#131 Automating Subtitling, Dubbing, Live Captioning With XL8 CEO Tim Jung

09/09/22 • 52 min

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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 MediaCAT, which allows users to streamline media localization workflows in three steps: sync, translate, and dub. XL8 also recently launched EventCAT, where users can interpret or add live subtitles for events through the power of AI.

Tim reveals some of the media-specific challenges of language automation, from speaker identification to generating subtitles by speech recognition. He tells us how the XL8 approach differs from big tech as it uses 100% human professional-curated data to train its MT engines.

The CEO talks about what they have gained from their partnership with Iyuno-SDI and the challenges of competing with big tech when hiring machine learning talent. The pod rounds off with XL8’s roadmap for 2023, including improving closed caption generation by working with companies that specialize in sound-effect recognition.

First up, Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week, with the launch of Slator’s monthly Language Industry Data and News Briefing available to all Starter, Growth, Pro, and Enterprise subscribers.

The duo then talk about the performance of a handful of publicly-listed language service providers, including Honyaku Center, Appen, ZOO Digital, Keywords Studios, and RWS. Over in Switzerland, SaaS translation platform, Neur.on, which offers custom MT for law firms, legal publishers, and public authorities has announced an investment round of USD 1.6m.

Esther gives an update on the Slator Language Industry Job Index, which dipped 4.5 points in September after the all-time high recorded in August. Meanwhile, video games service provider, Universally Speaking, appointed former Keywords Studios CMO, Andrew Brown, as CEO in July 2022, taking over from founder Vickie Peggs after 18 years.

Tim discusses his experience working for Samsung and Google and how they have adopted an engineering-driven culture at XL8.

Previous Episode

#130 Yasmin Moslem on Using Large Language Models to Custom Train Machine Translation

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 translation memory to improve MT. She breaks down the paper’s approach to domain-specific MT training using back-translation for data augmentation.

She discusses how some LSPs are already implementing this approach in real-life, customizing it for different use cases. She explains why they used a combination of BLEU, Comet, and other quality evaluation frameworks as well as human evaluation to rate machine translation quality.

Yasmin concludes the podcast with her advice for those in the core industry looking to enter the machine translation space, from the spiral learning process to reading research papers.

First up, Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week, including how a streaming platform used propriety machine dubbing technology for its film offerings in the first quarter of 2022.

Over in London, TransPerfect acquired a virtual data room (VDR) tech company to proactively address the VDR market. In transcription news, VIQ Solutions’ shares dipped by 20% despite reporting strong, half-year revenue growth of 45% year on year. Meanwhile, multilingual captioning provider Ai-Media turns EBITDA-profitable as a 2021 acquisition drives revenue growth.

Next Episode

#132 Rise of AI Writers, EU Interpreter Strike, Airbnb Expands MT, Lionbridge M&A

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 continues, as they decline to interpret for those that dial-in remotely. Among the complaints, poor sound quality and a heavier workload. As negotiations between European Parliament staff interpreters and the administration collapse, efforts have been made to get European Parliament President, Roberta Mesilla, involved.

In M&A news, Lionbridge is set to acquire Game Tester, a game-testing platform based in Australia and South Africa. This will be the third games-related acquisition for the Super Agency in three years and will allow them to add community-based testing capabilities to the Lionbridge Games division.

Meanwhile, Airbnb becomes even more multilingual as it expands its machine translation capabilities to translate reviews. This move comes after the company successfully launched its messaging feature this summer. Airbnb currently runs on ModernMT, the Translated-led, open-source project, co-founded by Fondazione Bruno Kessler and the European Commission.