#145 Everyone’s Talking About ChatGPT, DeepL Crowned Unicorn

Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week, with the hype surrounding ChatGPT. Slator joined in by prompting ChatGPT to answer questions as if it were a translation manager.

After reports back in November 2022 stated that DeepL was in the final stretch of closing a major investment round, DeepL has finally confirmed that it raised funds from VCs at a billion-dollar valuation.

Translator Scammers Directory shared their annual report of scammer activities in 2022. Last year saw the first dip in new scammer IDs since 2018, signaling lower payoffs for imposters involved in the CV scam.

Florian and Esther then talk about the best and worst-performing listed language service providers (LSPs) in 2022. Out of the 12 LSPs, only Zoo Digital and Honyaku Centre delivered a positive performance, while Appen’s stock continued to plunge.

A large Amazon study titled “Large Scale Study of Human Localization With Insights for Automatic Dubbing” reviewed hundreds of hours of Prime Video content. The researchers found that human dubbers prioritize translation quality and speech naturalness over timing and lip sync.

Slator waved goodbye to the Language Industry Job Index after four years as a result of changes to the availability of the underlying data.