#59 Limecraft CEO and Founder Maarten Verwaest on AI-enabled subtitling

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).