SlatorPod

XTM CEO Bob Willans joins the pod to discuss the journey of the company he co-founded back in 2002. Bob talks about growing XTM with little outside funding to become a USD 11m SaaS company in 2021.He discusses XTM’s decision and search to bring on financial backers in 2021, which culminated in XTM’s majority sale to US-based investment firm K1 Investment Management in January 2021.Bob shares his views on the TMS funding and investment boom in 2020 and unpacks the landmark shifts in translation management technology over the past two decades.Bob also talks about milestone developments in XTM’s product, including totally rewriting their translation editor at one stage, and discusses how the company balances out feature requests and customization for enterprise clients against general product enhancements.First up, Florian and Esther kick off with some key stats from the Slator 2021 Language Service Provider Index (LSPI), which features more than 175 companies on its launch in early March 2021.The two also talk about the Language Industry Job Index (LIJI), which climbed nearly 10 points in March 2021, while Florian discusses the underwhelming consumer reaction to the Apple Translate app.

In this week’s SlatorPod, Semantix Chief Business Officer Britta Aagaard joins us to talk about their recent major deal win — a EUR 34m translation contract for the EU GROW project. Britta discusses what’s involved in bidding for, winning, and setting up to go live on a contract of this size, as well as the role of Semantix’s technology partner ESTeam.Britta also talks about her path to joining Semantix, which resulted from the 2017 acquisition of Textminded, the translation company that she headed as CEO before its sale to public sector interpreting specialist Semantix. Four years later, Britta shares how learnings from the public sector carry over to servicing private sector customers, and how the acquisition of Textminded has seen Semantix expand its offering to become a bonafide full-service LSP. First up, Florian and Esther discuss dating website operator Match.com's acquisition of a multilingual video chat platform built on Google Translation API for a cool USD 1.73bn, while Microsoft rolled out ‘Document Translation’ for LSPs and Enterprises. The two unpack the latest financial results from Australia-listed companies Ai-Media — a captioning and subtitling provider that delivered upwards of seven million minutes in the six months to December 31, 2020  — and Appen, whose shares tumbled despite 12% growth in 2020.

In SlatorPod #59, Limecraft CEO and Founder Maarten Verwaest joins us to talk about digital workflow management in the media sector and AI-enabled subtitling. Maarten shares his entrepreneurial journey, tells us why he doesn’t plan to bring on financial investors, and explains why AI should not be left unattended. First up, Florian and Esther discuss the week’s language industry news as they revisit the majority sale of UK-based translation management system (TMS) provider XTM. The two discuss an MT-related court case in Poland. Having taken their client to court over non-payment for a book translation, a Polish LSP soon found their practices under scrutiny by the court and expert witnesses. Esther talks about a major deal win for LSP Semantix and friends worth around USD 40m over four years. Semantix, Summa Linguae, and ESTeam partnered up to bid for an EU translation contract for the Commission’s Directorate-General, and succeeded in ousting incumbent provider AMPLEXOR.Sticking with Europe’s public sector, the two talk about the European Parliament’s new remote interpretation platform. The roll-out of the selected platform, Interactio, involved a huge deployment effort and saw them tackle myriad challenges such as scale, funding, and firewalls. As remote interpreting went fully mainstream in 2020, UK-based LSP thebigword secured another three years of interpreting work from the Ministry of Justice (MoJ).

Smartling CEO Jack Welde joins the pod to talk about technology-enabled language services, scaling with fast-growing customers, the M&A and funding wave sweeping the translation management landscape.Jack shares why Smartling’s attitude towards machine translation shifted from “MT bad” in 2010 to fully embracing the technology in creating their own NMT engines in 2020. He also talks about his experience of running a 200-person company through a laptop in the era of Covid-19, and steering Smartling through its best-ever year in 2020. First up, Florian and Esther discuss the breaking news that UK-based TMS provider XTM has sold a majority stake to California-based investors K1.Florian talks about another language industry investment story, as Germany-based Lengoo announced they raised USD 20m in Series B funding based on an AI-agency investment thesis. The two discuss the recent MT Model Studio launch from machine translation provider SYSTRAN, which allows people to enhance existing MT models with their own bilingual or monolingual data, using SYSTRAN’s tech to clean and prep the data.Esther shares an update from Sweden-based media localization company Plint, which appointed Thomas Roberts as the new CEO in February 2021. 

In SlatorPod #57, Fardad Zabetian, Co-Founder and CEO of multilingual conferencing platform KUDO joins us to discuss the world of conferences and interpreting, his vision for KUDO from the get-go, and his company’s explosive growth during the pandemic. Fardad, who launched another of his businesses, Conference Rental, in the early 2000s, shares anecdotes from the early days of KUDO, talks about his commitment to removing the friction points in sourcing interpreters for the private sector, and tells us about his experience of securing USD 6m in funding during Covid-19. First up, Florian and Esther discuss language industry news from a week that saw virtual event platform Touchcast raise USD 55m, based on a feature list that includes AI- or human-generated captions in real-time, foreign subtitles, and dubbing. Esther talks about localization at health tech startup Oura. The Finland-based company, whose flagship product is a wearable smart ring that provides health and sleep insights, hired its first localization expert in 2020. Localization Program Manager Tarja Karjalainen, still a one-person team, oversaw localization into three languages in 2020 and told Slator about her company’s current localization model and plans for language expansion in this buyer feature.The two discuss the latest Slator Language Industry Job Index (LIJI), which climbed more than four points in February 2021, having seen the usual seasonal dip in January. Florian highlights a story picked up in SlatorSweep this week, as the multilingual TEDx corpus for speech recognition and translation was made available in eight original languages and up to five target languages. 

We welcome special guest Mark Shriner to this week’s SlatorPod. (Spoiler alert: He used to be Florian’s boss!) The longtime (former) language industry exec shares insights from 20+ years leading Asian offices for some of the world’s largest LSPs and discusses his experience of selling language services across the vast, diverse continent. Mark also offers tips for motivating LSP sales teams and talks about localization through the lens of enterprise technology.First up, Esther and Florian delve into the language industry stories of the week, which saw news break of a major upcoming transaction in the media localization space as Iyuno Media Group announced its plans to acquire dominant rival SDI Media. Subject to approvals being granted, the combined group will become the largest pure-play media localizer in the world, weighing in at, give or take, USD 400m in annual revenues.The two discuss fellow media localization provider ZOO Digital’s recent trading update, as the UK-listed company forecast revenues of at least USD 38m for the full-year to March 2021 — an increase of roughly 28% from the previous year. The announcement prompted ZOO’s shares to spike, and they are now hovering around 50% above the start of 2021.From media localization to another thriving niche in the language industry. Esther talks about game localization for the hugely popular game Call of Duty. We picked up on the story after a CoD developer spoke about what it takes to localize the game in a recent gaming podcast; revealing that each CoD title requires more than 100,000 dialogue files per language. Multiply that by 10 languages, and you’re looking at handling in the region of a million dialogue files. That’s before you even get to the text-based localization components.Florian picks out news announced in two press releases this week. Swiss-based LSP Supertext launched a chat-based instant translation service, which allows customers to speak directly with translators to resolve their small and urgent translation needs. (Supertext Managing Partner Fabian Dieziger teased the announcement when he joined SlatorPod three weeks ago).And MT provider Tilde explained how the EU Council Presidency Translator (a free, online machine translation portal), helped dramatically increase the volume of words translated by the Council. Florian’s key takeaway is this: The Council’s website is now available in all 24 European languages, and 21 of those involved machine translation.

In SlatorPod #55, aka “TMS week,” Memsource Founder and CEO David Canek joins us to talk about the acquisition of localization SaaS provider Phrase, announced just this week. David walks us through his company’s milestones, from Memsource’s launch in 2010 as a cloud-based TMS and their very first paying customer in 2012, to growing as a bootstrapped company until July 2020, when investment firm giant Carlyle took a majority stake in the company.He shares insights into the acquisition of Germany-based Phrase, discusses why their developer-targeted product is complementary to Memsource’s offering, and outlines the direction of the companyFirst up, Esther and Florian unpack the week’s language industry news, which was dominated by translation management acquisitions, as DACH-based Across sold to financial investor Volaris Group and New Zealand-based language service provider (LSP) Straker bought Lingotek, a US-based TMS provider.The two talk about TransPerfect’s 2020 financial results, as the LSP gorilla grew 11.5% over the year, adding revenues of USD 88m to its topline through a mix of acquisitive and organic growth. CEO Phil Shawe told Slator TransPerfect won’t be following in Lionbridge’s footsteps in selling off their data-for-AI division (“or any other any other division for that matter.”) Florian and Esther discuss the reasons why TransPerfect and Lionbridge are part of a growing number of LSPs operating in the data-for-AI services niche, and why LSPs are structurally geared up to succeed in the fast-growing space.

President of Oxford Languages Casper Grathwohl joins the Pod from sunny Florida this week to discuss OUP’s business in lexical data, working with big tech customers, the world’s under-served and low resource languages, and more.First up, Florian (from snowy Switzerland) and Esther (from lockdown London) talk about Slator’s newly-launched 2020 M&A and Funding report, a 40-page report with in-depth analysis of the 39 M&A transactions and 13 startup rounds covered by Slator in 2020. Esther gives an update from the UK, where the Ministry of Defence (MoD) launched a new USD 74m call for expressions of interest for interpreting and translation services, and outsourcing giant Capita put the planned sale of its translation and interpreting division, Capita TI, on hold.Florian talks about transcription and audio/video editing tool Descript — which raised USD 30m to expand its capabilities for enterprise use — and potential implications/use cases for the language industry. He also shares news from Japan-based MT and human translation provider Rozetta, which grew MT revenues by 40% in the nine months to November 2020.

In the first episode of 2021, Fabian Dieziger, Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Swiss-based language service provider (LSP) Supertext, joins the pod to discuss the local Switzerland market, Supertext’s US and Germany expansion and their copywriting roots, and why they’ve chosen to shun M&A in favor of organic growth.Florian and Esther talk about Slator’s all-new 2021 Data-for-AI Report, which is designed to help LSPs evaluate and pursue opportunities in the fast-growing niche of providing data for AI customers.Esther shares an update on how the UK-EU trade and cooperation agreement will impact freelance translators and interpreters on short-term missions to Europe post-Brexit, while Florian unpacks the US proposal to extend small business perks to LSPs generating up to USD 20m in annual revenues. In a last look back at 2020, the two select their top quotes of the year.

In the final episode of 2020, Isabelle Andrieu, co-Founder and Chairman of Italy-based LSP Translated, joins the pod to talk about her 20-year journey with Translated, their ModernMT and MateCat products, and why long-tail clients are still the soul of the business. Florian and Esther share their top five picks from Slator’s most viewed stories of 2020, singling out heavy-hitters from the year such as RWS’ acquisition of rival LSP SDL (the #1 breaking-news story of 2020), and Acolad’s acquisition of AMPLEXOR.Florian’s other picks include: Freelancers’ AB5 exemption win in California; LSPs suing a client over “polluted” TMs in Canada; and the launch of the world’s largest language model, GPT-3, which took the internet by storm. Esther’s top hitter was the Slator’s 2020 Language Service Provider Index (LSPI). Also on her list are Stratus Video’s sale to AMN Healthcare. And, incidentally, Stratus was one of the fastest-growing LSPs in 2019 (another top pick), while Netflix’s subtitling research and ASICS Digital’s localization buyer feature also made the cut.