#100 The Social Impact of Language Technology With Andrew Bredenkamp

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.