SlatorPod

Augustin Prot, Co-founder and CEO of Weglot, joins SlatorPod to talk about the startup’s journey as a no-code website localization technology provider. Augustin discusses his not-so-typical professional background in M&A and how he got into the language services and tech industry. He talks us through the transformation of their client segments, from self-service SMBs to large enterprises, and how Weglot aligns its product with these sectors.The CEO talks about raising EUR 45m with partner Partech Growth to scale product development and expand their 30-person team. He shares how no-code tech has evolved since Weglot was founded, with digitalization and Covid-19 accelerating the trend.Augustin shares the complexities behind website localization and how they tackle SEO challenges — such as getting Google to recognize the translated version of a website. The pod rounds off with Weglot’s roadmap for 2022, including a new integration with Squarespace and the ability to translate variables from within a platform.First up, Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week, unpacking Google’s huge new language model with 540 billion parameters.In the anime-translation world, the English release of the Japanese fantasy manga, Ranking of Kings, was suspended due to “typographical and translation issues.” (Previous SlatorPod guest, Katrina Leonoudakis, analyzed the English translation and tweeted how it was partly copied from a fan-made translation.)Esther talks about Iyuno-SDI’s strategic investment in UK-based technology provider, Ortana Media Group. (Florian points out how Iyuno-SDI’s German press release was lightly post-edited using, most likely, DeepL.)

In this week’s SlatorPod, we are joined by Bryan Forrester, Co-founder and CEO of Boostlingo, a Texas-based interpreting software and technology provider.Bryan begins with his journey to co-founding Boostlingo; from selling his first tech startup, Anchor Software, to entering the interpreting space. The CEO shares his experience partnering with growth equity firm Mainsail Partners in order to scale the business through hiring and M&A. He addresses the VoiceBoxer and Interpreter Intelligence acquisitions as part of a strategy to expand into remote simultaneous interpreting (RSI) and on-demand scheduling. He talks about some of the technical challenges with VRI and OPI when it comes to bandwidth.Bryan gives his take on the US interpreting market and how Covid-19 affected the structure of on-site, remote, and hybrid interpreting in healthcare. The pod rounds off with Boostlingo’s plans for 2022 with a build instead of buy approach.First up, Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week, with Microsoft giving early access for select users to their re-engineered multilingual machine translation system. Florian talks about the Japanese Government’s claim that their machine translation engine has reached the level of professional translators in the financial sector. In media localization, Esther shares Keywords Studios’ full-year 2021 results, which saw revenues grow by more than a third from 2020.Esther gives an update on the Slator Language Industry Job Index, which is up by six points since the beginning of 2022, only two points lower than the all-time high in December 2021. 

Nico Herbig and ​​Josef van Genabith join SlatorPod to talk all about their project, called MMPE, a multi-modal interface for post-editing machine translation.Nico shares the motivation behind starting MMPE and how they aim to improve the collaboration between human translators and language technology. Josef explains how they geared the project toward a human-in-the-loop model.The duo reflect on the early research behind the project, where they gathered input from professional translators to narrow down the design and handwriting interaction. They discuss the hardware technology and their approach when it comes to measuring cognitive load.The segment rounds off with the next steps for MMPE now that the project is complete — from the potential commercialization of certain aspects to further research in eye-tracking.First up, Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week, with RWS announcing the acquisition of Liones and analyst projections of USD 1 billion in FY 2022 revenue.In the US, Boostlingo has bought two tech-focused providers, Voiceboxer and Interpreter Intelligence, expanding their offering to VRI, OPI, RSI, and on-demand interpreting. Meanwhile, Google gives YouTubers early access to free machine dubbing with Aloud, the Google-grown dubbing solution that debuted in March 2022.Florian talks about the StartSummit conference, which kicked off with Jaroslaw Kutylowski, Founder and CEO of DeepL, highlighting the company’s strong growth despite zero marketing.In other news, France-based Weglot, a website localization provider powered by machine translation, secured a EUR 45m investment from tech-focused investor Partech Growth. And two of the largest French LSPs have come together as Super Agency Acolad acquired top-10 Leader Ubiqus.

In a guest solo, Meta’s VP of Internationalization, Product Quality, and Product Experience, Iris Orriss, joins SlatorPod to talk about the company’s mission to give people the power to build communities, bringing the world closer together.Iris recounts her journey to joining the language industry, from training as a geologist to working in big tech, from Microsoft to Meta. She also reveals her motivations for working in the field of internationalization.The VP shares Meta’s strategy to remove language and cultural barriers through technology and the localization of major languages not well-represented on the Internet, such as Amharic, Khmer, and Sinhala. She discusses the scale of internationalization operations at Meta with more than 100 languages on the platform and millions of words translated every week.Iris announces the end of their Community Translation program, where translators helped Meta make the Internet’s major languages available on the platform. The shift comes as Meta plans to migrate to a supplier source process, where they will work with single-language vendors (SLVs), specifically in African and Southeast Asian countries, to build Meta’s translation infrastructure.The Meta VP rounds out the episode with what internationalization looks like in the Metaverse. This includes the shift from text to audio, personalizing avatars, and creating your own home.

Felix Laumann, CEO of NeuralSpace, joins SlatorPod to talk all about the no-code, low-code natural language processing (NLP) platform for low-resource languages.Felix recalls his journey to startup CEO in the NLP milieu after coming from a computer and mechanical engineering background; plus the origin story of NeuralSpace. He discusses the difficulty behind building models for low-resource languages when faced with less than 1% of data available.The CEO recounts his experience connecting with investors to raise a USD 1.7m seed round. He explains how machine translation fits into their framework, with the main use-case being building chatbots.Felix reveals how they collect data and their plans to work directly with linguistic professionals to cover different pronunciations, tones, and emotions. He shares plans to add more speech capabilities and cover nearly any fundamental NLP project or problem.First up, Florian and Esther talk about the language industry news of the week, with the final agenda for SlatorCon Remote complete. Esther talks about Transline Gruppe swapping majority owners as former backer LEAD Equities exits via sale to investment firm Blue Cap. Florian then reviews Slator’s coverage of the skills required as a post-editor, MT engineer, and PE consultant.In M&A, ZOO Digital announces the launch of ZOO Korea, alongside the acquisition of a 51% stake in Seoul-based subtitling and dubbing provider, WhatSub Pro. Meanwhile, US-based Verbit expanded its transcription services in the UK with the acquisition of market research specialist Take Note.

Brigham Tomco, CEO of Emmersion, joins SlatorPod to talk all about automating language evaluation and the underlying tech behind it.Brigham begins with his journey into the language education and tech industry, where he started two venture-backed companies. He recounts the early days of Emmersion, where they offered language tutoring and how they evolved into building language assessment tech.The CEO shares the importance of language learning in the age of AI with language tech like machine translation and speech-to-speech. He identifies the different key client segments, from call centers and BPOs to academia and LSPs.Brigham unpacks the language tech and patenting process behind language testing products, such as TrueNorth Speaking Test and WebCAPE. He outlines how they handled the rapid demand for remote hiring as a result of Covid and Emmersion’s roadmap for the future.First up, Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week, with Simon Lee, CEO of language data platform Flitto, sharing how the company has integrated the metaverse into their everyday work.The duo talk about the state of the data-for-AI market as Appen’s share price fell by 28% after releasing full-year 2021 results. Meanwhile, in Australia, captioning and translation provider Ai-Media grew 29% to AUD 29.6m in the first half of 2022.Esther then gives an update on the Language Industry Job Index, which climbed three points to 176.6 in March 2022.

In this week’s episode, Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week, kicking off with some key stats from the Slator 2022 Language Service Provider Index (LSPI). Florian talks about the latest in M&A news, where the low-resource language API platform NeuralSpace raised USD 1.7m in a seed round led by Merus Capital. To cap off the episode, the duo unpacks a recent post from Meta titled, “Teaching AI to translate 100s of spoken and written languages in real time”, where the company announced two new projects.

In this week’s SlatorPod, we’re joined by Marco Assis, CEO of Propio Language Services (Propio), a US-based interpreting and language technology company.Marco begins with his unusual route into the language industry where he spent most of his career in finance and M&A before taking over Propio from its long-term owners in 2017. He talks about Propio’s highly specialized healthcare domain and outlines the similarities and differences between servicing public vs. private sector clients.The CEO shares his experience teaming up with private equity and what Triple Tree Capital Partners brings to the table in terms of operations. He also gives listeners a behind-the-scenes glimpse at recruiting, training, and working with translators and interpreters. Marco gives his take on the competition from in-house services at major hospital systems and insurance companies.He then talks about the motivation behind building proprietary technology and launching the mobile app platform Propio ONE. The pod rounds off with Propio’s plans for 2022 with Marco announcing the launch of the company’s first international operations hub in Mexico.First up, Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week, with machine dubbing startup Deepdub raising USD 20m in a series A round. Meanwhile, Florian unpacks a CNET article on the “dying art of subtitling,” where he points out that subtitling is actually thriving despite subtitlers being hard to source.Esther talks about “Why Eye-Tracking Matters in Machine Translation Post-Editing,” where eye-tracking has been found to be a promising tool for MT error identification and fair post-editing pricing models. Florian shares the latest on SlatorCon Remote March 2022 with Deluxe CEO Cyril Drabinsky and Straker CEO Grant Straker joining the 20 speaker lineup.

Alessandra Vincenzi, Head of Audio Localization at Keywords Studios, joins SlatorPod to talk about the ins and outs of audio localization in the video game industry.Alessandra starts with her route into the audio localization space with Binari Sonori and her transition to Keywords Studios. She shares the differences between localizing for mobile versus Triple-A games.She also talks about casting, onboarding, and categorizing voice-acting talent and how actors are matched to different clients. She goes into possible use cases for artificial voices in video games and the migration to remote recording solutions.Alessandra gives her outlook on game localization with a growing amount of titles coming from Asia and the continuing convergence of game and media localization.First up, Florian and Esther review the poll results from February, where the hottest localization trend of 2022 divided opinions.On Slator’s job ad platform LocJobs, DeepL posted their first job for a Localization and Language Specialist – Turkish, perhaps signaling the company’s intention to add Turkish to the 26 languages it currently offers.To cap off the episode, Esther shares the latest numbers from Slator’s Language Industry Job Index for February, which climbed 0.65 points following a seasonal dip in January 2022.

In this week’s SlatorPod, we are joined by Lynne Bowker, Professor at the University of Ottawa to discuss the Machine Translation Literacy Project, whose eye-catching infographics have proven very popular on Twitter.Lynne shares her background working in higher education and how this led to her running the MT Literacy Project. She talks about the evolution of machine translation (MT) systems and how this inspired her to teach users in the wider population about the dos and don'ts of using MT output.Lynne talks about the different use cases of free online MT systems, highlighting her research on how international students use MT as an aid for scholarly writing in English. She mentions the importance of confidentiality and privacy when using programs such as DeepL and Google Translate.The pod rounds off with Lynne’s plans to train teachers in MT Literacy and introduce the project to thousands of secondary school students as part of enhancing their digital literacy skills.First up, Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week, with TransPerfect becoming the first language service provider (LSP) to report annual revenues of over USD 1bn. Another company to clear the billionaire-dollar mark was Iyuno-SDI, as the media localization provider was valued at USD 1.2bn in its latest round of investment.Over in Europe, the “Irish derogation” has ended — meaning that every piece of EU legislation must be published in Irish. Florian talks about a mistranslation by the Scottish Government that saw “Happy Burns Night” being mistaken for “heat burns” in Scottish Gaelic.Meanwhile, Esther covers Straker Translations’ Q3 FY22 financial update, with the LSP recording a 99% increase from the Q3 FY21 and a 26% increase from Q2 FY22.