Addressing Vicarious Trauma Among Linguists With MasterWord CEO Mila Golovine

Mila Golovine, CEO and President of MasterWord, joins SlatorPod to talk about the important topic of stress and trauma that linguists may experience on the job.

Mila walks us through her journey in the language industry: immigrating from Russia, founding the Texas-based LSP straight out of university, and leading it to where it is today. She reflects on MasterWord’s diversification, expanding from oil and gas to healthcare, education, and government services.

The CEO talks about the strategy behind recruiting from refugee communities and using MasterWord Institute to train talent wanting to enter the language industry from scratch. She discusses how stress and vicarious trauma affect language professionals, as well as the specific training and tools that can help prevent this.

Mila gives her outlook on the dynamics of Language Access regulation in the US and how it differs state by state. The pod rounds off with Mila’s approach to balancing growth across all verticals having experienced and thrived through a number of recessions.

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First up, Florian and Anna discuss the language industry news of the week, with an interesting debrief from Florian about the Machine Translation Meetup hosted by TextShuttle in Zurich. 

In the UK, the University of Roehampton proposed staff cuts that directly affect the university’s 20-year-old Audiovisual Translation program — a move that caused the UK’s Subtitlers Association (SUBTLE) to launch a protest on social media. RWS released its H1 2022 results with new SaaS clients contributing to the 20% growth in profits; but the Super Agency’s IP Services division saw –8% growth.

Meanwhile, the dubbing space heats up as India-based startup Dubverse raised USD 0.8m in a seed round led by Kalaari Capital. AI dubbing startup, Papercup, raised USD 20m in an oversubscribed series A round, bringing funds raised to date to USD 34m.