January 2025. Paget Alves, CEO of Sorenson Communications said, “interpreters supported by the power of AI will mean, quite frankly, better interpretation. We can see this tech only increasing the accuracy of real-time interpretation and providing more immediate support.”
January 2025. On episode #238 of SlatorPod the Co-founder and CEO of Boostlingo, Bryan Forrester said, “What excites me is that there’s a lot of people and companies in the world that don’t have access to language access technology that will because of AI. That gets me really excited because Boostlingo’s mission is to expand language access, especially in underserved communities.”
March 2025. Samuel Läubli, CEO of Supertext, said at SlatorCon Remote, “I’ve been working in this field for ten years now, but I haven’t seen a system or AI agent that would actually guarantee that a translation is correct in the past ten years. And I’m quite sure I won’t see this in the ten years to come.”
March 2025. Discussing the executive order on English as the US national language on SlatorPod episode #242 Dipak Patel, CEO of GLOBO said,“even if you remove that mandate, I don’t think there’s a world where hospitals will say, ‘we’re not going to provide interpretation services.’ […] They do it because they recognize how important it is to be able to communicate and understand what people are thinking, what people are feeling, and that benefits everyone.”
March 2025. While discussing language AI in healthcare on SlatorPod episode #244, Joe Corkery, MD, CEO and Co-Founder of Jaide Health said, “because honestly, clinicians hate change, and changing the workflow is one of the biggest challenges in getting adoption for people. So making it easy, making it fit into their system, is really critical.”
April 2025. On SlatorPod episode #246 Luke Innes, CEO of Creative Translation said, “it’s very important, in the age of AI, that we are looking at the risks of shadow AI, as well. Because if you are a translation agency, and you haven’t necessarily taken the bull by the horns here, you may be using translators who are, of their own free will, using AI to enhance their productivity.”
April 2025. On SlatorPod episode #247, John Worne, CEO of the Chartered Institute of Linguists (CIOL) said, I think this is the interesting thing for me about languages, and the fascinating thing really, when you think about what AI is doing to languages, AI is now contributing actively to that corpus that we’re all exposed to.”
April 2025. In a statement discussing MTPE, the Danish Translators’ Association andthe Danish Authors’ Society wrote (in Danish) that, “some people have wrongly received public lending money for books where they were listed as translators. In these instances, no real translation work was done; instead, they only edited text that was already translated by a machine.”
May 2025. On SlatorPod Episode #249,Co-CEO of DATAmundi Véronique Özkaya said, “A lot of clients see pressure because they’ve been asked to, and I quote, ‘implement AI.’ What does that mean? And what does it mean to the legacy, and existing order? […] You have legacy systems. How do you just throw this out? Or, do you build on top? There’s a lot of questions that haven’t been answered yet.”
May 2025: Speaking at SlatorCon London 2025, Bertrand Gstalder, CEO at Acolad said, “we need to build trust because when everything changes — your workflows, your vendors, your tools — what remains is trust in the context of AI and automation. Trust is not just about believing in the technology, it is about having reliable frameworks that make our clients feel safe. That includes data security, ensuring every interaction and every asset is protected and AI usage is transparent.”
May 2025. While discussing the “AI revolution” at SlatorCon London 2025, Gabriel Fairman, founder and CEO of Bureau Works said, “I think this whole thing makes it so that the entire educational apparatus or framework that most translation programs that I see out there propose, they just don’t give people the tools that they need. Because the tools that I think are going to make people relevant from now on are curiosity, inquisitive spirits, highly critical thinking. And, these aren’t necessarily things that are taught or emphasized.”
May 2025. Benjamin Faes, the CEO of RWS, said during his keynote speech at SlatorCon London 2025, “but today, I still think language is in some shape a luxury product for companies. There’s not many companies that design for a hundred languages because it’s complicated, it costs too much. And I think if we unlock that possibility for companies, we can be at the heart of a huge transformation.”
June 2025. A message from SAG-AFTRA written to thousands of its members regarding their new Interactive Media Agreement (IMA) stated, “we fought as hard as possible for these protections because the use of performance-related generative AI in video games is as seamless and tempting as in any modern medium, if not more so — and the alarm raised by our community over this threat to our artistic autonomy was matched by determined employer resistance to granting essential guardrails”
June 2025. On the topic of AI translation in the European Union (EU), Stefaan van der Jeught, Professor of EU Constitutional Law at Vrije Universiteit Brussel, said on SlatorPod episode #254, “I think there’s no downside if you use it correctly, if you use it as a tool. If, of course, you think that you’re going to replace all your linguists and all your know-how, then you have a problem. If you just see it as a means of doing away with people or with jobs that you have now, then you have a problem. Because I think what changes is the nature of the job.
July 2025. In a July earnings call Greg Hart, CEO of Coursera said, “the cost of translating and dubbing is unbelievably cheaper because of AI. And also, the outcomes are better. Not surprisingly, a learner learns better in their native language than they do in English. And so we see that when we translate content into more and more languages, we get better engagement and better completion rates from learners in those geographies and in those languages.”
August 2025. On SlatorPod episode #261 Gayatri Shahane, Founder and CEO of Naitiv said, “language is one of the oldest gatekeepers [in] business. If you don’t speak the language, you’re just out of the room. And big tech is solving it at the mass level, they’re doing a great job of adding subtitles, auto-translate, auto-dubbing, post-processing, or even some type of real-time voice translation. And it does help billions, but business is a little different. It’s much more nuanced, and trust is the currency that we’re working on in business, and it needs a much [more] deeper understanding.”
September 2025. At a joint press conference with Spain’s Prime Minister, the German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said (in German) that, “there is a very good solution, even in the medium term. One day, with artificial intelligence, we will not need interpreters anymore. Then, we will all be able to hear, understand, and speak every language in the world in the European Union, right in our ears.”
September 2025. At SlatorCon Silicon Valley, Bryan Murphy, CEO of Smartling said, “LLMs can’t do it alone. Neural machine translations are lacking in certain things that we do here. So it’s the combination of both that’s resulting in really positive gains.”
September 2025. In a panel discussing AI dubbing at SlatorCon Silicon Valley, Matt Panoussis, theco-founder and COO at LipDub AI said, “In the next ten years, I really believe that every single video on the internet is going to be localized in this manner. That isn’t to say that subtitles will go away, but I believe every video is going to be localized.”
September 2025. Prajwal Renukanand, Co-Founder and Chief Scientist at sync. said at SlatorCon Silicon Valley 2025, “the state of video translation, at least from where I see it, is like the state of black and white TVs in [the] 1950s. […] People started adopting color TVs when both consumers and creators realized that this leads to [a] much better viewing experience.”
October 2025. Thordur Arnason, Global AI GTM Lead at Capgemini Invent, told Slator, “language is at the absolute core of generative AI and large language models. This fundamental capability — understanding, compiling, changing, and translating language — is central to the entire technology stack.”
November 2025. On SlatorPod episode #270, Alon Lavie, Distinguished Career Professor at Carnegie Mellon University, spoke on unanswered questions in AI translation saying, “why are we still in the world in which we have to have a separate system for measuring translation quality? And the translation system itself is not self-reflective, or capable of avoiding making those errors, or knowing how confident it is exactly about what it’s generating? […] And I think the answers to those things are evolving. We don’t quite understand them yet.”
November 2025. Referring to the closure of modern language departments at multiple British universities, Prof Cecilia Goria, Director of the Language Centre, University of Nottingham said, “an entire generation of aspiring linguists, translators, and cultural mediators will find themselves geographically excluded from higher education in their chosen field.”
December 2025. At SlatorCon Remote December 2025, Andrea Ballista, CEO and co-founder of Voiseed said, “is this the year of AI dubbing? I would say ‘yes.’ But it’s not just AI dubbing now. Voice is now taking the lead in multiple use Cases for conferences, interpreting voice agents, media, entertainment and gaming.” December 2025. Regarding the upcoming new edition of ISO 18841, the general ISO standard for interpreting, Dr. Verónica Pérez Guarnieri told Slator, “the new edition reflects the evolving landscape of our profession, where technology plays an increasingly significant role. While the standard continues to define interpreting as a human activity, it acknowledges the need to address the coexistence of technology and human expertise.”
