SlatorPod

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.

Björn Lifvergren, Executive Chairman of LinQ Media Group, joins SlatorPod to talk about dubbing, subtitling, and the media localization industry.Björn starts with his route into the media & entertainment and language space; where, after two decades of leading (and eventually selling) BTI Studios, he founded LinQ Media. He gives his take on delivering localized content at scale and reacts to Netflix revealing its subtitling and dubbing stats for the first time.Björn talks us through LinQ Media’s geographic market focus and experience in retaining dubbing and subtitling talent in the Nordics. He delves into dubbing services and the dynamics between owning a physical studio, using the cloud, and running a hybrid model.Björn reflects on his experience working with private equity and gives insights on how language service providers can work with investors. He shares his outlook on the media localization market and how linear TV and cinema will evolve in the next decade.Finally, he outlines how the strong demand for Nordic-language subtitling has allowed them to avoid post-editing machine-translation workflows for now and offer subtitlers a more traditional approach to their craft.First up, Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week, with an update on the lawsuit between Super Agencies Lionbridge and TransPerfect.Esther talks about Netflix’s surprising revelation from the COO, who disclosed that the streaming service subtitled seven million and dubbed five million run-time minutes in 2021. She also touches on the website OpenSubtitles.org, which announced that a hacker had gained access to nearly seven million users’ personal data in August 2021.Florian shares Meta’s latest unveiling of an AI supercomputer, which will be fully built out by mid-2022 to develop advanced AI for computer vision, NLP, speech recognition, and power translation in the metaverse.

Katrina Leonoudakis joins SlatorPod to discuss her experience as a Japanese-to-English Localization Specialist in the world of anime, manga, and video games.Katrina recounts her early years as a freelance translator and her experience breaking into the entertainment and media space. She shares the main cultural and linguistic challenges when localizing a Japanese game to adapt to a Western English-speaking culture.Katrina talks about how she deals with balancing the needs and preferences of the original scriptwriter, target audience, and client. She also reflects on the use of machine translation by indie versus Triple-A game studios and the negative impact of cost-cutting measures on freelancers.The Pod concludes with Katrina’s views on the highly skilled pool of media translators in film, animation, and gaming, as well as the recent hype around metaverse and virtual reality.First up, Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week, with SwissPost reversing its decision to block DeepL in the workplace after internal backlash. Meanwhile, in New Zealand, some interpreters who worked for ezispeak are complaining that their invoices have gone unpaid.Meanwhile, Germany-based LSP t’works Group announced the acquisition of Portugal’s Traductanet to expand into Iberia and South America. And Esther shares key data points from Slator’s newly-launched M&A and Funding Report.

In SlatorPod’s 100th episode, Andrew Bredenkamp, CEO of CLEAR Tech, joins the Pod to talk about the evolution of CLEAR Global, formerly known as Translators without Borders (TWB).Andrew recalls his path to joining CLEAR Global, with leadership roles at content governance platform Acrolinx and TWB, and why he stepped in to drive the tech piece of the puzzle with CLEAR Tech. He also defines how CLEAR Tech works with TWB and CLEAR Insights, the research and data branch of the organization.The CEO talks about the use of multilingual chatbots for two-way interactions in marginalized languages, and their plan to train chatbots in code-switching. He also shares how they collaborate with both Big Tech and local talent to build tech for low-resource languages in South Asia, South and Central America, Sub-Saharan Africa, and elsewhere.The Pod rounds off with Andrew outlining the organization’s current initiatives and what the language industry can do to support the group’s humanitarian efforts, from donating to volunteering language expertise.First up, Florian and Esther discuss the past three weeks of language industry news, with a recap of the best and worst-performing listed LSPs of 2021.In M&A and Funding news, Florian covers Unbabel’s surprising acquisition of Lingo24, which brings the AI agency deeper into conventional language services. Esther talks about machine translation startup Language I/O’s latest USD 6.5m funding round.Starting 2022 off, New Zealand-based Straker Translations expanded into Europe with the acquisition of Brussels-based LSP IDEST. This week, GLOBO strengthened its healthcare offering as it secured growth investment from VSS Capital Partners.