Bizarre AI Research, Perplexity Ad Blunder, New RWS Hires

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.