#139 AI Dubbing Finds Traction, Translation Buyer’s Guide Published

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.