#56 Media Loc Mega-Deal, Mark Shriner on Sales and Asia, Call of Duty Loc Stats

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.