Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week, including the newly released Slator 2025 Language AI 50 Under 50 , showcasing fifty of the most innovative and fast-growing language AI startups founded within the past fifty months. The duo explain how Slator sifted through hundreds of companies, assessing innovation, practical solutions to real buyer problems, and strong market positioning. The final fifty span five categories: multilingual video and audio, live speech translat...
Jul 11, 2025•29 min
Florian and Esther catch up on a few weeks’ worth of language industry news with a surge of developments in speech translation. Apple’s on-device translation debuts in apps like iMessage and FaceTime, and OpenAI enhances ChatGPT‘s Advanced Voice Mode with more human-like interactions and real-time translation. Florian unpacks YouTube’s broad rollout of AI dubbing for 80 million creators in 20 languages, where he trials German and finds robotic voices, bad translations, and no editing options, le...
Jul 04, 2025•31 min
Davit Baghdasaryan, Co-Founder & CEO of Krisp , joins SlatorPod to talk about the platform’s journey from a noise cancellation tool to a comprehensive voice productivity solution. Originally built to eliminate background noise during calls, Krisp has expanded into real-time accent conversion, speech translation , agent assistance, and note-taking — technologies being rapidly adopted in enterprise environments. The company’s accent conversion is now deployed by tens of thousands of call cente...
Jun 27, 2025•37 min
Stefaan van der Jeught, Professor of EU Constitutional Law at Vrije Universiteit Brussel , and a Press Officer at the Court of Justice of the European Union , joins SlatorPod to talk about the complex relationship between language and law in the EU . Stefaan outlines the historical evolution of EU language policy, from French-only founding treaties to the gradual inclusion of all member state languages. Despite formal equality, institutions largely define their own internal language regimes, lea...
Jun 20, 2025•51 min
Tom Elias Hanna, COO of Hanna Interpreting Services (Hanna), joins SlatorPod to talk about how a family-run interpreting initiative grew into a national language solutions integrator (LSI). Tom explained that the company was born out of necessity during an influx of Arabic-speaking refugees in San Diego, with his mother providing interpretation and him leveraging his legal background to establish a compliant, scalable business that now serves healthcare, government, education, and social service...
Jun 13, 2025•30 min
Florian and Esther welcome Slator’s Anna Wyndham and Alex Edwards to SlatorPod to explain the rationale behind the new industry framework introduced in the Slator 2025 Language Industry Market Report . Drawing from the flagship report and echoing the buzz of SlatorCon London, the team explains why the traditional labels, Language Service Providers (LSPs) and Translation Management Systems (TMSs), no longer capture the scope and complexity of the evolving market. Instead, Slator has introduced tw...
Jun 06, 2025•38 min
In a SlatorPod first, four guests — Scott Cooper, CEO of Language Services Associates ( LSA ), Pablo Tercero, COO of LSA, Jerry Song, CEO of Lingolet , and Edward Varela, VP of Business Development at Lingolet — shared their insights into a newly forged partnership . Scott explained that the decision to partner instead of building an in-house AI solution allowed LSA to stay focused on its core strengths while leveraging Lingolet’s technical edge. The alliance goes beyond a vendor agreement, with...
May 22, 2025•46 min
Rong Yan, CTO of HeyGen , joins SlatorPod to recount the company’s transformation from a Metaverse-focused startup to leading the emerging field of AI video generation . Rong recounts HeyGen’s beginnings and the pivot to its current avatar model, which saw ARR go from zero to USD 1m within six months. Rong attributes HeyGen ’s success to its emphasis on three key elements: quality, consistency, and controllability. The company’s newest model, Avatar IV, enables full-body video generation with na...
May 16, 2025•44 min
Véronique Özkaya , Co-CEO of DATAmundi , returns to SlatorPod for round 2 to talk about the company’s strategic rebrand and how it is positioning itself as a key player in the data-for-AI space. Véronique details her journey to leading DATAmundi , formerly known as Summa Linguae , where she now drives a strategic shift from traditional language services to AI-focused data enablement. The Co-CEO explains that their LSP background makes them well-suited to offer fine-tuning services for AI, especi...
May 06, 2025•37 min
Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week, with DeepL becoming the first third-party translation app users can set as default on the iPhone , a position gained by navigating Apple’s developer requirements that others like Google Translate have yet to meet. Florian and Esther examine RWS ’s mid-year trading update, which triggered a steep 40% share price drop despite stable revenue, healthy profits, and manageable debt. On the partnerships front, the duo covers multiple co...
May 02, 2025•30 min
John Worne, CEO of the Chartered Institute of Linguists ( CIOL ), joins SlatorPod to discuss CIOL’s mission to support and promote language professionals and the value of languages for the public good through professional standards, advocacy, and intercultural understanding. John highlights the challenges of applying AI in high-stakes contexts like court interpreting. He references the UK House of Lords inquiry into language services in the legal system, which emphasized the risks of AI, particu...
Apr 17, 2025•46 min
Luke Innes, CEO of Creative Translation , joins SlatorPod to discuss how the global transcreation agency puts “human at the heart of the process” of multilingual branding by combining creativity, cultural insight, and strategic use of AI . Luke recounts his unconventional entry into the language services industry, charting a path from his roots in design to leading Creative Translation. Despite early skepticism around the term “creative translation,” he built a business model that puts creativit...
Apr 11, 2025•37 min
Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week, breaking down Slator’s 2025 Language Service Provider Index (LSPI), which features nearly 300 LSPs and reports 6.6% combined growth in 2024 revenues, totaling USD 8.4bn. Florian touches on a surprise USD 10m donation from private equity executive Mario Giannini to launch a new MA translation and interpreting program at California State University, Long Beach. The duo talks about McKinsey’s State of AI report , which continues to ...
Mar 28, 2025•32 min
Joe Corkery, MD, CEO and Co-Founder of Jaide Health , joins SlatorPod to discuss how Jaide Health is driving medical interpreting and translation with AI , bridging communication gaps for limited English proficiency ( LEP ) patients and improving healthcare accessibility. With a background in computer science, medicine, and AI product leadership at Google, Joe co-founded Jaide Health with Julie Wilner, RN, in 2023 to address a long-standing need for real-time, interactive communication for the L...
Mar 19, 2025•36 min
Anna Albinsson, CEO of Gridly , joins SlatorPod to talk about the company’s evolution into a content operations platform, its expansion beyond gaming, and the increasing role of AI in localization. Anna discusses Gridly ’s transition from a niche CMS for gaming companies into a comprehensive content operations platform. Initially built by game developers for game developers, the company is now expanding into fintech and edtech, as demand for streamlined multilingual content management grows. The...
Mar 11, 2025•29 min
In response to President Trump’s executive order designating English as the official language of the US , SlatorPod gathered Dipak Patel, CEO of GLOBO , and Peter Argondizzo, CEO of Argo Translation , to discuss its implications for the US language industry. The discussion highlighted that language access has long been a key part of US policy, particularly in healthcare, education, and legal services. Dipak pointed out that eliminating language services would create inefficiencies, making it har...
Mar 05, 2025•30 min
Peter Reynolds , CEO of memoQ , joins SlatoPod to talk about the impact of AI on translation technology and how memoQ is enhancing its tools to meet the changing needs of enterprises, LSPs, and translators. Discussing AI, Peter recounts memoQ's response to the rise of generative AI, leading to the launch of memoQ AGT (Adaptive Generative Translation). By providing contextual data to LLMs, they replicated the advantages of custom machine translation without extensive training. The CEO acknowledge...
Mar 04, 2025•48 min
Florian and Esther, along with Slator Head of Research, Anna Wyndham, discuss the language industry and AI news of the week, with findings from Anthropic ’s recent research on Claude’s usage. The analysis of over 4 million conversations revealed a surprising fact about how people use AI for translation. Turning to YouTube , Florian discussed CEO Neal Mohan’s statement that AI dubbing is among the platform’s "big bets" for 2025. In a spree of AI announcements, Deepgram unveiled its Nova-3 speech-...
Feb 14, 2025•35 min
Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week, where they reviewed ElevenLabs ’ AI dubbing, on the back of a USD 3bn+ valuation . While they found the translation quality was strong, minor timing issues and lack of lip-syncing meant the output felt slightly unnatural. Esther then provided an update on M&A activity, where UK-based XTM International acquired US-based Transifex and DEMAN Übersetzungen expanded its presence in Germany by acquiring life sciences translation sp...
Feb 06, 2025•26 min
Bryan Forrester , Co-founder and CEO of Boostlingo , returns to SlatorPod for round 2 to talk about the company’s growth, the US interpreting market, and the evolving role of AI . Bryan shares how the company has tripled in size since he last appeared on the pod , driven by strategic acquisitions, including VoiceBoxer and Interpreter Intelligence , and a rebranding effort to unify its product portfolio. Bryan explains how Boostlingo balances innovation with practicality, ensuring that new featur...
Jan 29, 2025•45 min
Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week, focusing on Slator’s latest M&A and Funding Report , which highlights over 50 mergers, acquisitions, and financial investments, and nearly 20 funding rounds in 2024. Florian discusses OpenAI’s ChatGPT o1 model , praising its translation accuracy for complex texts like German legal documents, though he notes slower processing speeds and challenges with low-resource languages. In Esther’s first M&A and funding corner for 20...
Jan 17, 2025•30 min
In the 2024 year-end episode of SlatorPod, hosts Florian Faes and Esther Bond, along with guest Anna Wyndham, explore pivotal language industry trends from the past year and predictions for 2025. First, the language industry news of the week, with LXT’s acquisition of clickworker , which aims to expand its AI data capabilities and potentially double revenues by 2025. Meanwhile, Esther shares how EzDubs, a speech translation startup, secured USD 4.2m in seed funding . Florian notes that RWS repor...
Dec 20, 2024•45 min
Katharine Allen, Director of Language Industry Learning at Boostlingo , and Dr. Bill Rivers, Principal at WP Rivers & Associates, join SlatorPod to discuss the challenges and opportunities AI brings to interpreting . Both are founding members of the Interpreting SAFE AI Task Force , which aims to guide the responsible use of AI in language services. Allen describes AI as a double-edged sword — capable of expanding multilingual access but limited in its ability to handle the nuanced human dia...
Dec 13, 2024•47 min
Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week, where they explore how AI is influencing content creation and translation, noting its progress and limitations. A recent study on GPT-4 revealed its ability to match junior translators but lag behind experienced professionals, particularly in nuanced contexts. Florian highlights the public’s heightened perception of the risks of AI, such as OpenAI’s Whisper , in critical sectors such as healthcare, where transcription errors and ...
Dec 06, 2024•28 min
Charles Campbell , President of tbo. , returns to SlatorPod for round 2 to talk about his efforts to unite and professionalize the language services industry in Latin America and the Caribbean through the association Juntos . Founded just before the pandemic, Juntos aims to raise standards in translation, interpreting, and localization by fostering collaboration, mentoring, and quality benchmarking. Despite challenges posed by the vast geography and diverse cultural landscape, the organization h...
Nov 29, 2024•33 min
Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week, with Slator’s latest Translation as a Feature (TaaF) Report , which explores how AI translation is becoming an integral feature in enterprise technology. Florian talks about Reddit’s success with machine translation (MT). By localizing content into French, the social media platform quadrupled daily active users in France, demonstrating the high ROI of investing millions in AI-driven localization each quarter. In an M&A corner...
Nov 15, 2024•27 min
Stuart Green, CEO of ZOO Digital (ZOO), joins SlatorPod to discuss the role of AI in media localization and the essential role human linguists will continue to play in producing high-authenticity content in multiple languages. A technologist by training, Stuart recounts his entry into the media localization industry and how ZOO transitioned from DVD production to leading-edge solutions in multilingual entertainment content. The CEO shares key highlights from ZOO’s AI white paper, “ Will Robots T...
Nov 08, 2024•59 min
Christian Elongue, Managing Director of Ghana-based consulting firm and language service provider (LSP) Kabod Group , joins SlatorPod to share his insights into the African language services landscape, recounting his journey into language advocacy. Christian describes Kabod Group as a dual-purpose organization, offering translation services primarily to nonprofit clients, while advancing social impact projects for African language professionals with initiatives such as the Network of African Lan...
Nov 01, 2024•42 min
Sijie Wei, Co-CEO of language services, technology, and game localization specialist EC Innovations ( ECI ), joins SlatorPod to talk about his new role as co-CEO and leading one of Asia’s largest LSPs with revenues exceeding USD 50m in 2023 . Sijie shares how ECI, initially focused on helping Western blue-chip firms enter China, expanded to assisting Chinese tech giants like Tencent and ByteDance in globalizing their products. Sijie highlighted the challenges of the Asia-Pacific market, where lo...
Oct 28, 2024•38 min
Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week, with Slator’s latest Pro Guide on Audiovisual Translation , which outlines opportunities for language service providers (LSPs) and how AI is impacting the field. In a language AI corner, Florian covers Alibaba’s recent launch of a proprietary large language model (LLM) for translation, which will help expand the e-commerce giant’s global reach. He also adds that Reddit has piloted machine translation (MT) for French content, a su...
Oct 23, 2024•29 min
