Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week, with German machine translation (MT) company DeepL said to be in the final stretch of closing a major investment round led by Silicon Valley venture firm, IVP. This will allow DeepL to expand further into the enterprise, as it ramps up hiring of customer success, account management, and related enterprise-focused roles.
The duo talk about how BNP Paribas, Europe’s second-largest bank, has been building its MT engine in-house over the past five years — instead of using publicly available MT tools, such as Google Translate or DeepL.
In M&A news, LanguageLine, the language services sub-unit of French call center giant Teleperformance, acquired UK-based LSP Capita Translation and Interpreting (Capita TI) for an undisclosed amount. Capita TI’s parent company, Capita plc., has been trying to sell off the language services unit and eight other non-core businesses since early 2020.
