SlatorPod

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 provider Marie 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...

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.a Stay 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 in...

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 Slato...

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...

Manuel Herranz, CEO of MT and language service provider Pangeanic joins SlatorPod. Manuel joins us for part two, after your regular hosts give a run down of the week’s language industry news. Florian talks about what’s going on with RWS’ buying SDL , as the deal inches closer to, well, closing . Just the small matters of a court hearing and SDL’s delisting from the London Stock Exchange to take ca...

Florian and Esther are joined by Sandeep Nulkar, CEO and Founder of BITS Private Limited and co-Founder of Vernac Language Technologies to discuss India's language industry. Before Sandeep joins us, your regular SlatorPod hosts talk about the week’s language industry stories... Florian shares news from Mozilla, which just took the decision to retire Elmo — the backbone of its localization inf...

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...

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 to...

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 tran...

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...

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 year Esther talks international trade — more specifically how translation and interpret...

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 revenue The two whizz through the YT...

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 Howor...

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...

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 RW...

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 docum...

Florian brings you this week’s language news from his hideaway in the mountains of Switzerland, sharing news on the world’s largest language model, GPT-3 , from OpenAI. He and Esther (who is still hunkered down in London) discuss its applications in language generation, and whether or not it’s any good at the task of machine translation yet (spoiler: not really).  Esther talks about two funding st...

In this week’s episode, Florian and Esther delve into the numbers and rationale behind the Memsource transaction, as the translation technology (TMS) provider sold a majority stake to private equity giant Carlyle in a landmark deal for the language industry . The two talk about highlights from the game localization panel at SlatorCon Remote, moderated by Daniel Finck with machine translation and l...

Florian talks about research from Silicon Valley start-up Stripe, which surveyed hundreds of e-commerce websites for issues at checkout, the most common of which was a lack of local language translations.  The two discuss SlatorCon Remote, where the 300-strong audience heard about e-commerce localization courtesy of multilingual content provider Quill. Also present at Slator’s inaugural remote con...

In this week’s episode, Florian shares breaking news from the world of M&A and funding, as translation technology provider Memsource sold a majority stake to private equity giant Carlyle and machine translation matchmaker Intento raised USD 3m. Esther discusses a nationwide mega-tender for language services due to launch in August 2020 in the UK: the pan-government RFP is worth GBP 110m over t...

Florian and Esther discuss Apple’s announcement that its new operating system, iOS 14, will come pre-loaded with a Translate app when it’s released in September 2020. The Translate app will run on NMT, be one of just a few dozen built-in iPhone apps, and allow users to translate without an internet connection. What will this mean for other translation apps? Esther shares news of e-commerce company...

In a half-year anniversary episode, Florian and Esther unpack a wide-scale European Union survey of small and medium enterprises. Nearly 2,900 SMEs responded to questions about their language needs, MT use and attitudes of MT, as the EU rolls out an expansion program for their free automated translation platform, eTranslation. Florian ponders why a public body like the EU would be concerned with m...

Florian and Esther talk Google snafu, delving into the story of how Google “inadvertently sent” users’ translation memory data to someone else. Users of the now retired Google Toolkit, a free cloud-based translation productivity, may have had their translation memory contents shared with another user as a result of a technical issue affecting download requests. Florian discusses UK-based RWS’ acqu...

Florian and Esther discuss the plight of the EU’s contract interpreters. While conference interpreting work has dried up, the ca. 3,000 contract interpreters, many of whom generated 100% of their income from the institutions, have been given a one-off payment to see them through the coronavirus pandemic. In a show of solidarity, however, staff interpreters created an emergency fund to help support...

In this week’s episode, Florian and Esther discuss Netflix’s recent paper on sentence simplification and machine translation, destined to help improve the quality of machine-translated subtitles. But how will audiences react if simpler source sentences mean a lack of idioms and colloquialisms in foreign-language subtitles? The two talk about hyper-localized markets in the language industry and poi...