SlatorPod

In this week’s SlatorPod, LXT Chief Growth Officer Phil Hall joins us to talk about the company’s journey, from providing high-quality Arabic data for a Big Tech company to expanding into 750 languages. Phil shares his background teaching linguistics and leading business development for Appen before joining LXT. He discusses the key findings from The Path to AI Majority report, from the maturity l...

Google ’s Head of Product, Translation AI, Mallika Iyer, joins SlatorPod to talk all about the company’s new Translation Hub .  Mallika begins with her journey from software engineer to leading all of the translation products for Google Cloud , most recently Translation Hub . She shares the motivation behind launching the hub , where they saw that overall demand for translation had increased, but...

Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week, with the hype surrounding ChatGPT . Slator joined in by prompting ChatGPT to answer questions as if it were a translation manager . After reports back in November 2022 stated that DeepL was in the final stretch of closing a major investment round, DeepL has finally confirmed that it raised funds from VCs at a billion-dollar valuati...

In this week’s SlatorPod, Happy Scribe CEO André Bastié joins us to talk about building a unified platform for transcription and subtitling. André discusses the journey to co-founding Happy Scribe during his studies where he accidentally came across the challenge of transcription and built a first prototype with his flatmate and now CTO, Marc Assens Reina. The CEO shares how their product developm...

In the final SlatorPod episode of 2022, we are joined by Marco Trombetti , cofounder and CEO of Italy-based LSP Translated . Marco joins us two years on from our episode with Translated’s other cofounder, Isabelle Andrieu . Marco breaks down the LSP’s Singularity in AI research project and defines what singularity means in translation. He walks us through the process and the vast data collection e...

In this week’s SlatorPod, we are joined by Mark Lawyer, General Manager of Trados , the key technology product line of UK-based Super Agency RWS . Trados is a translation technology adopted by hundreds of thousands of freelance translators, LSPs, and enterprise customers — the three main market segments of the localization supply chain. Mark begins with his journey to joining the localization indu...

DeepL launches then pulls new AI-based writing tool, translator and interpreter employment declines in Germany, job index dips for fourth time in 2022, Blu Digital Group expands further into media localization , and Deluxe buys Post Haste Digital .

Joining SlatorPod this week is Ev Fedorenko , Associate Professor of Neuroscience at the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, MIT . Ev also runs EvLab , an MIT language lab that discovers how the human brain creates language. Ev talks about the different hypotheses concerning the origin of language and how it has likely been a gradual evolution. She shares a number of intriguing research fi...

In this week’s episode, Florian is joined by Anna Wyndham, Senior Research Analyst at Slator. The two discuss the language industry news of the week, with a recap of the Nordic Translation Industry Forum held in Sweden last week. The NTIF covered a broad range of presentations, including a talk from Ikea about how they are building a custom machine translation (MT) engine from scratch. In startup...

Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week, with German machine translation (MT) company DeepL said to be in the final stretch of closing a major investment round led by Silicon Valley venture firm, IVP. This will allow DeepL to expand further into the enterprise, as it ramps up hiring of customer success, account management, and related enterprise-focused roles . The duo ta...

Konstantin Savenkov , CEO and co-founder of Intento , joins SlatorPod to discuss how they enable enterprise clients to choose best-fit machine translation (MT) services and technology. Konstantin outlines Intento ’s services and product offerings, which include an MT Hub for localization and office productivity, an MT studio, as well as MT evaluation and maintenance. He talks about why there is a...

Scott Stephenson, CEO of Deepgram , joins SlatorPod to talk about his unique journey to co-founding the deep tech, automatic speech recognition ( ASR ) company and raising over USD 50m in funding. Scott recalls how his experience working with dark matter detectors as a particle physicist in China led to him becoming a deep-learning entrepreneur. He discusses some challenges in solving ASR; from la...

In this week’s SlatorPod, we are joined by Virpal Singh , CEO and co-founder of DigitalTolk , an interpreting services provider that uses technology and automation to help match interpreters to clients. Virpal begins with his journey to setting up DigitalTolk ; from studying computer engineering and electronics to entering the language industry with co-founder Leyla Sarac. The duo saw a gap in the...

The co-founder of Cohere , Nick Frosst, joins SlatorPod to talk about rapidly scaling one of the most exciting natural language processing (NLP) startups. Nick shares his journey to establishing Cohere alongside Aidan Gomez and Ivan Zhang with Aidan’s seminal paper, Attention Is All You Need , serving as an inspiration to the startup. He reflects back on his experience at the Google Brain team in...

Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week and announce the launch of Slator’s Interpreting Services and Technology Report . The 60-page report provides a 360-degree view on the growth industry of interpreting. The report features analysis by mode, setting, geo, buyers, use cases, and more. Florian touches on a new interpreting feature released by Microsoft , which allows si...

In this week’s episode, Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week, with various natural language generation (NLG) startups gaining traction of late. Esther covers whether these NLG startups, which can help content creators write copy in multiple languages, are a threat or an opportunity for LSPs . Over in Europe, the strike at the European Parliament among interpreters cont...

Tim Jung, CEO of XL8 , joins SlatorPod to talk about the startup’s journey — from co-founding the media-focused machine translation company with former Apple Software Engineer, Jay Park, to raising a USD 3m bridge round in August 2022 . Tim discusses his experience working for Samsung and Google and how they have adopted an engineering-driven culture at XL8 . The CEO walks through their product Me...

Machine Translation (MT) Researcher, Yasmin Moslem, joins SlatorPod to talk about her research on Domain-Specific Text Generation for Machine Translation — a project she conducted with Rejwanul Haque, John D. Kelleher, and Andy Way at the Adapt Center in Dublin. Yasmin shares her experience working as a translator, discovering translation productivity (CAT) tools, and experimenting with translatio...

Adrian Probst, German Language Specialist and Content Creator behind the YouTube channel Freelanceverse , joins the pod this week to talk about how he became arguably the most successful YouTuber in the language industry. The YouTuber looks back on his journey; from commercial apprenticeship and studying translation at university to working as project manager and branching off on his own as a free...

Joseph Lambert ( Lecturer in Translation Studies at Cardiff University) and Callum Walker ( Lecturer in Translation Technology at the University of Leeds) join SlatorPod to talk about their paper Because We’re Worth It : Disentangling freelance translation, status, and rate-setting in the United Kingdom. Joseph discusses the top three challenges for translators when it comes to pricing their servi...

In this week’s episode, Florian and Anna discuss the language industry news of the week, with RWS announcing the appointment of Julie Southern as Chairperson Designate .  Another leadership change saw Heith Mackay-Cruise replacing Phil Norman as Chairman of the Board at Straker Translations. Meanwhile, the UK Immigration Enforcement outlines exceptional cases in which staff might use a translation...

Dubverse co-founder, Anuja Dhawan, joins SlatorPod to talk about launching the machine dubbing startup and powering video content dubbing using the latest AI language models and tech. Anuja starts with her journey to co-founding Dubverse with Varshul Gupta as a result of the rise of English speaking video-generated content during the pandemic. She goes through the company’s core team structure whe...

In this week’s news episode, Florian and Anna catch up on a month’s worth of news, with RSI receiving a lot of opposition . First, there was a UN Today article where interpreters pushed back on poor sound quality and unreliable audio levels causing hearing problems. Then interpreters went on strike at the EU Parliament after negotiations seeking improved work conditions failed.  Anna talks about M...

In this week’s SlatorPod, we’re joined by Jan Rausch to discuss his experience in the interpreting industry as a freelance conference and business interpreter. Jan talks about his background in teaching modern languages and how he transitioned to freelance interpreting, where he eased himself into a highly competitive market. He shares the range of scenarios he has worked in; from European Works C...

Theo Hoffenberg, Founder and CEO of Reverso , joins SlatorPod to talk about specializing in AI-based language tools and translation aids used by millions online. Theo begins with his background in the software industry, where he helped launch tech companies in Europe and how he got into the language technology industry with Reverso. He discusses the evolution of the company, from a downloadable so...