#166 Translation and Localization Industry Maintains Growth in 2022 to USD 27.9bn

Florian and Esther discuss the launch of Slator’s flagship 2023 Language Industry Market Report. The 140-page report provides a comprehensive view of the global language services and language technology industry, which Slator estimates grew over 4% to nearly USD 28bn in 2022 on the back of a strong first half.

The duo talk about OpenAI’s new endeavor to enforce its branding guidelines to prevent companies from using GPT in their names or products. OpenAI believes that using GPT in branding confuses end-users, as it may imply a partnership or endorsement where there isn't one.

Esther examines Appen’s financial update, where they reported a decline in revenue and gross profit in the first third of 2023. She expects that the data-for-AI provider will continue to face headwinds from the broader technology market slowdown, impacting revenues for FY23.

In a roundup of Swiss-centered NLP news, Florian discussed how researchers at the University of Zurich have created SwissBERT, a pre-trained language model specifically for processing Switzerland-related text. The model was trained on over 21 million Swiss news articles in German, French, Italian, and Romansh, and outperformed previous models on natural language understanding tasks related to Switzerland.

The Swiss Parliament has rejected a proposal to allow Swiss-German to be used in official federal political debates alongside the country's four official languages. Opponents argued that it would pose translation challenges and lead to gaps between what is spoken and written.

Meanwhile, Zurich-based machine translation (MT) company Textshuttle has launched a free MT service for the general public covering all four national languages, including Swiss-German.