SlatorPod

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...

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...