for dubbing in the US; that is, “even Americans are embracing dubbing.”

Florian once again marvels at GPT-3. This time, it’s the stats that impress him: 300 apps or startups built on GPT-3 — and 4.5 billion words generated by the algorithm per day!

Babylon Health Content Design and Localization Lead, Michela Simonelli, joins the pod to talk about hyper-local digital content, localizing high-touch health materials, and the growing telehealth market.

Michela shares her professional journey prior to Babylon Health, which saw her spend 11 years “agency-side” in multiple language service providers (LSPs).

Michela discusses how content design interacts with localization at the digital health provider and collaborating across functions with epidemiologists, internationalization teams, and data scientists.

She also broaches the subject of machine translation (MT), explains why there is currently no interpreting provision for medical appointments, and identifies an opportunity for LSPs that can provide a holistic service for telehealth.

First up, Florian and Esther discuss two M&A and funding stories in the media localization space.

Private equity-backed Iyuno completed its acquisition of major rival SDI Media to become Iyuno-SDI Group, the largest pure-play media localization company globally, with combined revenues of around USD 400m in 2020.

A few days later, UK-based ZOO Digital raised GBP 7.4m (USD 10.3m) in a share placement on the London Stock Exchange. The publicly-traded company said it plans to spend the proceeds on building hubs in India and Southeast Asia, expanding international business development, and on “longer range” R&D.

Florian shares news from multilingual video conference startup KUDO, which secured an additional USD 21m in a Series A round, bringing total funds raised to USD 28m.

On the flipside, he talks about a survey conducted by the Belgian Chamber of Translators and Interpreters (CBTI-BKVT), which revealed that conference interpreters in the country saw their income decline by about 50% following the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Language I/O Co-founders Heather Shoemaker (CEO) and Kaarina Kvaavik (CBO) join the pod this week to discuss their newly announced Series A round, channel partnerships with CRM systems, expanding beyond their core multilingual customer support offering, and the future of subscription-based pricing models.

The two duo join SlatorPod fresh off their USD 5m funding round, which was announced on March 23, 2021. Kaarina and Heather discuss their journey from founding and bootstrapping Language I/O to bringing on angel and VC investors in early 2021, and their plans for deploying the latest investment.

Heather talks about the challenge of working with user-generated customer support content and Language I/O’s approach to identifying and dealing with “problematic” content. She describes Language I/O’s CRM integrations, and their approach to supporting major enterprises with their MT-based multilingual customer support offering.

Kaarina talks about the company’s tiered-subscription pricing models for both machine-only and human post-edited translation, their use of channel partnerships with CRM systems, growing the sales team, and their plans to expand beyond the customer support arena.

First up, Florian and Esther discuss the role of the “translators” (read: interpreters) that facilitated the recent US-China talks in Alaska, and the differences in the coverage they received from Vice, South China Morning Post, and Reuters.

Esther shares highlights from video game services provider Keywords Studios’ 2020 financial results. The company grew revenues by 14% from 2019, while its Localization segment was the only business line to report declines.

Florian applauds the success of his latest SaaS find: Copy.ai. The startup raised USD 2.9m with its multilingual copy-generating offering and is built atop OpenAI’s GPT-3, the world’s largest language model. Copy.ai follows in the footsteps of OthersideAI, which raised USD 2.6m in 2020.

The two also talk about Slator’s newly released Pro Guide on Translation Pricing and Procurement, which dives deep into established and emerging translation pricing models, and lifts the lid on translation and localization procurement practices among buyers.

In this week’s SlatorPod, Farfetch's Head of Linguistic Services, Alex Katsambas talks about the online luxury fashion platform’s localization model.

Alex talks about Farfetch’s internal teams, churning out billions of words annually, the importance of sustainability in content messaging, and why return-on-investment for localization cannot be measured immediately.

He shares insights into Farfetch’s approach to content differentiation, and explains why treating various content verticals differently is essential, particularly when thinking about integrating machine translation (MT).

Having already rolled out MT for two languages, Alex tackles expanding Farfetch’s use of MT in the coming months, and explains why MT is good news for human experts. He also discusses the challenges and opportunities presented by multilingual SEO.

First up, Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week. Florian talks about DeepL smashing it in global traffic rankings, and adding 13 languages.

Esther shares some takeaways from a TechCrunch feature piece profiling media localization giant Iyuno, and picks out some key growth stats from an analysis of the Slator 2021 LSPI.

Travod CEO Elena Grigoras joins the pod to discuss LSP’s past, present, and future. Elena talks about the company’s client mix and how Travod manages the balance of servicing both third-party LSPs — initially the company’s primary focus — and end customers.

She discusses the relationship with Travod’s sister companies, Worldminds and Traduno (translation technology arm), and parent company Mondia Technologies Group. Elena outlines Travod’s technology stack, which includes their proprietary business management system, Traduno, and discusses market demand for customer portals.

Elena shares Travod’s approach to business development and hiring sales talent, and talks about the company’s recent website relaunch. She also gives her insight on translation pricing trends, touching on the role of the per-word rate, the impact of effort-based pricing, and her vision of a value-based pricing model.

As CEO of a UK-headquartered business with a large employee base in Moldova and Romania, Elena talks about the unfolding impact of Brexit. She also unpacks the differing approaches to geographical expansion: building from scratch vs. M&A.

First up are Florian and Esther, who share more insights and analysis from the Slator 2021 Language Service Provider Index (LSPI). Florian talks about Netflix’s approach to A/B testing website copy in various languages, and Penn’s State College’s research into machine-generated content detection.

Esther shares some recent financial information from interpreting giant LanguageLine, which derived more than 90% of its USD 618m revenues from remote interpreting services in 2020. The two close with a few words on an intriguing company memo from Japan-based LSP Rozetta, which has banned its employees from speaking any language other than their native one.

XTM CEO Bob Willans joins the pod to discuss the journey of the company he co-founded back in 2002. Bob talks about growing XTM with little outside funding to become a USD 11m SaaS company in 2021.

He discusses XTM’s decision and search to bring on financial backers in 2021, which culminated in XTM’s majority sale to US-based investment firm K1 Investment Management in January 2021.

Bob shares his views on the TMS funding and investment boom in 2020 and unpacks the landmark shifts in translation management technology over the past two decades.

Bob also talks about milestone developments in XTM’s product, including totally rewriting their translation editor at one stage, and discusses how the company balances out feature requests and customization for enterprise clients against general product enhancements.

First up, Florian and Esther kick off with some key stats from the Slator 2021 Language Service Provider Index (LSPI), which features more than 175 companies on its launch in early March 2021.

The two also talk about the Language Industry Job Index (LIJI), which climbed nearly 10 points in March 2021, while Florian discusses the underwhelming consumer reaction to the Apple Translate app.

In this week’s SlatorPod, Semantix Chief Business Officer Britta Aagaard joins us to talk about their recent major deal win — a EUR 34m translation contract for the EU GROW project. Britta discusses what’s involved in bidding for, winning, and setting up to go live on a contract of this size, as well as the role of Semantix’s technology partner ESTeam.

Britta also talks about her path to joining Semantix, which resulted from the 2017 acquisition of Textminded, the translation company that she headed as CEO before its sale to public sector interpreting specialist Semantix.

Four years later, Britta shares how learnings from the public sector carry over to servicing private sector customers, and how the acquisition of Textminded has seen Semantix expand its offering to become a bonafide full-service LSP.

First up, Florian and Esther discuss dating website operator Match.com's acquisition of a multilingual video chat platform built on Google Translation API for a cool USD 1.73bn, while Microsoft rolled out ‘Document Translation’ for LSPs and Enterprises.

The two unpack the latest financial results from Australia-listed companies Ai-Media — a captioning and subtitling provider that delivered upwards of seven million minutes in the six months to December 31, 2020 — and Appen, whose shares tumbled despite 12% growth in 2020.

In SlatorPod #59, Limecraft CEO and Founder Maarten Verwaest joins us to talk about digital workflow management in the media sector and AI-enabled subtitling. Maarten shares his entrepreneurial journey, tells us why he doesn’t plan to bring on financial investors, and explains why AI should not be left unattended.

First up, Florian and Esther discuss the week’s language industry news as they revisit the majority sale of UK-based translation management system (TMS) provider XTM.

The two discuss an MT-related court case in Poland. Having taken their client to court over non-payment for a book translation, a Polish LSP soon found their practices under scrutiny by the court and expert witnesses.

Esther talks about a major deal win for LSP Semantix and friends worth around USD 40m over four years. Semantix, Summa Linguae, and ESTeam partnered up to bid for an EU translation contract for the Commission’s Directorate-General, and succeeded in ousting incumbent provider AMPLEXOR.

Sticking with Europe’s public sector, the two talk about the European Parliament’s new remote interpretation platform. The roll-out of the selected platform, Interactio, involved a huge deployment effort and saw them tackle myriad challenges such as scale, funding, and firewalls.

As remote interpreting went fully mainstream in 2020, UK-based LSP thebigword secured another three years of interpreting work from the Ministry of Justice (MoJ).

Smartling CEO Jack Welde joins the pod to talk about technology-enabled language services, scaling with fast-growing customers, the M&A and funding wave sweeping the translation management landscape.

Jack shares why Smartling’s attitude towards machine translation shifted from “MT bad” in 2010 to fully embracing the technology in creating their own NMT engines in 2020. He also talks about his experience of running a 200-person company through a laptop in the era of Covid-19, and steering Smartling through its best-ever year in 2020.

First up, Florian and Esther discuss the breaking news that UK-based TMS provider XTM has sold a majority stake to California-based investors K1.

Florian talks about another language industry investment story, as Germany-based Lengoo announced they raised USD 20m in Series B funding based on an AI-agency investment thesis.

The two discuss the recent MT Model Studio launch from machine translation provider SYSTRAN, which allows people to enhance existing MT models with their own bilingual or monolingual data, using SYSTRAN’s tech to clean and prep the data.

Esther shares an update from Sweden-based media localization company Plint, which appointed Thomas Roberts as the new CEO in February 2021.

In SlatorPod #57, Fardad Zabetian, Co-Founder and CEO of multilingual conferencing platform KUDO joins us to discuss the world of conferences and interpreting, his vision for KUDO from the get-go, and his company’s explosive growth during the pandemic.

Fardad, who launched another of his businesses, Conference Rental, in the early 2000s, shares anecdotes from the early days of KUDO, talks about his commitment to removing the friction points in sourcing interpreters for the private sector, and tells us about his experience of securing USD 6m in funding during Covid-19.

First up, Florian and Esther discuss language industry news from a week that saw virtual event platform Touchcast raise USD 55m, based on a feature list that includes AI- or human-generated captions in real-time, foreign subtitles, and dubbing.

Esther talks about localization at health tech startup Oura. The Finland-based company, whose flagship product is a wearable smart ring that provides health and sleep insights, hired its first localization expert in 2020. Localization Program Manager Tarja Karjalainen, still a one-person team, oversaw localization into three languages in 2020 and told Slator about her company’s current localization model and plans for language expansion in this buyer feature.

The two discuss the latest Slator Language Industry Job Index (LIJI), which climbed more than four points in February 2021, having seen the usual seasonal dip in January. Florian highlights a story picked up in SlatorSweep this week, as the multilingual TEDx corpus for speech recognition and translation was made available in eight original languages and up to five target languages.

We welcome special guest Mark Shriner to this week’s SlatorPod. (Spoiler alert: He used to be Florian’s boss!) The longtime (former) language industry exec shares insights from 20+ years leading Asian offices for some of the world’s largest LSPs and discusses his experience of selling language services across the vast, diverse continent. Mark also offers tips for motivating LSP sales teams and talks about localization through the lens of enterprise technology.

First up, Esther and Florian delve into the language industry stories of the week, which saw news break of a major upcoming transaction in the media localization space as Iyuno Media Group announced its plans to acquire dominant rival SDI Media. Subject to approvals being granted, the combined group will become the largest pure-play media localizer in the world, weighing in at, give or take, USD 400m in annual revenues.

The two discuss fellow media localization provider ZOO Digital’s recent trading update, as the UK-listed company forecast revenues of at least USD 38m for the full-year to March 2021 — an increase of roughly 28% from the previous year. The announcement prompted ZOO’s shares to spike, and they are now hovering around 50% above the start of 2021.

From media localization to another thriving niche in the language industry. Esther talks about game localization for the hugely popular game Call of Duty. We picked up on the story after a CoD developer spoke about what it takes to localize the game in a recent gaming podcast; revealing that each CoD title requires more than 100,000 dialogue files per language. Multiply that by 10 languages, and you’re looking at handling in the region of a million dialogue files. That’s before you even get to the text-based localization components.

Florian picks out news announced in two press releases this week. Swiss-based LSP Supertext launched a chat-based instant translation service, which allows customers to speak directly with translators to resolve their small and urgent translation needs. (Supertext Managing Partner Fabian Dieziger teased the announcement when he joined SlatorPod three weeks ago).

And MT provider Tilde explained how the EU Council Presidency Translator (a free, online machine translation portal), helped dramatically increase the volume of words translated by the Council. Florian’s key takeaway is this: The Council’s website is now available in all 24 European languages, and 21 of those involved machine translation.

In SlatorPod #55, aka “TMS week,” Memsource Founder and CEO David Canek joins us to talk about the acquisition of localization SaaS provider Phrase, announced just this week. David walks us through his company’s milestones, from Memsource’s launch in 2010 as a cloud-based TMS and their very first paying customer in 2012, to growing as a bootstrapped company until July 2020, when investment firm giant Carlyle took a majority stake in the company.

He shares insights into the acquisition of Germany-based Phrase, discusses why their developer-targeted product is complementary to Memsource’s offering, and outlines the direction of the company

First up, Esther and Florian unpack the week’s language industry news, which was dominated by translation management acquisitions, as DACH-based Across sold to financial investor Volaris Group and New Zealand-based language service provider (LSP) Straker bought Lingotek, a US-based TMS provider.

The two talk about TransPerfect’s 2020 financial results, as the LSP gorilla grew 11.5% over the year, adding revenues of USD 88m to its topline through a mix of acquisitive and organic growth.

CEO Phil Shawe told Slator TransPerfect won’t be following in Lionbridge’s footsteps in selling off their data-for-AI division (“or any other any other division for that matter.”) Florian and Esther discuss the reasons why TransPerfect and Lionbridge are part of a growing number of LSPs operating in the data-for-AI services niche, and why LSPs are structurally geared up to succeed in the fast-growing space.

President of Oxford Languages Casper Grathwohl joins the Pod from sunny Florida this week to discuss OUP’s business in lexical data, working with big tech customers, the world’s under-served and low resource languages, and more.

First up, Florian (from snowy Switzerland) and Esther (from lockdown London) talk about Slator’s newly-launched 2020 M&A and Funding report, a 40-page report with in-depth analysis of the 39 M&A transactions and 13 startup rounds covered by Slator in 2020.

Esther gives an update from the UK, where the Ministry of Defence (MoD) launched a new USD 74m call for expressions of interest for interpreting and translation services, and outsourcing giant Capita put the planned sale of its translation and interpreting division, Capita TI, on hold.

Florian talks about transcription and audio/video editing tool Descript — which raised USD 30m to expand its capabilities for enterprise use — and potential implications/use cases for the language industry. He also shares news from Japan-based MT and human translation provider Rozetta, which grew MT revenues by 40% in the nine months to November 2020.

In the first episode of 2021, Fabian Dieziger, Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Swiss-based language service provider (LSP) Supertext, joins the pod to discuss the local Switzerland market, Supertext’s US and Germany expansion and their copywriting roots, and why they’ve chosen to shun M&A in favor of organic growth.

Florian and Esther talk about Slator’s all-new 2021 Data-for-AI Report, which is designed to help LSPs evaluate and pursue opportunities in the fast-growing niche of providing data for AI customers.

Esther shares an update on how the UK-EU trade and cooperation agreement will impact freelance translators and interpreters on short-term missions to Europe post-Brexit, while Florian unpacks the US proposal to extend small business perks to LSPs generating up to USD 20m in annual revenues. In a last look back at 2020, the two select their top quotes of the year.

In the final episode of 2020, Isabelle Andrieu, co-Founder and Chairman of Italy-based LSP Translated, joins the pod to talk about her 20-year journey with Translated, their ModernMT and MateCat products, and why long-tail clients are still the soul of the business.

Florian and Esther share their top five picks from Slator’s most viewed stories of 2020, singling out heavy-hitters from the year such as RWS’ acquisition of rival LSP SDL (the #1 breaking-news story of 2020), and Acolad’s acquisition of AMPLEXOR.

Florian’s other picks include: Freelancers’ AB5 exemption win in California; LSPs suing a client over “polluted” TMs in Canada; and the launch of the world’s largest language model, GPT-3, which took the internet by storm.

Esther’s top hitter was the Slator’s 2020 Language Service Provider Index (LSPI). Also on her list are Stratus Video’s sale to AMN Healthcare. And, incidentally, Stratus was one of the fastest-growing LSPs in 2019 (another top pick), while Netflix’s subtitling research and ASICS Digital’s localization buyer feature also made the cut.

The special guest for episode #51 is Slator’s very own Monica Jamieson, a new translation grad who joins the Pod to talk about why today’s 20-somethings are studying languages, and to offer tips on language industry job hunting during Covid-19.

Esther shares her key takeaways from SlatorCon Remote on December 3, 2020, which drew in +250 attendees from 30 countries, who tuned in to watch 6 CEOs, a CMO and 3 enterprise clients provide insights from their vantage points in the language industry.

Florian talks about the top 10 most influential research papers on neural machine translation (NMT), based on Slator’s analysis of citation counts, which sparked some discussion on Twitter.

He also discusses the latest financial results from language data provider Appen, which downgraded its earnings guidance after a disappointing November, and from language service provider (LSP) RWS, which outlined its plans to integrate former rival SDL.

In this half-century, guestless episode of SlatorPod, Florian unpacks the contentious matter of pay rises for interpreters and translators in Germany’s courts. Linguists for Germany’s judicial system will see their hourly and per-word rates increase from January 2021, but not everyone’s satisfied.

He and Esther discuss big bucks equity research after US-based investment firm Jefferies formed an alliance with Japanese firm SMBC Nikko Securities, which will see Nikko translate Jeffries’ equity research reports for distribution in Japan. Under the alliance, research for high-profile stocks will be the first to be translated, before Nikko — or an LSP they engage — ramps up to translating research covering ca. 100 stocks.

From a cross-continental alliance to another form of inter-business collaboration: the two talk about the often-overlooked biz dev strategy of channel partnerships for LSPs, after UK-based SDL announced a partnership with office provider Rovva, which enables companies using Rovva’s offices and business support services to sign up to SLATE, SDL’s MT-powered subscription-based translation service.

Former Netflix exec and Managing Director of EGA Chris Fetner joins the pod this week to talk about entertainment localization’s new association, the drivers of media loc, and how content owners view the ROI of subtitling and dubbing.

First up, Florian unpacks some bold claims coming out of New Zealand-based LSP Straker’s investor presentation, which placed 20,000 LSPs in the “Dying Zone,” and dismissed 40 larger LSPs (+USD 50m) as providing “global coverage but lacking innovation.

Esther talks about the World Intellectual Property Organization’s (WIPO) upcoming open translation tender. WIPO, which spends around USD 5m on translation outsourcing each year, is inviting patent-specialized LSPs from around the world to express interest in bidding for 26m words annually.

The two discuss the week’s investment and funding news, as telemedicine and video remote interpreting (VRI) provider Cloudbreak Health gets snapped up by investors and simultaneously taken public in New York, and transcription and captioning provider Verbit raises (another) USD 60m.

Joining the pod is Kris Zdanowski, Founder and CEO of Summa Linguae Technologies. Kris talks about his entrepreneurial journey, from paying for receivables collections with shares, doing a merger with an LSP in India, to rolling out an M&A strategy and launching into the data annotation industry.

Florian shares a few choice insights from Slator’s Inside India’s High-Growth Language Industry webinar, which this week attracted more than 130 participants and featured four expert panelists.

The two discuss startup Otherside AI, which raised USD 2.6m in funding just six months after launch for one of the first real-life GPT-3 uses cases. Florian unpacks the tech, which transforms bullet points into complete sentences (including in other languages), and its potential benefit for translators. They also venture down the translation test rabbit hole — a divisive issue, as highlighted by Slator’s recent reader poll.

Esther talks about the language industry’s latest association: Entertainment Globalization Association (EGA), which launched this week with 60 members from within the media localization niche, and is led by ex-Netflix exec Chris Fetner.

Marie Amigues, Founder and CEO of Altagram, joins Slator Pod and talks to Esther and Florian about how she runs the fast-growing game localization provider

Marie recounts her experience of launching Altagram and growing the business internationally, and discusses the ins and outs of game loc.

In part 1, Florian unpacks the sale of Lionbridge’s AI division to Canada’s TELUS International nearly one billion US-Dollar. He talks about the success of Lionbridge’s private equity owners, HIG Capital, in selling just one part of the business they acquired in late 2016 (Lionbridge) for nearly triple the amount paid for the entire company. Lionbridge, meanwhile, is left with around USD 500m in core translation and localization revenues.

Esther shares some recent financial highlights from LSPs Summa Linguae Technologies, Stratus Video and ZOO Digital, whose dubbing revenues soared in the company’s first half.

The two delve into machine dubbing and discuss a recent paper from DeepMind and Google, which used ASR, MT, speech synthesis and lip movement synthesis to (semi)automate dubbing for educational videos. The potential applications are considerable; so too are the concerns around deep fakes and consent issues.

Episode #46 of SlatorPod sees Florian and Esther welcome a very special guest and true linguist, 2M CEO Tea Dietterich joins the pod from Sunshine Coast in Australia.a

Stay tuned for our discussion with Tea on the language market in Australia: from the country’s biggest translation clients in the private sector, and Cultural and Linguistic Diversity (CALD) communities to the emergence of remote interpreting, and everything in between.

First off, Florian discusses Smartcat’s Series B funding: the US-based language technology provider raised USD 14.6m earlier in the summer, led by Matrix Partners, continuing the run of investment in the core language technology space...Intento, Memsource, the list goes on; and there’s now even a company advertising for investment.

Esther talks about the promising earnings updates from language service providers Straker Translations in New Zealand, and Honyaku Center in Japan, and from LanguageLine’s parent company, which said the interpreting unit was maintaining strong growth from June.

She also shares the latest figures from the language industry job index, which climbed for a fourth consecutive month in November.

This week, Florian and Esther welcome Kåre Lindahl, CEO of Venga Global for a wide ranging discussion about language data as a business for LSPs, lessons from M&A, selling consulting to loc buyers, and Amazon’s Swedish MT fail.

First up, Florian talks about advances in automated transcription and AI video editing including the function to edit from transcripts. (Watch this space for full SlatorPod transcripts…) The two discuss the world of translation and localization for the complex and growing medical technology (medtech) industry, and share some of the key takeaways from the newly published Slator 2020 Medtech Translation and Localization Report.

As many parts of the world begin to experience a second wave of the coronavirus, Florian talks about the implications for the language industry, while Esther shares some of the findings from the latest UK ATC Survey, which asked language service providers (LSPs) about the state of their businesses in October 2020. Then we finish by highlighting some new hires at TransPerfect, LanguageWire, Deluxe, and Roman Zelenka’s departure from his company.

Interprefy founder Kim Ludvigsen joins the pod this week to talk about why he decided to pass the CEO baton to Annett Polaszewski-Plath while business is booming after Covid restrictions turbocharged the adoption of remote simultaneous interpreting.

Slator Co-founder and Commercial Director Andrew Smart guest-hosts this week. Andrew and Florian talk about TransPerfect’s solid third-quarter results, why more language service providers should consider an IPO, and why Zoom Zapps could be a big deal.

Facebook’s big announcement about soon deploying massively multilingual machine translation models is also on the agenda.

Manuel Herranz, CEO of MT and language service provider Pangeanic joins SlatorPod. Manuel joins us for part two, after your regular hosts give a run down of the week’s language industry news.

Florian talks about what’s going on with RWS’ buying SDL, as the deal inches closer to, well, closing. Just the small matters of a court hearing and SDL’s delisting from the London Stock Exchange to take care of next...

The two talk about Japanese MT provider and LSP Rozetta, which released financial results for the first half of 2021. Remarkably, the English language version of Rozetta’s financial statements had been machine translated (with no manual modification), using Rozetta’s own MT engines.

Esther discusses translation startup TAIA’s recent investment, and shares news from UK-based LSPs thebigword, Capita TI and translate plus, after all three filed results from 2019 and provided business updates on Covid-19.

Stay tuned for our discussion with Manuel, who talks about Pangeanic’s Japanese roots, their MT offering, and plans to anonymize multilingual data for Europe’s public administrations.

Florian and Esther are joined by Sandeep Nulkar, CEO and Founder of BITS Private Limited and co-Founder of Vernac Language Technologies to discuss India's language industry.

Before Sandeep joins us, your regular SlatorPod hosts talk about the week’s language industry stories...

Florian shares news from Mozilla, which just took the decision to retire Elmo — the backbone of its localization infrastructure — and to axe hundreds of jobs. Esther talks about the recovery in the language industry job index (LIJI), which climbed above the baseline in October for the first time since March 2020.

The two pick up on a few news items circulated in SlatorSweep: from TransPerfect’s out-of-court settlement with former co-owner Liz Elting over the ownership of Wordfast LLC, to interpreting platform KUDO announcing an integration with Microsoft Teams.

Don’t miss our in-depth discussion with Sandeep; we delve into India’s language industry, Sandeep’s take-aways from the Slator’s recent Indian LSP survey results, and his vision for the newly created Indian language industry association, CITLoB.

SlatorPod welcomes Nour Al Hassan, CEO of the Middle East’s leading language services provider, Tarjama. A lawyer by training, Nour talks about how she started in the language industry and grew Tarjama to 160 employees, the decision to build a proprietary translation management platform, and her take on language services demand in the MENA region.

Before Nour’s segment, Slator’s Florian and Esther kick off the week’s language industry news with a discussion about translator marketplaces in light of Across Systems’ decision to retire their version of it, “Crossmarket.” (Spoiler alert: They plan to launch a new one in 2021.)

Esther talks about her recent experience during an LSP’s Capital Markets Day and Florian shares news that the South Korea Exchange, KRX, has started to offer English translation services for regulatory filings of eligible companies, which include the likes of Naver, Samsung Biologics, and more than 50 others.

The duo also discuss the handful of US-based LSPs that made this year’s Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing companies, and highlight some insights from the latest UK ATC Coronavirus pulse survey, where 85% of respondents said they are seeing signs of recovery in the language services industry.

Florian and Esther are joined by Gene Schriver, CEO and Founder of US-based on-demand interpreting tech and services provider GLOBO. Stay tuned for the interview section to hear Gene share his insights on video remote interpreting (VRI), telehealth platforms, helping interpreters cope with the demands of the job, and more.

Your regular hosts, Florian and Esther, talk in depth about this week’s top language industry story: the acquisition by France-based Acolad Group of rival AMPLEXOR to become Continental Europe’s largest LSP — once the deal passes antitrust clearance, that is.

Esther shares a few key findings from the Chartered Institute of Linguists’ (CIOL) recent survey on the relationship between linguists and LSPs, which found that only 5% of translators and interpreters prefer to receive assignments through TMS platforms.

The two discuss optical character recognition (OCR), a persisting project management headache, and talk about why big tech, LSPs, startups, and the research community are all invested in finding ways to improve recognition of text within troublesome “uneditable” files.

In SlatorPod’s third guest episode, Florian and Esther are joined by Lokalise co-Founder Petr Antopov, fresh from his company’s Series A funding round announced on Sept 7, 2020.

Your regular hosts bring you the week’s language industry news; from Jeff Brink’s BIG Language Solutions acquiring US-based healthcare specialist ISI to two LSPs merging in Belgium, this week was awash with corporate transactions (not an NMT story in sight).

Another two companies went public, as the owner of Language Connect, The Hut Group (THG), successfully completed a major IPO in London. Florian and Esther discuss why an e-commerce giant like THG would not only bother doing localization internally, but make it an integral part of their IPO messaging. The two also talk about Ai-Media’s IPO in Australia.

In financial results, Esther gives an update on H1 2020 trading from London-listed video game specialist Keywords Studios, which grew 8% organically. Keywords’ Localization division suffered as customers postponed projects, but is rebounding now the dam has lifted.

We’re joined by serial entrepreneur Petr, who talks about why localization appealed, taking Lokalise fully remote, and his plans for scaling for the localization SaaS provider.

In SlatorPod’s second guest episode, Florian and Esther are joined by former Google Translate developer and ModelFront founder and CEO Adam Bittlingmayer to discuss machine translation, machine translation risk prediction, how LSPs should leverage MT, how big tech thinks about MT, and much more.

Your two hosts first talk about localization SaaS startup Lokalise — which announced a USD 6m in Series A funding this week — and their decidedly corporate (read not LSP)-focused customer base

Florian talks about Google’s foray into telehealth via a USD 100m partnership with Amwell, bringing together Amwell’s video platform and Google’s NLP and machine translation know-how to compete with the likes of Stratus, LanguageLine and Boostlingo.

He and Esther delve into a new research paper’s claims that MT OUTperforms humans (within a very specific set of parameters) and Esther shares localization insights from digital healthcare company Babylon Health, which provides accessible healthcare services in 15 languages across 13 countries.

Florian and Esther are joined by 🎤special guest 🎤Kimon Fountoukidis, Founder and Chairman of Argos Multilingual for a frank and animated discussion about the language industry.

Florian also provides an update on the market reaction following the breaking news last week that RWS plans to acquire SDL later this year

Esther talks international trade — more specifically how translation and interpreting are run at the World Trade Organization (WTO) —, sharing insights from Josep Bonet, Division Director, Language and Documentation Services Division at WTO.

Florian reviews the latest developments in the AB5 saga over in California, where interpreters, translators and LSPs are celebrating their success in getting exempted from a bill that would have compelled LSPs to hire freelancers as direct employees in the State. Hopping to China, he talks about several language technologies that have made the list of restricted exports, as the US and China’s tech battle intensifies.

Florian and Esther conclude the rundown of the week’s news with a discussion about the positive upswing in the Slator Language Industry Job Index figure for September before they are joined by the first ever SlatorPod guest...

👉Don’t miss Kimon sharing his experience of developing Argos into a USD 22m LSP through sales, tech and ops savvy, M&A and a passion for entrepreneurship. Kimon weighs in on all the burning topics, gives expert project managers their due praise, and makes a case for paying good translators more 💰money💰.

In this week’s SlatorPod, Florian and Esther share a hot take on❗the story of the week❗— if not of recent language industry history: RWS’s acquisition of rival SDL. The coming together of the two UK-based Super Agencies will see the creation of the first ever billion-dollar-revenue LSP, and TransPerfect stripped of its current title of world’s largest LSP by revenue

The two whizz through the YTD trading performance of RWS, SDL and the seven other listed LSPs that Slator tracks. After a predictable Covid-19-related dip between February and April 2020, which LSPs bounced back stronger than ever and which continue to limp? (Yes, the disappearance of the SDL brand will take the number of publicly traded LSPs from nine to eight, but watch this space for the upcoming listing of Australia-based Ai-Media).

Esther talks about a patent translation-related fiasco in the US courts, which highlights, as one legal commentator put it, the need to “pay extra scrutiny to a patent application that has been translated, translators are human and errors occur.”

🎤Special announcement 🎤Tune in next week for SlatorPod’s first guest...we are delighted to welcome Kimon Fountoukidis, Founder of Argos Multilingual, to the podcast.

Florian and Esther talk about remote interpreting’s moment in the spotlight. From phone interpreting (OPI) to video remote interpreting (VRI) and remote simultaneous interpreting (RSI), the two discuss the various use cases for each, the differences in margins, and how RSI is booming as conferences have moved online.

Esther shares insights from a deep-dive interview with SDI Media CEO Mark Howorth, who warned of a double-digit revenue drop in 2020. She and Florian talk about the impact of Hollywood’s four-month closure and how the absence of new productions has left a content void for media localizers that will likely take months to fill.

From some cold hard figures put out by LSPs, to somewhat abstract theory...Florian wraps his head around new research from Princeton that explores whether translation equivalents really mean the same thing in each language. Bit of a head scratcher.

In amongst arguing about salmon in this week’s SlatorPod, Florian and Esther talk about SDL’s shares, which rallied on the release of their H1 2020 financial results. Esther discusses SYSTRAN’s new owner, South Korea-based STIC Investments, who took a controlling stake in the MT provider in July 2020 alongside a consortium of minority investors.

The two share localization insights from Croatian cloud communications company Infobip, who recently hired an LSP and a translation management system (TMS) provider and implemented a continuous loc model.

Florian gives an update on Sockeye (not the salmon). Amazon’s open source toolkit for neural machine translation (NMT) has just been released in its second iteration, Sockeye 2, and is now available on Github.

Esther talks about how mistranslations are causing a stir over in Australia this week. Problems observed in the translations of coronavirus-related public messaging have prompted the state of Victoria to announce additional funds for health interpreting and translation of materials relating to the pandemic.

In episode 33 of SlatorPod, Florian and Esther talk about fresh signs of recovery in the language industry, from the Slator Language Industry Job Index (LIJI) — which rose (slightly) in August 2020 for the first time since the pandemic hit — to encouraging survey data from the ATC UK’s Coronavirus Pulse Survey in July.

The two also share news that the world’s most valuable listed LSP, UK-based RWS, decided to voluntarily hand back money to the UK government that they received under the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme. It’s probably not a huge sum of cash that RWS is giving up since they only “furloughed a small number of employees,” but still.

With what looks like more than tentative green shoots appearing, what better time for LSPs to think about ramping up Sales and Marketing? The two discuss Slator’s recently published Pro Guide on Sales and Marketing for LSPs and share personal anecdotes from working in Sales (Florian) and Project Management (Esther) functions at large LSPs.

In other news, they talk about a mistranslation of a Facebook post, which sparked public and monarchical outrage in Thailand, and run through LSP Ai-Media’s unfolding plans to list on the Australian Stock Exchange.

In this week’s SlatorPod, Florian and Esther discuss the quirky use of social media ads by the Royal Australian Navy in their quest to recruit 40 crypto linguists (which also happens to sound like a pretty cool job). We also talk about Salesforce’s new open-source XML-tagged dataset for NMT training, based on thousands of XML files per language pair to help improve translation of online help documentation.

From Silicon Valley tech to the UK public sector, Esther shares her takeaways from a presentation given by the UK’s central government procurement arm, CCS, to nearly 80 would-be suppliers on a huge upcoming language services tender.

Finally, as earnings season kicks off the two give a run down of the latest quarterly results from TransPerfect, Australia-listed Straker Translations and Teleperformance, the owners of interpreting giant LanguageLine.

Florian brings you this week’s language news from his hideaway in the mountains of Switzerland, sharing news on the world’s largest language model, GPT-3, from OpenAI. He and Esther (who is still hunkered down in London) discuss its applications in language generation, and whether or not it’s any good at the task of machine translation yet (spoiler: not really).

Esther talks about two funding stories from the week: a USD 1.1m raise from Sweden-based localization and tech provider LocalizeDirect, which has built a headless CMS to support multilingual game development; and multilingual web conferencing platform Kudo, which raised USD 6m from VC based on their remote simultaneous interpreting tech.

Leaping from distance interpreting to a machine interpreting, Florian discusses the launch of M.INTerpreting, an open-source project to help further research into machine interpreting, spearheaded by Claudio Fantinuoli from the University of Mainz. Also in the land of open-source, the two talk about Amazon Translate, which has just announced added support for powerpoint files.

In this week’s episode, Florian and Esther delve into the numbers and rationale behind the Memsource transaction, as the translation technology (TMS) provider sold a majority stake to private equity giant Carlyle in a landmark deal for the language industry.

The two talk about highlights from the game localization panel at SlatorCon Remote, moderated by Daniel Finck with machine translation and localization experts from Frontier Developments and Electronic Arts, Tamara Tirják and Cristina Anselmi.

From gaming to media entertainment, Esther talks about media localizer ZOO Digital’s financial results for the 12 months to March 2020. ZOO said the new year is off to a good start, and that the coronavirus lockdowns had proven to be a catalyst for buyers to try remote dubbing.

Finally, Florian shares news from India, where a new language industry association, CITLoB, has formed, attracting 50 members within a month of launching.

Finally, Florian unveils that SlatorPod now has its very own website here (the perks that come with new tools!).

Links to the stories discussed

New! SlatorPod website

Memsource Sells to Carlyle: The Inside Story

Game Localization: Why Nuance Is Key in Discussing Automation

ZOO Digital Says FY 2021 Off to a Strong Start

Florian talks about research from Silicon Valley start-up Stripe, which surveyed hundreds of e-commerce websites for issues at checkout, the most common of which was a lack of local language translations.

The two discuss SlatorCon Remote, where the 300-strong audience heard about e-commerce localization courtesy of multilingual content provider Quill. Also present at Slator’s inaugural remote conference was EasyLing, whose CEO described their web proxy solution for translated website. We had a private equity perspective on the industry, heard from CRM SaaS company Pipedrive about their localization operations, and featured experts across media and game localization, and more

Esther shares news of media post-production giant Deluxe’s partial sale to private equity (PE) and discusses a bit about the winning papers from ACL, the organizer of the world’s largest NLP conference, while Florian talks more about Memsource selling a majority stake to a major PE firm.

Links to the stories discussed:

Stripe Says Lack of Translation Most Common Error in European E-commerce

Deluxe Sells Its Media Localization Arm to PE in Carve-Up

Jonckers Promotes Silke Zschweigert to CEO

And the Winner Is…ACL 2020 Announces Best Paper Awards

In this week’s episode, Florian shares breaking news from the world of M&A and funding, as translation technology provider Memsource sold a majority stake to private equity giant Carlyle and machine translation matchmaker Intento raised USD 3m.

Esther discusses a nationwide mega-tender for language services due to launch in August 2020 in the UK: the pan-government RFP is worth GBP 110m over three years and is designed to replace an existing contract that has been extended due to coronavirus. Keen to get the procurement process right, the buyer is hosting a webinar at the end of July for suppliers to give input on how the RFP should be structured.

The two talk about Slator’s newly launched pro guide on How to Run a Translation and Localization RFP. If you’re a buyer keen to get your translation and localization procurement right, this guide is an indispensable resource for your organization and is packed full of practical insights on running an RFP.

Florian provides an update on the Slator Language Industry Job Index (LIJI). Since plummeting between March and May 2020, the downward trend has continued into July 2020, but shows signs of slowing as a restart in investments points to the beginnings of a recovery for the industry.

Links to the stories discussed

The Carlyle Group Invests in Translation Software Provider Memsource

Intento Raises $3 Million to Serve Increasing Demand of Global Companies for AI Transformation

UK Plans Translation and Interpreting Mega-Tender

Pro Guide: How to Run a Translation and Localization RFP

Decline in Slator Job Index Slows in July 2020

Florian and Esther discuss Apple’s announcement that its new operating system, iOS 14, will come pre-loaded with a Translate app when it’s released in September 2020. The Translate app will run on NMT, be one of just a few dozen built-in iPhone apps, and allow users to translate without an internet connection. What will this mean for other translation apps?Esther shares news of e-commerce company Localised’s USD 6.5m funding round with investment from a UK growth fund and celebrity entrepreneur Peter Jones of Dragon’s Den fame. Localised provides pre-built localized websites to help brands connect with prospective customers internationally. The second of three M&A and funding features this week, Esther talks about US government contractor SOSi’s investment in machine translation and speech recognition provider AppTek. Florian discusses the acquisition by Japanese financial printer Takara of local LSP Simul International from the owner of Berlitz Language Schools.And the two review a blog post published on Medium by a Localization Manager at Deliveroo. Links to the stories discussedNow We Know Why Apple Stepped Up Machine Translation Researchhttps://slator.com/machine-translation/now-we-know-why-apple-stepped-up-machine-translation-research/Localised.com Raises USD 6.5m in Series Ahttps://slator.com/ma-and-funding/localised-com-raises-usd-6-5m-in-series-a/SOSi Buys Minority Stake in Language Tech Firm AppTekhttps://slator.com/ma-and-funding/sosi-buys-minority-stake-in-language-tech-firm-apptek/Takara Pays Berlitz Owner USD 46m for Japanese LSP Simulhttps://slator.com/ma-and-funding/takara-pays-berlitz-owner-usd-46m-for-japanese-lsp-simul/

In a half-year anniversary episode, Florian and Esther unpack a wide-scale European Union survey of small and medium enterprises. Nearly 2,900 SMEs responded to questions about their language needs, MT use and attitudes of MT, as the EU rolls out an expansion program for their free automated translation platform, eTranslation.Florian ponders why a public body like the EU would be concerned with making MT available for use among private sector companies, and discusses a recent blog post from Google on the latest tweaks and techniques they’re applying to MT. The two talk about media localizer IYUNO’s acquisition of German dubbing and post-production studio Scalamedia, and highlight a possible language industry IPO reportedly being considered by Ai-Media in Australia. Florian shares his take on the diverging fortunes of language industry stakeholders amid the pandemic, as the gap widens between those who are suffering financially (e.g., the EU’s contract interpreters) and those who are seeing their businesses at all-time highs. Links to the stories discussedHuman or Machine Translation? Survey Reveals EU SME Preferences by Use Casehttps://slator.com/demand-drivers/human-or-machine-translation-survey-reveals-eu-sme-preferences-by-use-case/IYUNO Acquires German Dubbing Studio Scalamediahttps://slator.com/ma-and-funding/iyuno-acquires-german-dubbing-studio-scalamedia/Media Localizer Ai-Media Reported to Consider Sydney IPOhttps://slator.com/ma-and-funding/media-localizer-ai-media-reported-to-consider-sydney-ipo/Contract Interpreters Rally Over Lack of Support From EUhttps://slator.com/industry-news/contract-interpreters-rally-over-lack-of-support-from-the-eu/

Florian and Esther talk Google snafu, delving into the story of how Google “inadvertently sent” users’ translation memory data to someone else. Users of the now retired Google Toolkit, a free cloud-based translation productivity, may have had their translation memory contents shared with another user as a result of a technical issue affecting download requests.Florian discusses UK-based RWS’ acquisition of machine translation provider Iconic Translation Machines for a whopping USD 20m maximum, or 16x revenues. Why would the world’s most valuable LSP buy an MT startup rather than build the tech internally? An existing partnership, as well as Iconic’s focus on critical content and their customer base likely helped move the needle in favor of an acquisition.Esther outlines salary data coming out of the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, which indicates that US translators and interpreters earned a median wage of USD 51,830 annually in 2019. We also look at which states offer the best pay and employ the most linguists. Finally, Florian shares an update from the California Assembly, which passed AB1850 on June 11, 2020, exempting only “certified translators” from the proposed bill to ban gig work.Links to the stories discussedYour Google Translator Toolkit Data ‘Was Inadvertently Sent to Another User’https://slator.com/industry-news/google-translator-toolkit-data-was-inadvertently-sent-to-another-user/RWS Acquires MT Provider Iconic and Indian LSP Webduniahttps://slator.com/ma-and-funding/rws-acquires-mt-provider-iconic-and-indian-lsp-webdunia/SlatorPro Why the World’s Most Valuable LSP Bought a Machine Translation Startuphttps://slator.com/ma-and-funding/why-the-worlds-most-valuable-lsp-bought-a-machine-translation-startup/US Translator and Interpreter Salaries Rose 3.8% in 2019https://slator.com/industry-news/us-translator-and-interpreter-salaries-rose-3-8-in-2019/

Florian and Esther discuss the plight of the EU’s contract interpreters. While conference interpreting work has dried up, the ca. 3,000 contract interpreters, many of whom generated 100% of their income from the institutions, have been given a one-off payment to see them through the coronavirus pandemic. In a show of solidarity, however, staff interpreters created an emergency fund to help support their contract colleagues.Florian draws attention to the Slator Language Industry Job Index figures, showing a further drop from May to June, and highlights anecdotal evidence of localization job losses, including a LinkedIn-publicized cull in WeWork’s Globalization team. Esther shares insights from Verizon Media’s localization teams on their tech stack, including a proprietary loc platform, called Dragonfly, which helps to process 500,000 translated words monthly across platforms including Yahoo Mail, HuffPost, TechCrunch and more, in as many as 79 languages. Picking up on a news item in Jost Zetzsche’s Tool Box Journal, the two talk about free usage of SDL, Google and DeepL NMT. Use of SDL and Google’s free NMT has ramped up since March, with use of SDL’s free NMT around double that of Google and DeepL, according to SDL data. In other NMT news, Esther summarizes a research paper on the surprising and volatile behavior of MT in dealing with almost identical source sentences.Links to the stories discussedContract Interpreters ‘Puzzled’ and ‘Hurt’ by EU Offerhttps://slator.com/industry-news/contract-interpreters-puzzled-and-hurt-by-eu-offer/Slator Language Industry Job Index Falls Again in June 2020https://slator.com/industry-news/slator-language-industry-job-index-falls-again-in-june-2020/This Is How Verizon Media Runs a Centralized Localization Teamhttps://slator.com/features/this-is-how-verizon-media-runs-a-centralized-localization-team/Researchers Explore Surprising Behavior of Machine Translationhttps://slator.com/machine-translation/researchers-explore-surprising-behavior-of-machine-translation/

In this week’s episode, Florian and Esther discuss Netflix’s recent paper on sentence simplification and machine translation, destined to help improve the quality of machine-translated subtitles. But how will audiences react if simpler source sentences mean a lack of idioms and colloquialisms in foreign-language subtitles?The two talk about hyper-localized markets in the language industry and point out that a lot of demand is still local to an LSP’s home turf, limiting widespread industry consolidation. They discuss a few examples, from onsite dubbing and interpreting requirements in countries in Europe, to specific types of work that only exist in a particular geography, as with IPO translation in Hong Kong. They also revisit remote simultaneous interpreting (RSI) in Zoom, having received new user feedback from a listener. The conference interpreter, who had been using Zoom for a year, praised the platform: all they need to do is tweak a couple of things and it should be a solid interpreting option, she said. Florian schools Esther on some new terminology requirements out of France, where the official government gazette, the Journal officiel, has published a series of ‘correct’ French terms for English neologisms like, fittingly, podcast (audio à la demande).Links to the stories discussedHow Netflix Researchers Simplify Subtitles for Translationhttps://slator.com/machine-translation/how-netflix-researchers-simplify-subtitles-for-translation/Why You Need a Local Office to Compete in These 9 Translation Marketshttps://slator.com/features/why-you-need-a-local-office-to-compete-in-these-9-translation-markets/‘Fake News’ Should Be ‘Infox,’ French Government Sayshttps://slator.com/industry-news/fake-news-should-be-infox-french-government-says/

22 Japan’s Undervalued LSP, Australia and VRI, Translator Strike Contd.In this week’s podcast, Florian shares news from Japan’s largest LSP, Honyaku Center, whose translation revenues shrunk by +4% to a still-substantial USD 75m year-on-year (and USD 107m for the whole company). He says that the listed LSP could be a steal for companies looking to acquire within the world’s third largest economy, as its market cap stands at a meagre USD 39m.Florian points to research that shows almost 70% of global clinical trials have been disrupted, and discussed the impact that may have for many of the world’s largest LSPs, for whom clinical trials are typically a high-margin and lucrative business.One market less susceptible to coronavirus disruptions is the public sector. And Florian outlines how a heads up about multiple large tenders is making waves in the Netherlands, amid fears from interpreters that quality may be compromised as procurement becomes more centralized. Esther shares updates from language associations in three countries; first in Belgium, where language industry association CBTI-BKVT has outlined financial support measures available to interpreters and translators. Meanwhile in Australia, a group of associations are making their views known about use of phone and video interpreting. Back in the UK, Esther pinpoints a few findings from the UK ATC’s Coronavirus Pulse survey for May.Links to the stories discussedHonyaku Keeps Losing Ground in Core Translation Businesshttps://slator.com/financial-results/honyaku-keeps-losing-ground-in-its-core-translation-business/Rundown on Lockdown: How Large LSPs Are Navigating the Pandemichttps://slator.com/features/rundown-on-lockdown-how-large-lsps-are-navigating-the-pandemic/Dutch Minister Moves Ahead With Controversial Language Services Contracthttps://slator.com/demand-drivers/dutch-minister-moves-ahead-with-controversial-language-services-contract/

Despite Esther’s laptop going into its own form of lockdown, Florian and Esther ploughed ahead to bring you this week’s language industry news. Florian highlights three finance-focused stories, as Plint, Lilt and Keywords Studios, three very different types of language service providers, all announced financing news. Firstly, Florian shares news from Sweden, where private equity firm Priveq took a majority stake in Plint, a subtitling-focused media localizer whose revenues have grown significantly from 2015 when they first signed Netflix as a customer. Florian also unpacks tech-enabled LSP Lilt’s fortunately-timed USD 25m funding raise involving big names such as Intel Capital and Sequoia. The round completed ahead of the pandemic. And, in Ireland, gaming services provider Keywords Studios announced a GBP 100m share placing to fuel future acquisitions of smaller rivals weakened by the coronavirus pandemic.Breaking from the world of M&A and funding, Esther discusses insights into localization at the Presbyterian Church in the US, courtesy of Jason Raff, Global Language Resources Manager. With 1.7m members and 10,000 congregations in the US, the Presbyterian Church established an Office of Language Resources in 2018 to improve language access for its members, and have matured from having one lone in-house translator to running a loc team of five, who processed some 1.5m words in Q1 2020 alone.Links to the stories discussed Slator 2020 Language Industry Market Reporthttps://slator.com/data-research/slator-2020-language-industry-market-report/Presbyterian Church (USA): From One Heroic Translator to Full Localizationhttps://slator.com/features/presbyterian-church-usa-from-one-heroic-translator-to-full-localization/Lilt Raised USD 25m Just Before Pandemic Hithttps://slator.com/ma-and-funding/lilt-raised-usd-25m-just-before-pandemic-hit/Media Localizer Plint Sells Majority to PE Firm Priveqhttps://slator.com/ma-and-funding/media-localizer-plint-sells-majority-to-pe-firm-priveq/

Florian and Esther pick out two of their favorite sales and biz dev insights from the recently launched Slator 2020 Language Industry Market Report: 400+ buyer job titles and 200+ LSP core and adjacent services.Florian gives an update on coronavirus’ industry impact and talks about the added factor of debt for some private equity backed LSPs. The two ponder LSP thebigword’s bold Word-pie initiative, which seeks to find LSPs running out of cash and offers to pay some continued income in exchange for onboarding clients.Esther gives an overview of Amazon Prime Video’s new research paper on quality estimation for subtitle translations, and shares an update from media localizer ZOO Digital, which is seeing a “reassuring resumption in demand” as back catalog localization ramps up while new production work is stalled. Florian discusses why Germany’s ISO Terminology Committee has broken ranks with other countries by rejecting the adoption of ISO 20771, the new standard for legal translation.Links to the stories discussed in this episode:Slator 2020 Language Industry Market Reporthttps://slator.com/data-research/slator-2020-language-industry-market-report/Good, Bad or Loose: Amazon’s New Subtitle Quality Estimation Systemhttps://slator.com/machine-translation/good-bad-or-loose-amazons-new-subtitle-quality-estimation-system/Media Localizer ZOO Sees ‘Reassuring Resumption in Demand’https://slator.com/financial-results/media-localizer-zoo-sees-reassuring-resumption-in-demand/Germany Rejects ISO Standard for Legal Translationhttps://slator.com/industry-news/germany-rejects-iso-standard-for-legal-translation/

Florian and Esther share highlights from the newly-released Slator 2020 Language Industry Market Report. The 55-page report features a wealth of insights and data to help LSPs drive strategy, sales and marketing and enable buyers to assess the vendor landscape. Esther talks about terminology management at scale after Facebook’s Uwe Muegge gave Slator an inside look at how his team is bringing consistency to the tech giant’s marketing terms. They’re using data and analytics, automation, and a robust terminology management process to soon bring the Facebook Marketing Dictionary onstream.Esther picks out a number of takeaways from the “European Language Industry Survey 2020, Before and After Covid-19,” run by the EU ATC and other industry bodies. WIth many freelancers saying they only have 1-3 months’ runway without additional support, she shares insights from the survey around how freelancers and LSPs are responding to the crisis. Over in California, freelancers are dealing with the one, two punch of AB5 and coronavirus, and Florian unpacks the current state of affairs in the US state, pointing to one small glimmer of hope in the form of a new bill hoped to lessen the fallout. Hopping across to New Zealand, Florian discusses LSP Straker’s recent financial results for the three months to March 2020, as the company paused M&A and noted “early signs of slower decision making” from customers as a result of the outbreak. Florian concludes with a quick update from the life sciences sector, where a number of industry insiders are saying that many clinical study sites are shut amid the lockdown. Pent up demand may release in H2 when lockdowns are eased, but there’s an immediate slowdown in clinical trial-related work, likely to impact on CROs and LSPs.Links to the stories discussed in this episode:Slator 2020 Language Industry Market Reporthttps://slator.com/data-research/slator-2020-language-industry-market-report/How Facebook Scaled Terminology Managementhttps://slator.com/industry-news/survey-reveals-impact-of-covid-19-on-europes-language-industry/Survey Reveals Impact of Covid-19 on Europe’s Language Industryhttps://slator.com/features/how-facebook-scaled-terminology-management/New Bill Aims to Lessen Fallout From AB5-Coronavirus One-Two Punchhttps://slator.com/industry-news/new-bill-aims-to-lessen-fallout-from-ab5-coronavirus-one-two-punch/Straker Posts Q4 FY 2020 Earnings, Puts M&A on Holdhttps://slator.com/financial-results/straker-posts-q4-fy-2020-earnings-puts-ma-on-hold/

In another lockdown episode, Florian discusses how LSPs are faring in the current climate. He also previews the results from the European Language Industry Survey, run by a group of industry associations. The survey found that LSPs plan to increase sales and marketing after Covid-19 and are not yet considering making layoffs. Among freelancers surveyed, only 16% said they have had to renegotiate rates. Esther talks about the coronavirus effect on the medical devices regulation (MDR) in Europe. Originally scheduled for May 2020, it has now been delayed by a year. LSPs hoping for a revenue boost linked to increased translation requirements under EU MDR may now have to wait a little longer.The two speculate on DeepL’s possible plans to begin offering customization, after they updated their T&Cs to introduce a clause on “Customer Training Data.” Providing custom MT would be a departure from the off-the-shelf generic model DeepL is known for. Florian also highlights broader MT research trends, such as live translation, speech translation and massively multilingual MT.Esther closes with a green-shoots update from media localizer VSI, which has re-opened its Berlin recording studios as lockdowns start to lift. Spain and Italy are expected to be among the next to re-open. Links to the stories discussed in this episode:EU Delays New Medical Device Translation Requirementshttps://slator.com/industry-news/eu-delays-new-medical-device-translation-requirements/New Google Research May Improve Live-Translation of Virtual Meetingshttps://slator.com/machine-translation/new-google-research-may-improve-live-translation-of-virtual-meetings/(Press Release) VSI Update – Resuming In-Studio Production as Lockdowns are Relaxedhttps://slator.com/press-releases/vsi-update-resuming-in-studio-production-as-lockdowns-are-relaxed/

17 Startup Cuts, Super Agency Headwinds, Fixing Gender in NMTFlorian and Esther discuss the language industry startup environment amid the coronavirus pandemic. As the language industry’s most heavily-funded startup, Unbabel, lays off a third of its staff, others may need to take similar measures to extend their runways given the uncertainty around capital raises in 2020. From startups to stalwarts: Florian shares news from TransPerfect and SDL, which both released financial results this week. TransPerfect had a strong Q1 2020 with 14% growth, while SDL delivered a solid performance across its three divisions — Language Services, Language Technologies, and Content Technologies — in 2019. Looking into summer and beyond, TransPerfect is warning of a softening in Q2, while the first phase of SDL’s mitigation plan is in full swing.Esther discusses a new paper from Cambridge researchers, one of the many papers released ahead of July’s ACL conference. Danielle Saunders and Bll Byrne explored reducing gender bias in neural machine translation using fine-tuning. An evolving topic in machine translation research, and one which is far from solved, gender bias can lead to “identifiable errors” in translations.Links to the stories discussed in this episode:SDL Beats 2019 Forecast, Moves to Cushion Against Pandemichttps://slator.com/financial-results/sdl-beats-2019-forecast-moves-to-cushion-against-pandemic/TransPerfect Posts Strong Q1 2020 but CEO Expects ‘Significant Headwinds’https://slator.com/financial-results/transperfect-posts-strong-q1-2020-but-ceo-expects-significant-headwinds/Cambridge Researchers Tackle Neural Machine Translation’s Gender Biashttps://slator.com/machine-translation/cambridge-researchers-tackle-neural-machine-translations-gender-bias/

Florian shares his own bizarre story of being pitched coronavirus masks by an LSP over LinkedIn. Esther discusses news that LSPs are suing the Translation Bureau of Canada (Attorney General of Canada), one of the world’s largest translation buyers. LSPs claim that the Translation Bureau’s translation memory is “flawed and polluted,” which is costing them time and money.Florian unpacks RWS’s latest half-year trading update to March 2020. Revenues were down by -1.8% from 2019, but overall, Life Sciences and some large enterprise IT were not doing too badly, suggesting these sectors may take less of a hit from Coronavirus across the wider language industry. Florian shares localization insights from Swiss-based life science company Hamilton, which manufactures ventilators and coronavirus testing equipment. Hamilton has language services volumes of 3-5 million words annually, most of which is technical documentation (tech doc).The two close with a story on public sector interpreting in the UK, where Registered Interpreters have been given key worker status by the London Metropolitan Police during the Coronavirus lockdown, but are still battling for fair pay and appropriate safety measures to be granted. Links to the stories discussed in this episode:LSPs Sue Canada Translation Bureau Over ‘Polluted’ Translation Memorieshttps://slator.com/industry-news/lsps-sue-canada-translation-bureau-over-polluted-translation-memories/RWS Gives Early Indication of Pandemic’s Impact on Translation Industryhttps://slator.com/financial-results/rws-gives-early-indication-of-pandemics-impact-on-translation-industry/Inside Localization at Hamilton, Maker of Coronavirus Testing Workstationshttps://slator.com/features/inside-localization-at-hamilton-maker-of-coronavirus-testing-workstations/NRPSI Voices Concerns Over Fair Pay, Safety of Registered UK Interpretershttps://slator.com/industry-news/nrpsi-voices-concerns-over-fair-pay-safety-of-registered-uk-interpreters/

Florian highlights some stories picked up this week in SlatorSweep, Slator’s daily news aggregation service, including Keywords Studios’ decision to furlough 200 of its game testers employees in Dublin, and news from Germany of the government’s financial support package for freelancers and small businesses. Esther discusses the impact of Coronavirus on the Slator Language Industry Job Index, which fell more than three percentage points in April 2020. Job postings for localization and translation roles fell by as much as 20% and 40% on some job aggregation sites from the month before.With much attention focused on the race to find a Coronavirus vaccine, the two talk about the role of translation services in Covid-19-related clinical trials, which are ongoing even as many others have been halted given the logistical challenges posed by a global lockdown. And Florian shares Piotr Misztal’s tips for company management teams. Piotr is Partner Value4Capital, the PE firm that backs Summa Linguae Technologies.Links to the stories discussed in this episode:Slator Job Index Falls in April 2020 as Coronavirus Hitshttps://slator.com/industry-news/slator-job-index-falls-in-april-2020-as-coronavirus-hits/Translation Services and the Race for a Coronavirus Vaccinehttps://slator.com/features/translation-services-and-the-race-for-a-coronavirus-vaccine/A Language Industry Investor’s View on the Coronavirus Crisishttps://slator.com/ma-and-funding/a-language-industry-investors-view-on-the-coronavirus-crisis/Streaming Platform HOOQ Sees ‘Great Return’ on Localization, Sets 100 Originals for 2020 Releasehttps://slator.com/features/streaming-platform-hooq-sees-great-return-on-localization-sets-100-originals-for-2020-release/

Florian and Esther share an update on the impact of Coronavirus on the language industry, zooming in on contingency plans communicated by SDL, ZOO Digital and Keywords Studios in their recent updates to investors, as well as the UK’s newly unveiled financial aid package for self-employed people.Esther unpacks a recent study on machine translation evaluation, published by leading academics from Zurich, Dublin City, Carnegie Mellon and Groningen universities. The study found that previous claims of ‘human parity’ are linked to flaws in the way that MT output is being evaluated. Florian discusses the ongoing TransPerfect-Lionbridge lawsuit, as a judge rules that eight of TransPerfect’s ten claims against Lionbridge can go to discovery.Links to the stories discussed in this episode:SlatorPro Media Localization: ZOO Sees This Bright Spot as Production of Originals Slowshttps://slator.com/financial-results/media-localization-zoo-sees-this-bright-spot-as-production-of-originals-slows/SlatorPro Keywords Says Demand Outstrips Capacity Near-Term as Clients Reappraise Productionhttps://slator.com/financial-results/keywords-says-demand-outstrips-capacity-near-term-as-clients-reappraise-production/SDL Cuts Costs in Anticipation of Revenue Declinehttps://slator.com/financial-results/sdl-cuts-costs-in-anticipation-of-revenue-decline/How to Fix the 5 Flaws in Evaluating Machine Translationhttps://slator.com/machine-translation/how-to-fix-the-5-flaws-in-evaluating-machine-translation/TransPerfect Case Against Lionbridge Proceeds to Discoveryhttps://slator.com/industry-news/transperfect-case-against-lionbridge-proceeds-to-discovery/

In this week’s SlatorPod, Florian and Esther discuss the collective responses of more than 40 LSPs to the Coronavirus pandemic, from remote working to cloud-based services and business continuity plans. Esther talks about the results of a recent survey published by the CIOL — Chartered Institute of Linguists — which revealed a significant degree of dissatisfaction around translator and interpreter pay, but a healthy overall fondness of the profession. The two discuss localization at Airbnb, where the team has doubled the number of languages available to more than 60. Airbnb human-translated more than 100 million words in 2019, and used third-party machine translation for huge volumes of user generated content. Lastly, looking at an industry that may be boosted by the current climate, Esther shares some highlights about the trend for multilingual podcasts.Links to the stories discussed in this episode:Language Service Providers Respond to Coronavirus Lockdownshttps://slator.com/industry-news/language-service-providers-respond-to-coronavirus-lockdowns/As Stock Markets Crash, How Are SDL, RWS, Appen, Other Listed LSPs Faring?https://slator.com/financial-results/as-stock-markets-crash-how-are-sdl-rws-appen-other-listed-lsps-faring/Translator and Interpreter Pay: CIOL Finds ‘Significant Degree of Dissatisfaction’https://slator.com/industry-news/translator-and-interpreter-pay-ciol-finds-significant-degree-of-dissatisfaction/How Airbnb ‘Human Translated’ Over 100 Million Words in 2019https://slator.com/features/how-airbnb-human-translated-over-100-million-words-in-2019/Podcasts Are Going Multilingualhttps://slator.com/demand-drivers/podcasts-are-going-multilingual/

Capping off a hectic week with a Friday 13th special, Florian and Esther unpack the state of the language industry as Coronavirus goes global. From reports of demand surges for video remote interpreting and from some retail and e-commerce customers, to slowdowns in IT, e-learning and multimedia translation requests, how are the world’s language service providers faring in the face of the pandemic? The two discuss localization at asset and wealth management firm Fisher Investments, where the in-house team of five linguists, one project manager and one localization manager have shifted from outsourcing 70% of language tasks to handling more than half internally.Links to the stories discussed in this episode:The State of the Language Industry as Coronavirus Goes Globalhttps://slator.com/industry-news/the-state-of-the-language-industry-as-coronavirus-goes-global/At Fisher Investments, Localization Drives Revenue Through Client Retentionhttps://slator.com/features/at-fisher-investments-localization-drives-revenue-through-client-retention/

Esther gives a short briefing on the AILIA conference she attended in Ottawa last week. The two discuss how the ongoing economic disruptions caused by the coronavirus are impacting the language industry and freelance linguists. They review the ranking of the fastest growing language service providers of 2019 and wonder about a recent RFP published by US Department of Homeland Security, which is looking to procure a quasi-magic translation and interpreting device for less than a million US-Dollars.Links to the stories discussed in this episode:The Slator 2020 Language Service Provider Indexhttps://slator.com/data-research/the-slator-2020-language-service-provider-index/US Coast Guard Opens RFP to Replace ‘Human Translator’ with ‘Portable Translator’https://slator.com/technology/us-coast-guard-opens-rfp-to-replace-human-translator-with-portable-translator/Here Are the 20 Fastest-Growing Language Service Providers of 2019https://slator.com/data-research/here-are-the-20-fastest-growing-language-service-providers-of-2019/

Who came in top? Who grew fastest? Who struggled? Florian and Esther discuss the newly released Slator 2020 Language Service Provider Index (LSPI), featuring 130 language service providers on first release. Breaking down the landscape of providers into four segments: Super Agencies, Leaders, Challengers and Boutiques, the two analyze some of the best performances across each of the categories, and look at factors that influenced growth.The fasting growing segment was the Leaders, at 14.85%, which outpaced growth across the three other segments through a mix of organic and acquisitive growth. Growth across the 130 LSPs who participated in the LSPI was around 15%. Stripping away acquisitions, LSPs are growing in the mid-single digits, Florian estimated.

Florian and Esther share a sneak peak of 2019’s LSP results ahead of publishing the Slator 2020 LSPI next week. Get an exclusive look at the top 10 language service providers by revenue in 2019, as Florian and Esther discuss language industry Super Agencies and Leaders, and reveal which media localizer made it into the top 10 for the first time. What could go wrong? As several US airports have taken to using Google Assistant Interpreter to help foreign travellers interact with airport staff, Florian live-tests the software on air with German to English! See how it fares (and whether Esther understands) as Florian tries out some tourist lingo.Esther talks about Capita plc’s planned sale of its translation and interpreting business (Capita TI), along with eight other “specialized services” businesses, which come with a total price tag of GBP 200m plus for the lot. UK outsourcing giant Capita plc is offloading its sideline translation and interpreting business as part of its efforts to refocus on high-margin digital and software solutions.Florian unpacks the information shared by game localization provider Keywords Studios during its recent Capital Markets event, highlighting how the company plans to use machine translation (through recently acquired KantanMT) for its player support operations. Links to the stories discussed in this episode:Capita Plans to Sell Translation and Interpreting Business, UK Media Reportshttps://slator.com/ma-and-funding/capita-plans-to-sell-translation-and-interpreting-business-uk-media-reports/Keywords Studios Updates Investors on M&A, Media Loc, and an Intriguing Use Case for KantanMThttps://slator.com/financial-results/keywords-studios-updates-investors-on-ma-media-loc-and-an-intriguing-use-case-for-kantanmt/After Watchdog Fine, Norway’s Police Opens Bidding for Nationwide Interpreting Contracthttps://slator.com/demand-drivers/after-watchdog-fine-norways-police-opens-bidding-for-nationwide-interpreting-contract/

SlatorPod #8! Esther shares details about localization at US-based coaching app BetterUp, which works with enterprise customers across 62 countries and 30 languages. BetterUp’s Localization Program Manager, Ella Pętlicka spoke to Slator about localization operations at BetterUp including the Trans-Adaptation workflow — Florian and Esther discuss this and other workflows (e.g., transcreation and linguistic validation) that aim to deliver hyper locale-aware content. Florian runs through the latest financial results for Japan’s largest translation company, Honyaku Center, and unpacks Straker Translations’ recent acquisition of New Zealand’s oldest company, NZTC International. Esther talks about new subtitling standards in Finland that seek to promote consistency across streaming platforms. The two discuss online language provision for Indian languages, and how Oxford Languages (a division of Oxford University Press) is driving better access and experiences for India’s internet users through wordlists, dictionary entries, bilingual lexicons etc. in 12 major Indian languages. Datasets for such low-resource languages can be used to improve machine translation, voice recognition and speech-to-text solutions and more.Links to the stories discussed in this episode:Why BetterUp’s Localization Process Starts at Content Creationhttps://slator.com/features/trans-adaptation-why-betterups-localization-process-starts-at-content-creation/Shares in Japan’s Largest Translation Company Slide on Declining Revenueshttps://slator.com/financial-results/shares-in-japans-largest-translation-company-slide-on-declining-revenues/Straker Translations Pays USD 1.1Million for New Zealand Rival NZTChttps://slator.com/ma-and-funding/straker-translations-pays-usd-1-1-million-for-new-zealand-rival-nztc/Finland Introduces Subtitling Standards for Consistency Across Platformshttps://slator.com/demand-drivers/finland-introduces-subtitling-standards-for-consistency-across-platforms/How Oxford Languages is Transforming Indian Language Internet Users’ Online Experienceshttps://slator.com/sponsored-content/how-oxford-languages-is-transforming-indian-language-internet-users-online-experiences/

Florian talks about DeepL’s claims of making yet another “breakthrough” in what they call “AI translation quality”. Esther unpacks a recent survey of UK gaming professionals by industry association ukie, which finds that localization workers in gaming are better educated, and less depressed and anxious than their counterparts in other functions. According to the survey, game loc professionals are also the most diverse bunch in gaming: if looked at in terms of gender, nationality and ethnicity. Esther and Florian also discuss the Slator Job Index, which rebounded from a dip in January to reach record highs, +9% above the benchmark of July 2018.Florian talks about Straker Translations’ latest quarterly results and how the strategic shift to serving enterprise customers impacts results.Esther shares news of a debate that’s developing in Mexico around the idea of increasing the use of dubbing in Mexican movie theaters. Pro-dubbing campaigners, including voice actors, want all foreign-language films to have dubbed versions. In the other camp, film purists want to protect what they see as the audience’s right to experience film content in its intended form. Lastly, Florian highlights a small acquisition in Switzerland by LSP Apostroph Group, which acquired Swiss rival boutique provider USG - the fourth M&A deal Slator covered in 2020.Links to the stories discussed in this episode:Localization Pros are Best Educated and Least Depressed, UK Gaming Industry Survey Findshttps://slator.com/industry-news/localization-pros-are-best-educated-and-least-depressed-uk-gaming-industry-survey-finds/Slator Job Index Rebounds in February 2020, Hits Record Highhttps://slator.com/industry-news/slator-job-index-rebounds-in-february-2020-hits-record-high/Straker’s Growth Slows as Enterprise Shift Subdues Third Quarter FY 2020 Resultshttps://slator.com/financial-results/strakers-growth-slows-as-enterprise-shift-subdues-third-quarter-fy-2020-results/Pro-dubbing Senator Sparks Debate in Mexico Over Foreign-Language Film Proposalhttps://slator.com/demand-drivers/pro-dubbing-senator-sparks-debate-in-mexico-over-foreign-language-film-proposal/Apostroph Group Tucks in Boutique Language Service Provider USG in Switzerlandhttps://slator.com/ma-and-funding/apostroph-group-tucks-in-boutique-language-service-provider-usg-in-switzerland/

SlatorPod #6! Florian Faes and Esther Bond unpack ASICS’ localization strategy and weigh up the benefits of centralized and local procurement strategies. The two also discuss when to use a vendor-agnostic (pureplay) translation management system (TMS), or one offered by an LSP. Florian analyzes the acquisition of US-based video interpreting provider Stratus Video by healthcare service giant AMN Healthcare for a whopping USD 475m, while Esther shares highlights from the UK Association of Translation Companies (UK ATC)’s newly published manifesto on public sector translation and interpreting. Links to the stories discussed in this episode:How ASICS Runs Localization: Insights on Vendors, Processes, Technologieshttps://slator.com/features/how-asics-runs-localization-insights-on-vendors-processes-technologies/AMN Healthcare to Buy Interpreting Provider Stratus Video for USD 475 Millionhttps://slator.com/ma-and-funding/amn-healthcare-to-buy-interpreting-provider-stratus-video-for-usd-475-million/UK ATC Manifesto Tackles Issues in Public Sector Translation and Interpretinghttps://slator.com/industry-news/uk-atc-manifesto-tackles-issues-in-public-sector-translation-and-interpreting/

SlatorPod #5! Florian Faes and Esther Bond discuss the 1,500-strong interpreter strike in the Netherlands. Florian talks about Amazon’s foray into automatic machine dubbing, which combines machine translation, text-to-speech, and audio rendering models. Esther unpacks the 2019 financial results for two Super Agencies — SDL and TransPerfect. TransPerfect’s acquisition of no less than seven media localizers in 2019 made it the most acquisitive LSP in 2019, just one of a number of highlights Esther shared from the recently released Slator 2019 Language Industry M&A and Funding Report.Links to the stories discussed in this episode:We’re On Strike: Dutch Linguists Oppose the Use of ‘Less Qualified’ Interpretershttps://slator.com/industry-news/were-on-strike-dutch-linguists-oppose-the-use-of-less-qualified-interpreters/Machine Dubbing: Amazon AI Opens New Chapter in Automating Media Localizationhttps://slator.com/technology/machine-dubbing-amazon-ai-opens-new-chapter-in-automating-media-localization/SDL Expects 2019 Revenues of Roughly USD 488mhttps://slator.com/financial-results/sdl-expects-2019-revenues-of-roughly-usd-488m/TransPerfect Revenue Climbs to Record USD 764m in 2019 but Growth Slowshttps://slator.com/financial-results/transperfect-revenue-climbs-to-record-usd-764m-in-2019-but-growth-slows/Slator 2019 Language Industry M&A and Funding Reporthttps://slator.com/data-research/slator-2019-language-industry-ma-and-funding-report/

SlatorPod #4! Florian Faes and Esther Bond discuss South-East Asia streaming joint-venture HOOQ and their localization efforts across a handful of Asian languages. The two also talk about Lionbridge being sued over earn-out payments by the founders of Geotext, a legal translation company they acquired in 2015. Translation scams continue to be a problem with fake translators impersonating real ones. Esther talks about how those scams work and what can be done about it. Finally, the two discuss the ubiquitous “translation earpieces” which apparently were a hot topic at the Consumer Electronic Shows (CES) in Las Vegas.Links to the stories discussed in this episode:Streaming Platform HOOQ Sees ‘Great Return’ on Localization, Sets 100 Originals for 2020 Releasehttps://slator.com/features/streaming-platform-hooq-sees-great-return-on-localization-sets-100-originals-for-2020-release/Here’s What Translator Scammers Were Up to in 2019https://slator.com/industry-news/heres-what-translator-scammers-were-up-to-in-2019/Geotext Founders Sue Lionbridge Over Earn-Out From 2015 Acquisitionhttps://slator.com/industry-news/geotext-founders-sue-lionbridge-over-earn-out-from-2015-acquisition/Subscribe to SlatorSweep and SlatorPro herehttps://slator.com/slator-market-intelligence

SlatorPod #3! Florian Faes and Esther Bond discuss London localization meet-ups, the European Parliament’s giant Translation Directorate’s EUR 60m translation award, Amazon hiring new media localizers, and the scorecard of the handful of publicly listed language service providers. Esther talks about the January reading of the Slator Language Industry Job Index and Florian plucks Amazon’s new batch translation and two other stories featured in this week’s SlatorSweep. Then the two do some crystal ball gazing and make predictions for 2020 language industry M&A and startup funding as well as trends in MT, and talk about their Q1 conference speaking schedule.Links to the stories discussed in this episode:EU Awards EUR 63 Million in Translation Contracts to Kick Off 2020https://slator.com/deal-wins/eu-awards-eur-63-million-in-translation-contracts-to-kick-off-2020/Slator Language Industry Buyer Tracker January 2020https://slator.com/people-moves/slator-language-industry-buyer-tracker-january-2020/Ranking and Analysis: 2019 Full-Year Performance of Listed Language Service Providershttps://slator.com/financial-results/ranking-and-analysis-2019-full-year-performance-of-listed-language-service-providers/Slator Job Index Edges Down Slightly in January 2020https://slator.com/industry-news/slator-job-index-edges-down-slightly-in-january-2020/What It Takes to Be a Lawyer-Linguist at the European Unionhttps://slator.com/features/what-it-takes-to-be-a-lawyer-linguist-at-the-european-union/Subscribe to SlatorSweep and SlatorPro herehttps://slator.com/slator-market-intelligence

Florian Faes and Esther Bond discuss the week’s language industry news.Featured this week: the top language industry quotes of 2019 including TransPerfect, BTI Studios, Unbabel’s venture capital backer, and Nike’s Global Localization Manager. Then, the two discuss California’s controversial AB5 gig worker bill, which the language industry is fighting tooth and nail, and Keyword Studio’s acquisition of machine translation provider KantanMT for EUR 7M.Links to the stories discussed in this episode:Top Language Industry Quotes of 2019https://slator.com/features/top-language-industry-quotes-of-2019/Capital Markets Day: What Keywords Studios Said About Game and Media Localizationhttps://slator.com/industry-news/capital-markets-day-what-keywords-studios-said-about-game-and-media-localization‘Translation Agencies Are Cancelling My Contracts’ — California’s AB5 Bill Starts to Bite https://slator.com/industry-news/translation-agencies-are-cancelling-my-contracts-californias-ab5-bill-starts-to-bite/Keywords Studios Buys Machine Translation Provider KantanMT for Up to EUR 7 Millionhttps://slator.com/ma-and-funding/keywords-studios-buys-machine-translation-provider-kantanmt-for-up-to-eur-7-million/From Translation Service to Globalization Consultancy: Transforming Localization at LogMeInhttps://slator.com/slatorcon/from-translation-service-to-globalization-consultancy-transforming-localization-at-logmein/How Localization Is Run at Nike, Bose, and KAYAK: SlatorCon Panel Insighthttps://slator.com/slatorcon/how-localization-is-run-at-nike-bose-and-kayak-slatorcon-panel-insights/

SlatorPod #1, the very first edition! Florian Faes and Esther Bond discuss the week’s language industry news. Featured this week: a giant interpreting contract gone wrong in Denmark; the EU’s translation test fail; RWS continues its growth streak posting yet another year of revenue and profit growth, and takeaways from SlatorCon Amsterdam’s enterprise localization panel.Links to the stories discussed in this first episode of SlatorPod:How Localization Is Run at Nike, Bose, and KAYAK: SlatorCon Panel Insightshttps://slator.com/slatorcon/how-localization-is-run-at-nike-bose-and-kayak-slatorcon-panel-insights/Serious Data Protection Violations: Denmark Terminates Giant EasyTranslate Contracthttps://slator.com/industry-news/serious-data-protection-violations-denmark-terminates-giant-easytranslate-contract/‘Unacceptable’ — Tempers Flare Over European Commission’s Bungled Translation Testhttps://slator.com/industry-news/unacceptable-tempers-flare-over-european-commissions-bungled-translation-test/RWS Delivers Another Strong Year as Strategic Bets Pay Offhttps://slator.com/financial-results/rws-delivers-another-strong-year-as-strategic-bets-pay-off/