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

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

09/16/22 • 19 min

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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.

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

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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.

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#133 Sizing the Global Interpreting Market, DeepL Hiring, Europe’s Audiovisual Hub

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 simultaneous unidirectional interpretation in 16 language pairs in Teams Meetings. In addition, Microsoft will finish rolling out its multilingual live captioning functionality for Teams in early October 2022.

Big Language Solutions has announced the appointment of Dick Surdykowski as CEO. He takes over from Jeff Brink, who has moved into the Chairmanship and is focusing on strategic initiatives.

Esther talks about DeepLs’ hiring patterns based on 300+ LinkedIn profiles of people associated with the machine translation (MT) company. The results indicate what the MT giant will focus on moving forward.

Esther also shares a one-year update on the Spanish government’s plan to make Spain the audiovisual hub of Europe. The initiative gained momentum in 2022 with increased foreign investment, revamped visa laws, as well as new audiovisual production and training facilities.

Meanwhile, in the UK, Zoo Digital’s first-half 2023 performance beats expectations, with revenues increasing 89% year over year. The media localization, subtitling, and dubbing provider plans to invest in all kinds of growth plans and initiatives, including Zoo Academy.

In funding news, Indian machine dubbing startup, Dubdub, announced it had raised USD 1m in seed funding. Co-founder Anubhav Singh disclosed their vision: To “bridge this language gap with state-of-the-art AI in speech synthesis and generative modeling.”