SlatorPod

SlatorPod welcomes Nour Al Hassan, CEO of the Middle East’s leading language services provider, Tarjama. A lawyer by training, Nour talks about how she started in the language industry and grew Tarjama to 160 employees, the decision to build a proprietary translation management platform, and her take on language services demand in the MENA region.Before Nour’s segment, Slator’s Florian and Esther kick off the week’s language industry news with a discussion about translator marketplaces in light of Across Systems’ decision to retire their version of it, “Crossmarket.” (Spoiler alert: They plan to launch a new one in 2021.)Esther talks about her recent experience during an LSP’s Capital Markets Day and Florian shares news that the South Korea Exchange, KRX, has started to offer English translation services for regulatory filings of eligible companies, which include the likes of Naver, Samsung Biologics, and more than 50 others.The duo also discuss the handful of US-based LSPs that made this year’s Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing companies, and highlight some insights from the latest UK ATC Coronavirus pulse survey, where 85% of respondents said they are seeing signs of recovery in the language services industry.

Florian and Esther are joined by Gene Schriver, CEO and Founder of US-based on-demand interpreting tech and services provider GLOBO. Stay tuned for the interview section to hear Gene share his insights on video remote interpreting (VRI), telehealth platforms, helping interpreters cope with the demands of the job, and more.Your regular hosts, Florian and Esther, talk in depth about this week’s top language industry story: the acquisition by France-based Acolad Group of rival AMPLEXOR to become Continental Europe’s largest LSP — once the deal passes antitrust clearance, that is.Esther shares a few key findings from the Chartered Institute of Linguists’ (CIOL) recent survey on the relationship between linguists and LSPs, which found that only 5% of translators and interpreters prefer to receive assignments through TMS platforms.The two discuss optical character recognition (OCR), a persisting project management headache, and talk about why big tech, LSPs, startups, and the research community are all invested in finding ways to improve recognition of text within troublesome “uneditable” files.

In SlatorPod’s third guest episode, Florian and Esther are joined by Lokalise co-Founder Petr Antopov, fresh from his company’s Series A funding round announced on Sept 7, 2020.Your regular hosts bring you the week’s language industry news; from Jeff Brink’s BIG Language Solutions acquiring US-based healthcare specialist ISI to two LSPs merging in Belgium, this week was awash with corporate transactions (not an NMT story in sight).Another two companies went public, as the owner of Language Connect, The Hut Group (THG), successfully completed a major IPO in London. Florian and Esther discuss why an e-commerce giant like THG would not only bother doing localization internally, but make it an integral part of their IPO messaging. The two also talk about Ai-Media’s IPO in Australia. In financial results, Esther gives an update on H1 2020 trading from London-listed video game specialist Keywords Studios, which grew 8% organically. Keywords’ Localization division suffered as customers postponed projects, but is rebounding now the dam has lifted.We’re joined by serial entrepreneur Petr, who talks about why localization appealed, taking Lokalise fully remote, and his plans for scaling for the localization SaaS provider.

In SlatorPod’s second guest episode, Florian and Esther are joined by former Google Translate developer and ModelFront founder and CEO Adam Bittlingmayer to discuss machine translation, machine translation risk prediction, how LSPs should leverage MT, how big tech thinks about MT, and much more.Your two hosts first talk about localization SaaS startup Lokalise — which announced a USD 6m in Series A funding this week — and their decidedly corporate (read not LSP)-focused customer baseFlorian talks about Google’s foray into telehealth via a USD 100m partnership with Amwell, bringing together Amwell’s video platform and Google’s NLP and machine translation know-how to compete with the likes of Stratus, LanguageLine and Boostlingo. He and Esther delve into a new research paper’s claims that MT OUTperforms humans (within a very specific set of parameters) and Esther shares localization insights from digital healthcare company Babylon Health, which provides accessible healthcare services in 15 languages across 13 countries.  

Florian and Esther are joined by 🎤special guest 🎤Kimon Fountoukidis, Founder and Chairman of Argos Multilingual for a frank and animated discussion about the language industry.Florian also provides an update on the market reaction following the breaking news last week that RWS plans to acquire SDL later this yearEsther talks international trade — more specifically how translation and interpreting are run at the World Trade Organization (WTO) —, sharing insights from Josep Bonet, Division Director, Language and Documentation Services Division at WTO.Florian reviews the latest developments in the AB5 saga over in California, where interpreters, translators and LSPs are celebrating their success in getting exempted from a bill that would have compelled LSPs to hire freelancers as direct employees in the State. Hopping to China, he talks about several language technologies that have made the list of restricted exports, as the US and China’s tech battle intensifies.Florian and Esther conclude the rundown of the week’s news with a discussion about the positive upswing in the Slator Language Industry Job Index figure for September before they are joined by the first ever SlatorPod guest...👉Don’t miss Kimon sharing his experience of developing Argos into a USD 22m LSP through sales, tech and ops savvy, M&A and a passion for entrepreneurship. Kimon weighs in on all the burning topics, gives expert project managers their due praise, and makes a case for paying good translators more 💰money💰.

In this week’s SlatorPod, Florian and Esther share a hot take on❗the story of the week❗— if not of recent language industry history: RWS’s acquisition of rival SDL. The coming together of the two UK-based Super Agencies will see the creation of the first ever billion-dollar-revenue LSP, and TransPerfect stripped of its current title of world’s largest LSP by revenueThe two whizz through the YTD trading performance of RWS, SDL and the seven other listed LSPs that Slator tracks. After a predictable Covid-19-related dip between February and April 2020, which LSPs bounced back stronger than ever and which continue to limp? (Yes, the disappearance of the SDL brand will take the number of publicly traded LSPs from nine to eight, but watch this space for the upcoming listing of Australia-based Ai-Media).  Esther talks about a patent translation-related fiasco in the US courts, which highlights, as one legal commentator put it, the need to “pay extra scrutiny to a patent application that has been translated, translators are human and errors occur.” 🎤Special announcement 🎤Tune in next week for SlatorPod’s first guest...we are delighted to welcome Kimon Fountoukidis, Founder of Argos Multilingual, to the podcast. 

Florian and Esther talk about remote interpreting’s moment in the spotlight. From phone interpreting (OPI) to video remote interpreting (VRI) and remote simultaneous interpreting (RSI), the two discuss the various use cases for each, the differences in margins, and how RSI is booming as conferences have moved online. Esther shares insights from a deep-dive interview with SDI Media CEO Mark Howorth, who warned of a double-digit revenue drop in 2020. She and Florian talk about the impact of Hollywood’s four-month closure and how the absence of new productions has left a content void for media localizers that will likely take months to fill. From some cold hard figures put out by LSPs, to somewhat abstract theory...Florian wraps his head around new research from Princeton that explores whether translation equivalents really mean the same thing in each language. Bit of a head scratcher.

In amongst arguing about salmon in this week’s SlatorPod, Florian and Esther talk about SDL’s shares, which rallied on the release of their H1 2020 financial results. Esther discusses SYSTRAN’s new owner, South Korea-based STIC Investments, who took a controlling stake in the MT provider in July 2020 alongside a consortium of minority investors. The two share localization insights from Croatian cloud communications company Infobip, who recently hired an LSP and a translation management system (TMS) provider and implemented a continuous loc model.Florian gives an update on Sockeye (not the salmon). Amazon’s open source toolkit for neural machine translation (NMT) has just been released in its second iteration, Sockeye 2, and is now available on Github.Esther talks about how mistranslations are causing a stir over in Australia this week. Problems observed in the translations of coronavirus-related public messaging have prompted the state of Victoria to announce additional funds for health interpreting and translation of materials relating to the pandemic. 

In episode 33 of SlatorPod, Florian and Esther talk about fresh signs of recovery in the language industry, from the Slator Language Industry Job Index (LIJI) — which rose (slightly) in August 2020 for the first time since the pandemic hit — to encouraging survey data from the ATC UK’s Coronavirus Pulse Survey in July.The two also share news that the world’s most valuable listed LSP, UK-based RWS, decided to voluntarily hand back money to the UK government that they received under the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme. It’s probably not a huge sum of cash that RWS is giving up since they only “furloughed a small number of employees,” but still.With what looks like more than tentative green shoots appearing, what better time for LSPs to think about ramping up Sales and Marketing? The two discuss Slator’s recently published Pro Guide on Sales and Marketing for LSPs and share personal anecdotes from working in Sales (Florian) and Project Management (Esther) functions at large LSPs.In other news, they talk about a mistranslation of a Facebook post, which sparked public and monarchical outrage in Thailand, and run through LSP Ai-Media’s unfolding plans to list on the Australian Stock Exchange.

In this week’s SlatorPod, Florian and Esther discuss the quirky use of social media ads by the Royal Australian Navy in their quest to recruit 40 crypto linguists (which also happens to sound like a pretty cool job). We also talk about Salesforce’s new open-source XML-tagged dataset for NMT training, based on thousands of XML files per language pair to help improve translation of online help documentation.From Silicon Valley tech to the UK public sector, Esther shares her takeaways from a presentation given by the UK’s central government procurement arm, CCS, to nearly 80 would-be suppliers on a huge upcoming language services tender. Finally, as earnings season kicks off the two give a run down of the latest quarterly results from TransPerfect, Australia-listed Straker Translations and Teleperformance, the owners of interpreting giant LanguageLine.