SlatorPod

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.

The special guest for episode #51 is Slator’s very own Monica Jamieson, a new translation grad who joins the Pod to talk about why today’s 20-somethings are studying languages, and to offer tips on language industry job hunting during Covid-19.Esther shares her key takeaways from SlatorCon Remote on December 3, 2020, which drew in +250 attendees from 30 countries, who tuned in to watch 6 CEOs, a CMO and 3 enterprise clients provide insights from their vantage points in the language industry. Florian talks about the top 10 most influential research papers on neural machine translation (NMT), based on Slator’s analysis of citation counts, which sparked some discussion on Twitter.He also discusses the latest financial results from language data provider Appen, which downgraded its earnings guidance after a disappointing November, and from language service provider (LSP) RWS, which outlined its plans to integrate former rival SDL.

In this half-century, guestless episode of SlatorPod, Florian unpacks the contentious matter of pay rises for interpreters and translators in Germany’s courts. Linguists for Germany’s judicial system will see their hourly and per-word rates increase from January 2021, but not everyone’s satisfied.He and Esther discuss big bucks equity research after US-based investment firm Jefferies formed an alliance with Japanese firm SMBC Nikko Securities, which will see Nikko translate Jeffries’ equity research reports for distribution in Japan. Under the alliance, research for high-profile stocks will be the first to be translated, before Nikko — or an LSP they engage — ramps up to translating research covering ca. 100 stocks.From a cross-continental alliance to another form of inter-business collaboration: the two talk about the often-overlooked biz dev strategy of channel partnerships for LSPs, after UK-based SDL announced a partnership with office provider Rovva, which enables companies using Rovva’s offices and business support services to sign up to SLATE, SDL’s MT-powered subscription-based translation service. 

Former Netflix exec and Managing Director of EGA Chris Fetner joins the pod this week to talk about entertainment localization’s new association, the drivers of media loc, and how content owners view the ROI of subtitling and dubbing.First up, Florian unpacks some bold claims coming out of New Zealand-based LSP Straker’s investor presentation, which placed 20,000 LSPs in the “Dying Zone,” and dismissed 40 larger LSPs (+USD 50m) as providing “global coverage but lacking innovation.Esther talks about the World Intellectual Property Organization’s (WIPO) upcoming open translation tender. WIPO, which spends around USD 5m on translation outsourcing each year, is inviting patent-specialized LSPs from around the world to express interest in bidding for 26m words annually. The two discuss the week’s investment and funding news, as telemedicine and video remote interpreting (VRI) provider Cloudbreak Health gets snapped up by investors and simultaneously taken public in New York, and transcription and captioning provider Verbit raises (another) USD 60m.

Joining the pod is Kris Zdanowski, Founder and CEO of Summa Linguae Technologies. Kris talks about his entrepreneurial journey, from paying for receivables collections with shares, doing a merger with an LSP in India, to rolling out an M&A strategy and launching into the data annotation industry.Florian shares a few choice insights from Slator’s Inside India’s High-Growth Language Industry webinar, which this week attracted more than 130 participants and featured four expert panelists.The two discuss startup Otherside AI, which raised USD 2.6m in funding just six months after launch for one of the first real-life GPT-3 uses cases. Florian unpacks the tech, which transforms bullet points into complete sentences (including in other languages), and its potential benefit for translators. They also venture down the translation test rabbit hole — a divisive issue, as highlighted by Slator’s recent reader poll. Esther talks about the language industry’s latest association: Entertainment Globalization Association (EGA), which launched this week with 60 members from within the media localization niche, and is led by ex-Netflix exec Chris Fetner.

Marie Amigues, Founder and CEO of Altagram, joins Slator Pod and talks to Esther and Florian about how she runs the fast-growing game localization providerMarie recounts her experience of launching Altagram and growing the business internationally, and discusses the ins and outs of game loc.In part 1, Florian unpacks the sale of Lionbridge’s AI division to Canada’s TELUS International nearly one billion US-Dollar. He talks about the success of Lionbridge’s private equity owners, HIG Capital, in selling just one part of the business they acquired in late 2016 (Lionbridge) for nearly triple the amount paid for the entire company. Lionbridge, meanwhile, is left with around USD 500m in core translation and localization revenues. Esther shares some recent financial highlights from LSPs Summa Linguae Technologies, Stratus Video and ZOO Digital, whose dubbing revenues soared in the company’s first half.  The two delve into machine dubbing and discuss a recent paper from DeepMind and Google, which used ASR, MT, speech synthesis and lip movement synthesis to (semi)automate dubbing for educational videos. The potential applications are considerable; so too are the concerns around deep fakes and consent issues.

Episode #46 of SlatorPod sees Florian and Esther welcome a very special guest and true linguist, 2M CEO Tea Dietterich joins the pod from Sunshine Coast in Australia.aStay tuned for our discussion with Tea on the language market in Australia: from the country’s biggest translation clients in the private sector, and Cultural and Linguistic Diversity (CALD) communities to the emergence of remote interpreting, and everything in between.First off, Florian discusses Smartcat’s Series B funding: the US-based language technology provider raised USD 14.6m earlier in the summer, led by Matrix Partners, continuing the run of investment in the core language technology space...Intento, Memsource, the list goes on; and there’s now even a company advertising for investment.Esther talks about the promising earnings updates from language service providers Straker Translations in New Zealand, and Honyaku Center in Japan, and from LanguageLine’s parent company, which said the interpreting unit was maintaining strong growth from June. She also shares the latest figures from the language industry job index, which climbed for a fourth consecutive month in November.

This week, Florian and Esther welcome Kåre Lindahl, CEO of Venga Global for a wide ranging discussion about language data as a business for LSPs, lessons from M&A, selling consulting to loc buyers, and Amazon’s Swedish MT fail.First up, Florian talks about advances in automated transcription and AI video editing including the function to edit from transcripts. (Watch this space for full SlatorPod transcripts…) The two discuss the world of translation and localization for the complex and growing medical technology (medtech) industry, and share some of the key takeaways from the newly published Slator 2020 Medtech Translation and Localization Report.As many parts of the world begin to experience a second wave of the coronavirus, Florian talks about the implications for the language industry, while Esther shares some of the findings from the latest UK ATC Survey, which asked language service providers (LSPs) about the state of their businesses in October 2020. Then we finish by highlighting some new hires at TransPerfect, LanguageWire, Deluxe, and Roman Zelenka’s departure from his company.

Interprefy founder Kim Ludvigsen joins the pod this week to talk about why he decided to pass the CEO baton to Annett Polaszewski-Plath while business is booming after Covid restrictions turbocharged the adoption of remote simultaneous interpreting.Slator Co-founder and Commercial Director Andrew Smart guest-hosts this week. Andrew and Florian talk about TransPerfect’s solid third-quarter results, why more language service providers should consider an IPO, and why Zoom Zapps could be a big deal.Facebook’s big announcement about soon deploying massively multilingual machine translation models is also on the agenda.