However, just under half the respondents said PM (23%) and Loc Manager roles (21%) are slightly harder to fill compared to AI and machine learning engineers or sales and bus dev roles.
Slator 2021 Language Industry Market Report
80-pages. Market Size by Vertical, Geo, Intention. Expert-in-Loop Model. M&A. Frontier Tech. Hybrid Future. Outlook 2021-2025.
Where to Find Good Salespeople
Alyssa Yorgan recently told Slator, “I am a huge advocate for hiring salespeople with boots-on-the-ground experience in language services.” Yorgan is Director of Business Development for the Americas at AI-enabled LSP, Pangeanic.
She explained that it is “more effective to turn a project manager or linguist with solid communication skills into a salesperson” rather than recruiting from outside the industry.
We posed the question to Slator readers and, while a fourth agreed with Yorgan, more than half said it is better to have a mix of both. The rest, meanwhile, said sales skills are what matter most, regardless of industry background.
Pro Guide: Sales and Marketing for Language Service Providers
36 pages. How LSPs generate leads, hire and compensate Sales staff, succeed in Digital Marketing, and benchmark against rivals.
How Relevant Is Language Learning to Localization?
It was difficult to ignore the news about edtech unicorn, Duolingo, filing to go public. The language learning app left most of its competitors eating dust after its November 2020 series H valuation; a cool USD 2.4bn. Now comes news that the company hopes to up that even more by as much as 40%. Duolingo said it will aim for a ca. USD 3.4bn valuation when it IPOs.
While Duolingo was once a language-learning-and-translation app, the company has moved away from language services into edtech, a space not typically covered by Slator. But another thing that is hard to ignore is how edtech and e-learning have increasingly come up in the localization milieu.
E-learning companies figure significantly in the client portfolios of LSPs and tech providers; and, as pointed out by Oxford University Press’ Casper Grathwohl at SlatorCon Remote, edtech uses AI to create an experience that is adaptive and personalized to a particular student — something that can be supported by language industry data, because it is, well, localized.
We wondered if language learning was something on the radar of Slator readers and a recent survey showed mixed results. While more than half the respondents expressed interest saying we should “definitely” cover language learning (22%) or that it “might be interesting” (32%), the rest advised Slator to “stick to loc” (25%) or that they “would not read” (21%) such stories.
Slator 2021 Video Localization Report
45-pages on subtitling, dubbing, RSI, and captioning for media & entertainment, training & education, meetings & events.
B2B Video as a Nascent Market
The streaming boom as well as the recent rise of video usage for meetings and events, staff training, and customer engagement campaigns has highlighted the potential of B2B video as a market for LSPs and tech providers.
According to the Slator 2021 Video Localization Report, released on July 20, 2021, there are over a hundred video localization providers that currently figure in the competitive landscape, as presented in a supplier map segmented by output (e.g., speech or text) and setting (live or non-live).
The report also looks at the ways industry participants are adopting and advancing technologies such as automatic speech recognition, machine translation, speech-to-speech for video-based use cases, automatic subtitling, machine dubbing, and so on.
Roughly a third of respondents to a recent Slator poll, think B2B video is a “strong growth market for many providers” (31%), while a little less than half think it offers a “good opportunity” (47%), but only for specialists.
Only about a fifth showed general disinterest, saying they “don’t know” (16%) or B2B video may offer good potential “but not for me” (6%).
