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

09/23/22 • 24 min

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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.”

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.

Previous 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.

Next Episode

#134 Cohere Co-founder Nick Frosst on Building the NLP Platform of the Future

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 Toronto, where he worked on neural network research with Geoffrey Hinton, and breaks down the evolution of neural networks to the current state-of-the-art large language models.

Nick touches on the level of machine learning experience needed to deploy on Cohere’s NLP platform — and how it is Cohere’s goal to eventually become the default NLP toolkit for all types of developers.

Nick gives his thoughts on generative AI, such as Dall-E and Stable Diffusion, and the possible business applications for them. He shares the rationale behind partnering with Google Cloud to cater to Cohere’s huge demand for raw computing power.

The pod rounds off with the startup’s future plans to integrate a multilingual offering; specifically multilingual embedding.