SlatorPod

Vistatec CEO Thomas Murray joins the pod to discuss the company’s international presence, the tech and business environment, and managing growing content volumes. Thomas shares his insights on how geographic spread and the follow-the-sun model are important in serving clients. He explains why the language service provider (LSP) prefers organic growth over M&A, owing to the quality and longevit...

Vasco Pedro , CEO of Unbabel , joins SlatorPod to discuss the company’s growth journey — from identifying the initial use case to raising USD 60m in Series C funding in 2019 , and beyond. Vasco outlines Unbabel’s translation pipeline and underlying technology. He describes the importance of the human-in-the-loop model and the ability humans have to impact the output of machine learning (ML) models...

On SlatorPod this week, Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week — and share the exciting agenda for SlatorCon Remote , which is just around the corner.  Florian briefly discusses the breaking news of Appen shares taking a beating , causing trading to halt. Esther talks about Canadian LSP TRSB’s acquisition of local rival Anglocom . According to TRSB CEO Mary Kazamias, Ang...

Florian is starstruck this week as Rachel Carruthers (Head of Internationalization and Localization) and Michael Levot (Localization Program Lead) from his favorite SaaS tool, Canva, join SlatorPod. Rachel and Michael join the Pod from Down Under to talk about Canva’s hub-and-spoke model for Localization, which enables them to run a “[expletive] massive” localization operation across no less than...

Spence Green , CEO and co-founder of tech-enabled language service provider Lilt , joins SlatorPod to talk about the journey from research concept to enterprise-scale AI translation agency. Having raised USD 25m in Series A funding in early 2020, Spence recalls hiring researchers, developers, and enterprise sales professionals , and the benefit of the monthly standups Lilt holds. Spence touches on...

Papercup CEO Jesse Shemen and Science Advisor Simon King join the pod to discuss how they develop synthetic voices to make videos accessible in multiple languages. The two talk about the underlying components of the Papercup workflow and outline the role that technology as well as humans play in the creation of multilingual videos. Simon, a Professor of Speech Processing at the University of Edinb...

Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week, where they compare the stock performance of the handful of publicly-listed LSPs both year-to-date (Q1 2021) and from the start of 2020.  Florian calls out ZOO Digital and Keywords Studios — both of which are up more than 60% from January 2020 — and the two talk about Appen’s fall from the dizzying heights of mid-August 2020. Floria...

Babylon Health Content Design and Localization Lead, Michela Simonelli, joins the pod to talk about hyper-local digital content, localizing high-touch health materials, and the growing telehealth market. Michela shares her professional journey prior to Babylon Health, which saw her spend 11 years “agency-side” in multiple language service providers (LSPs).  Michela discusses how content design int...

Language I/O Co-founders Heather Shoemaker (CEO) and Kaarina Kvaavik (CBO) join the pod this week to discuss their newly announced Series A round, channel partnerships with CRM systems, expanding beyond their core multilingual customer support offering, and the future of subscription-based pricing models. The two duo join SlatorPod fresh off their USD 5m funding round , which was announced on Marc...

In this week’s SlatorPod, Farfetch's Head of Linguistic Services, Alex Katsambas talks about the online luxury fashion platform’s localization model . Alex talks about Farfetch ’s internal teams, churning out billions of words annually, the importance of sustainability in content messaging, and why return-on-investment for localization cannot be measured immediately. He shares insights into F...

Travod CEO Elena Grigoras joins the pod to discuss LSP’s past, present, and future. Elena talks about the company’s client mix and how Travod manages the balance of servicing both third-party LSPs — initially the company’s primary focus — and end customers.  She discusses the relationship with Travod’s sister companies, Worldminds and Traduno (translation technology arm), and parent company Mondia...

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...

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...

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 revi...

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...

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...

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 tal...

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 g...

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-d...

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 , wh...

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 s...

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...

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 a...

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 dis...

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 we...