SlatorPod

Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week, kicking off with highlights from Slator’s latest Game Localization Report. The 100-page report outlines the role that localization plays in bringing games to life and onto the market.In funding news, former Keywords Studios’ Exec, Andrea Ballista, raised EUR 1m in a seed round for his new machine dubbing venture, Voiseed. The funds will go towards Voiseed’s voice platform, Revoiceit, by improving its patented AI core technology and proprietary emotional multilingual dataset.Former SlatorPod guest and ADAPT Centre’s MT researcher Yasmin Moslem co-authored a paper recently on whether GPT-3 — the large language model behind ChatGPT — is capable of enhancing “adaptive MT."The European Commission are putting out a EUR 20m tender for Natural Language Understanding and Interaction in Advanced Language Technologies. The RFP will be open until 29 March 2023 and currently has 37 applicants offering their expertise.Over in North America, Public Services and Procurement Canada were required to report on the steps that they were taking to protect the health and safety of federal interpreters. The order came from Canada’s Labor Program following an increase in incidents linked to sound quality, including an October 2022 injury that sent an interpreter to the hospital.

Ramsri Goutham Golla joins SlatorPod to talk about his creator journey in AI SaaS (software-as-a-service), AI consulting, and AI courses.Ramsri discusses his shift from software engineer in Silicon Valley to entrepreneur in India with AI SaaS apps Questgen.ai, Supermeme.ai, and Supertranslate.ai. He shares how a “build in public” strategy can help inspire people to follow your journey.Ramsri talks about his blended approach to building products, marketing, and driving his social media channels. He touches on his most recent project, Supertranslate, which is powered by OpenAI's Whisper for its one-click subtitle generation.Ramsri shares how to build quickly on large language models like Whisper on a serverless GPU infrastructure and by partnering with developers who can build the front end. He gives his thoughts on the impact of ChatGPT on micro SaaS businesses and companies that have built on GPT-3.Ramsri outlines some of the movers in the data science space that have propelled innovation, from serverless GPUs and open-source machine learning to vector search companies. He talks about how to form a startup in India, including tips on logistics, operations, hiring, and whether to raise funding or not.The pod rounds off with Ramsri’s plans for the future, where he aims to eventually settle on one project full-time and sell off the others.

Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week, with TransPerfect sharing its financial results for 2022. The Super Agency grew by 4.6% to USD 1.16bn in 2022. CEO, Phil Shawe, disclosed that half the growth was organic and the other half was attributed to M&A.Natural language processing startup, Cohere, is reportedly raising hundreds of millions of dollars at a valuation of more than six billion dollars. Alongside ChatGPT and Anthropic, this funding is the latest nod to the ongoing hype in all things AI.In the UK, a report was released revealing how much the Nation Health Service (NHS) spent on interpreting services over three years. The NHS' spending came under scrutiny from the Taxpayers’ Alliance, which lobbies to “cut waste [and] reform taxes and public services”.Esther talks about Iyuno’s recent strategic investment in Turkish subtitling and dubbing provider, Ak’la Kara International. This move strengthens the US-headquartered media localizer’s presence in the EMEA region and expands its capacity for Turkish dubbing.At the end of January, the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Translation announced a forthcoming call for tenders for TRAD23. TRAD23 is a contract for the translation of EU documents from and into EU official languages and will cover more than one million pages per year.Florian discusses some of the announcements made at Google’s Live From Paris event (including additions to Google Translate), which saw Google Bard’s AI chatbot give the wrong answer at its launch, impacting Alphabet’s share price.

Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week, kicking off with a sneak peek into the brand new Slator 2022 Language Industry M&A and Funding Report. Spanning 44 pages, the report covers 62 M&A transactions and 18 startup and tech funding rounds. Following the latest research in ChatGPT, Intento published an article comparing ChatGPT translations to translations done by other stock MT engines. Florian discusses the results with ChatGPT performing well for English to Spanish but found lacking for English to German.The Committee for Organizing the Olympic and Paralympic Games is looking for an interpreting technology provider who can offer a platform for remote simultaneous interpreting (RSI). The winning candidate will supply an RSI platform for more than 60 interpreters working in 11 languages before and during the Games.Esther shares her experience watching Netflix’s 1899, which brought together nine source languages, and a number of translated versions: 14 dubbed languages and 32 subtitle options. The one-season series was distributed in 58 countries and was made up of an international cast and crew. Over in Ireland and London, Keywords Studios are seeing a healthy demand for game localization after posting 22% organic growth in the second half of 2022. The gaming services giant expects full-year revenue and profits to slightly exceed previous guidance.

Tanya Bogin, Managing Director of Craft London, joins SlatorPod to talk about the company’s end-to-end creative production services across all media channels and languages. Tanya discusses her route into the language industry; from working as a radio station manager to entering the transcreation industry with Craft. She talks about how the company brings creative ideas to life through cultural adaptation, translation, and transcreation.Tanya outlines the rigorous testing process behind recruiting transcreation specialists and how their bespoke workflow yields successful results with clients. She touches on the role of language technology at Craft with a combination of best-of-breed cloud-based CAT tools and human-driven translation.Tanya talks about the impact of AI and how they have implemented features like SEO, dynamic content optimization, and virtual production to improve workflow. She shares how they partnered with AI video generation platform Synthesia to transcreate JustEat’s Snoop Dogg advertisement for the global market.The pod rounds off with Craft’s initiatives for 2023, including continuing to pay translators fairly and using AI to increase the sustainability of their productions.

In this week’s SlatorPod, LXT Chief Growth Officer Phil Hall joins us to talk about the company’s journey, from providing high-quality Arabic data for a Big Tech company to expanding into 750 languages.Phil shares his background teaching linguistics and leading business development for Appen before joining LXT. He discusses the key findings from The Path to AI Majority report, from the maturity levels among 200 executives surveyed to which industries are trailblazers in AI adoption.Phil touches on search relevance ranking as a method to retrain machine learning and give more relevant results. He gives his thoughts on ChatGPT and why he considers it a step change in AI.Phil talks about LXT’s growth strategy, with M&A a potential avenue to acquire new customers and improve the technology stack. He goes over some of the legal and security considerations when it comes to data, with permission and secure facilities taking priority.The pod rounds off with Phil’s take on where the AI industry is heading, with quite a long way to go before it becomes stable, low risk, and deployed with absolute confidence.

Google’s Head of Product, Translation AI, Mallika Iyer, joins SlatorPod to talk all about the company’s new Translation Hub.  Mallika begins with her journey from software engineer to leading all of the translation products for Google Cloud, most recently Translation Hub. She shares the motivation behind launching the hub, where they saw that overall demand for translation had increased, but budgets necessarily hadn’t.Mallika discusses the basic and advanced tiers the hub offers, with the latter including domain-specific translation, translation memory, and translation quality prediction. She explains how the hub has gained traction early on with languages of lesser diffusion in addition to the major FIGS or CCJK combinations.Mallika talks about a case study with Avery Dennison and how they rolled out Translation Hub to all their employees to improve language communication and promote an inclusive workplace culture. She expands on the different sectors the hub serves, from those with limited budgets in the public sector to those on the opposite side in retail and manufacturing. The pod rounds off with Mallika laying out the Hub’s roadmap for 2023, with plans to add more document types, improve user experience, and integrate with third-party products. Translation Hub’s ultimate goal is to make the hub more accessible with new features while keeping its simplicity.

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.

In this week’s SlatorPod, Happy Scribe CEO André Bastié joins us to talk about building a unified platform for transcription and subtitling.André discusses the journey to co-founding Happy Scribe during his studies where he accidentally came across the challenge of transcription and built a first prototype with his flatmate and now CTO, Marc Assens Reina.The CEO shares how their product development has evolved, from initially deploying the Google Speech API to connecting to various off-the-shelf systems to, now, building their own custom models. He talks about how being a bootstrapped company forces them to focus on producing results with limited resources.André touches on the different customized features that allow users to create a vocabulary list, build their own dictionary, and adjust the number of characters per line for subtitling projects.He gives his take on what’s driving the popularity of subtitles in short-form content and how subtitling differs between TikTok and long-form entertainment.The CEO talks about the positives and negatives of Whisper, OpenAI’s open-source ASR model, and its impact on the AI space. The pod rounds off with Happy Scribe’s roadmap for 2023, including some interesting changes to pricing.

In the final SlatorPod episode of 2022, we are joined by Marco Trombetti, cofounder and CEO of Italy-based LSP Translated. Marco joins us two years on from our episode with Translated’s other cofounder, Isabelle Andrieu.Marco breaks down the LSP’s Singularity in AI research project and defines what singularity means in translation. He walks us through the process and the vast data collection effort behind the research, with “time to edit” emerging as the key performance indicator for machine translation quality.He talks about whether Translated has reached a plateau of productivity in postediting and the challenges of building a user interface for interacting with natural language. He also gives his take on the importance of owning an adaptive solution for machine translation like ModernMT.Marco shares Translated’s approach to working with some of the world’s biggest companies such as Airbnb. He explains how they see financing as a requirement to reach their goals — which eventually fuelled their decision to secure USD 25m in growth equity.The CEO shares his thoughts on ChatGPT. He thinks big language models will be the future of search and natural language will become the primary way of interacting.Initiatives such as participating in the Ocean Globe Race 2023, the Imminent research center, and Pi Campus are all central to spreading their values and creating an innovative community, Marco concludes.