To mark the end of another busy and exciting year in the language industry, Slator has compiled a list of the most noteworthy quotes of 2019, covering an array of topics from technology and M&A to markets, investment and the competitive landscape.
“Post-editing today is about 35% of the business. And it is a mix. There are languages where we do around 50% of post-editing and there are some languages still in the single digits due to the availability of neural machine translation (or lack thereof) in those languages. We do a lot more in life sciences, financial services, and others that lends itself less. In other areas like fund management, clinical labelling, we use less machine translation” — Adolfo Hernandez, CEO, SDL
“The most valuable companies in the world — Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Facebook — are leading the way in deploying speech applications, but every company should evaluate how to incorporate this technology in their business model” — Brian Keane, Senior Vice President of Corporate Development and Strategy, AppTek
“Custom NMT models already show great promise for our multilingual email and chat support, and we see NMT and AI at large as great tools to augment and improve the current interpretation process — though we don’t anticipate it as a full replacement” — Steven Cheeseman, Vice President of Contact Center Operations, TransPerfect
“CAI technology offers exciting possibilities for revolutionizing interpreting in the same way CAT tools revolutionized translation” — Alexander Gansmeier, Jonathan Downie & Alexander Drechsel, Interpreters & Podcast Presenters, Troublesome Terps
“Even with language pairs that have received little attention in research settings and small amounts of in-domain data for system adaptation, NMT post-editing allows for substantial time savings and leads to equal or slightly better quality” — Samuel Läubli, CTO, TextShuttle
“If I think of something that is needed in the translation industry, it would be quality estimation integrated with automated post-editing. If I think of what will be the next big thing in MT, it will be something that we are starting to see: speech-to-speech translation in real time” — Carla Parra Escartín, Director of Linguistic Services, Unbabel
“The scale of the data is 25 billion sentences, which is several orders of magnitude larger than previous multilingual models” — Graham Neubig, Assistant Professor, Carnegie Mellon’s Language Technology Institute in the School of Computer Science
“Translation buyers do not stop at the funny mistakes made by Google Translate anymore. They are now more aware of the possibilities offered by MT. Some buyers are expert in MT and know exactly what they want. Yet, others are still hesitant and want to hear more. In between, there are buyers who want to use MT thinking they will significantly drop costs or delivery times” — Christophe Eyraud, Head of Business Solutions, Acolad Group
“Machine translation has become mainstream and there is a strong interest for domain-specialized machine translation services” — Olivier Debeugny, CEO, Lingua Custodia
“Understanding how human post-editors work could open the door to the design of better interfaces, smarter allocation of human translators to content, and automatic post-editing” — André Martins, Head of Research and António Góis, Research Scientist, Unbabel
“In my experience, whenever a client has requested PEMT, it is often riddled with so many errors that it takes as long, if not longer, than it would have taken if the linguist had just done the initial translation” — Amanda Hadlock, Director of Project Management, AccuLing
“This perspective of BLEU becoming useless is actually not that scary. This is happening because of increased quality” — Marcin Junczys-Dowmunt, Principal NLP Scientist with Microsoft’s Machine Translation Team
“When it comes to delivering value, none of the algorithms will deliver value without data. Data trumps algorithms every time” — Andrew Bredenkamp, CEO and Founder, Acrolinx
“There are two main reasons why customers are approaching us and asking about taking advantage of machine translation. One is price, and the second one, which I like more, is, ‘I have tons of content to translate’” — Yaron Kaufman, Co-founder and Chief Marketing Officer, One Hour Translation
“The Nordic markets have traditionally relied heavily on pre-booked interpretation, even for over-the-phone assignments. On demand offerings do exist, but often suffer from low reliability, few languages, and long connection times due to low volumes” — Patrik Attemark, CEO, Semantix
“In the legal industry, Verbit’s solution is able to help tackle the court reporter shortage and provide companies with the technology to make reporters more efficient to cover all jobs” — Tom Livne, CEO, Verbit
“The most critical issue is how to find good linguists for an acceptable fee. Baltic countries are not that big and the resources are really limited. Sometimes, it seems that a good translator’s name is more top secret than your client’s name” — Karmela Molodok, Vendor Manager, Technica Translations
“Simply making those workers employees of every agency with whom they engage is wildly inefficient and financially untenable for the agencies” — Rick Antezana, President, Association of Language Companies
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.
“Making the subtleties of language and emotion of a spoken or sung performance carry across to whatever language […] those creative elements are not easily replicated by AI, just yet” — Chris Carey, Chief Revenue Officer and Managing Director for The Americas, BTI Studios
“Volume commitment is very hard to get from a client, pricing will always be the priority, and clients will never guarantee you a specific number of hours” — Grégoire Parcollet, CEO, Lylo (since acquired by TransPerfect)
“In some instances, the technical nature of IP lends itself well to NMT, while the fact that each and every foreign filing is novel limits the application” — Tom Klein & Roland Lessard, co-CEOs, Morningside Translations
“If bilingual staff act as interpreters in a dual role, they end up with dual motivation, having to diagnose and treat and interpret, which is not ideal” — David Fetterolf, President, Stratus Video
“At the moment, I don’t think there should be a concern that this [automatic lip sync dubbing] is going to take over the dubbing industry as we still need an actor to deliver a believable and empathetic performance; and I have not seen any technologies yet that can deliver a ‘performance’ rather than [just] a ‘read’” — Mike Cardinal, VP of Global Dubbing, IYUNO
“Travel is an obvious area of high adoption for us. With numerous global OTA (online travel agents) and sites allowing us to compare before we commit, prices fluctuate, availability of flights and accommodations change constantly; and, in order to maintain profit margin, NMT is the best way to deliver great service at profitable cost” — Michael Ollitervo-Murphy, VP of Customer Experience, Unbabel
“Interpreting is rather enigmatic for the general public. When done well by a professional, it looks like magic. When done poorly, it can be a real mess” — Barry Slaughter Olsen, Associate Professor, Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey
“In the case of certain languages, an interpreter might get no more than one or two assignments per year and it would make no sense to treat that person as an employee” — James G. Queenan, Administrative Law Judge, California Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board
“We are not the ‘gig economy’ workers AB5 is designed to protect, but rather highly trained and skilled professionals with established professional standards to adequately perform our work” — Michèle Stevens, Professional Conference Interpreter, Member of the International Association of Conference Interpreters (AIIC)
“I fail to see how HK can have advocated for the current situation or otherwise been involved in it. Instead of bashing and blaming interpreters and HK for EasyTranslate’s shortcomings, I strongly recommend that EasyTranslate direct any legal concerns to the consultants in charge of the tender” — Susanne Frank, Police and Court Interpreter
“Transcreation and creative marketing localization requires the linguists to be able to move freely between the cultures they’re localizing into, not only language. And while there are many specialists with superb knowledge of languages, finding linguists with equally good understanding of the cultures is more difficult and it permeates all language combos” — Paulina Makles, Transcreation Solutions Director, Venga Global
“Video games, since the very beginning, have always gone into all languages simultaneously. That’s what those new streaming platforms are trying to do” — Andrew Day, CEO, Keywords Studios
“You can’t look past gaming, which is close to my heart. This is a booming industry and will only continue to grow. We partner with a lot of Asian gaming companies looking to bring their games to the West. I can’t see this slowing any time soon” — Ivan Tutka, Global Business Development Manager, Andovar
“The OTT consumer video market is about to undergo a step change due to the forthcoming launches of several Direct-to-Consumer [D2C] services from major media companies” — Stuart Green, CEO, ZOO Digital
“If there’s a fight in the Disney boardroom about who’s going to control Disney, people don’t stop taking their kids to ride Space Mountain” — Phil Shawe, CEO, TransPerfect
“We made the change to our leadership structure because we found we didn’t have the right people in the right roles to allow innovation, creativity, and rapid growth. We are an incredibly close leadership team. We don’t believe that people can be creative when they are scared that failure could mean back-stabbing, so we don’t tolerate politics” — Deborah Kirkham, CEO, Pole To Win
“BTI Studios is taking a new course with the new management, that I do not support, as a result I’m taking the consequences and am leaving the board” — Björn Lifvergren, Founder, BTI Studios
“After losing the auction, Lionbridge / H.I.G. proceeded to download thousands upon thousands of TransPerfect corporate documents. What’s ‘farcical’ is their story that this post-auction document raid was made in the spirit of good faith due diligence” — Phil Shawe, CEO, TransPerfect
“We made the change to our leadership structure because we found we didn’t have the right people in the right roles to allow innovation, creativity, and rapid growth. We are an incredibly close leadership team. We don’t believe that people can be creative when they are scared that failure could mean back-stabbing, so we don’t tolerate politics” — Deborah Kirkham, CEO, Pole To Win
“We are looking into tools that offer a greater range of automated checks specifically designed for the file validation of language files” — Jan-Hendrik Hein, Director of Media Operations, A+E Networks UK
“I believe we will see an increasing demand for transcreation or even original copy written in local languages. Especially in very competitive industries, such as travel and tourism, you will need to stand out by providing a true local experience to your customers” — Matthias Borngrebe, Head of Localization, SiteMinder
“We use 55-plus different third-party vendors who are based in territory” — Amanda Smith, Director of Language Strategy and Content Business Operations, Discovery Networks
Amanda Smith, Director of Language Strategy and Content Business Operations, Discovery Networks
“We localize into 20 languages and create around 1,500 new language tracks every month” — Jan-Hendrik Hein, Director of Media Operations, A+E Networks UK
“ITV GE produced about 8,500 hours of programming last year and that comes out of about 12 different local centers as well, so we’re fairly global” — Justin Walton, Global Content Operations Manager, ITV
“If we notice that a competitor channel has a successful show at 9 o’clock, maybe we move our key shows to 8 o’clock or to 10 o’clock. Or we move them to a different day of the week, which will then impact delivery deadlines for localization” — Jan-Hendrik Hein, Director of Media Operations, A+E Networks UK
“When we started, we kept adding more systems and resources to the localization process. At some point, we began to pare it down. We now only have one external resource — an LSP — and one third-party app for delivering the translations. So, from five systems to just two” — Mario Tarantino, Content and Merchandising Manager, Huel
“In two years, we added a couple more languages, a lot more global original content, and we therefore added to our membership” — Kathy Rokni, Director of Globalization, Netflix
“If the content is not Netflix content, there’s a lot of licensing agreement that needs to happen. That licensing agreement is both for languages, what languages we can actually broadcast or show, and also what countries can have them” — Kathy Rokni, Director of Globalization, Netflix
“Subtitles are considered kind of like an IP. So if the title was owned by Disney, for example, or by some other big or small studio, we don’t necessarily have the right to change those subtitles. But what we will do depending on how disruptive that experience could be for our members, is go back to them and give them feedback and ask them for a re-delivery, but we can’t change them ourselves” — Kathy Rokni, Director of Globalization, Netflix
“The testing showed that, in principle, interpreting platforms can be used to provide interpretation services” — European Commission Directorate‑General for Interpretation
“Right now, we localize about 10 to 17 languages for consumer apps […], but we do see the need to localize beyond CCJK [Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Japanese, and Korean] and FIGS [French, Italian, German, and Spanish], and go deeper into emerging southeast Asian countries as well as European languages” — Claire Tsai, Head of Globalization, Cloudflare
“Multilingual communication is crucial at a time when the EU Bank, which has been Europe’s climate bank for many years, has just confirmed its increased ambition in climate action and environmental sustainability and launched a very ambitious climate investment strategy” — Thierry Fontenelle, Head of Linguistic Services Division, European Investment Bank
“[Good account management] is something that has been lacking in the localization industry for years, good accounts teams to partner with the clients. This is something that marketing agencies have done a lot better and the localization industry needs to catch up on” — Alvaro Villalvilla Merelo, Senior Global Localization Manager, Nike
“This is one of the few industries that has been around forever but still shows double-digit growth just about every year” — Richard Loyer, Managing Director, Byword
“The exponential development and interest in MT is reshaping our industry and impacting the way we do business on a daily basis” — Liliana Henriques, Head of Client Services, Milengo
“The traditional business model for LSPs is ripe for disruption” — Patrik Attemark, CEO, Semantix
SlatorCon London 2026
SlatorCon provides the platform for executives, founders, investors, and buyers to meet and get actionable market intel on what drives language tech, services, and AI.
“LSPs need to innovate and offer value-added services to their clients, otherwise these will bypass them, in a similar way to travel agencies when travellers started to buy tickets online” — Kim Ludvigsen, Founder and CEO, Interprefy
“We know that there has long been a desire by the current administration to roll back, cut and, eventually, repeal the ACA (Affordable Care Act); and, along with that, any provisions to support healthcare services in any language other than English. In my opinion, this is of course a very myopic and potentially dangerous path backwards” — Dieter Runge, VP of Marketing and Global Business Development, Boostlingo
“We know it will certainly have a significant impact on SME language service agencies and, frankly, it will also impact the 800-pound gorillas in this business as well” — Dieter Runge, VP of Marketing and Global Business Development, Boostlingo
“You could get more efficient and you don’t have to grow. But even with the greatest MT in the world, eventually, your efficiency flattens out” — Phil Shawe, CEO, Transperfect
Phil Shawe (TransPerfect) and Andrew Smart (Slator)
“If we are ever going to get Brexit done successfully, we could easily see our revenues increase by USD 20 or 30 million when the pound bounces back. If there is a hard Brexit, we have prepared well. We have hedged very well because we are such a huge operation in the UK that it would make our operation incredibly cheap under a hard Brexit” — Joshua Gould, CEO, thebigword
“The competitive landscape hasn’t changed much in localization for a long time, so new entrants are very welcome. It’s my view that the landscape will continue to change, and there’ll be fewer, bigger global players who move seamlessly between pure localization and other adjacent verticals” — Shaun Gregory, CEO, IYUNO
“I think it was TransPerfect that bought three media companies. They’re obviously, in our view, just trying to buy scale. And scale will not win. Innovation will win. We’ve proven that. We wouldn’t exist if we hadn’t come up with innovative ways to grow into this business. So these guys aren’t coming up with innovation and we are” — Grant Straker, CEO, Straker Translations
“The data breach issue seems to be the straw that broke the camel’s back. Apparently, EasyTranslate neglected to protect sensitive information, and content such as indictments and arrest warrants have been available to uncleared staff” — Susanne Frank, Police and Court Interpreter
“Given our current leverage position, we feel very comfortable that we have sufficient ‘dry powder’ to complete a major acquisition should the right opportunity arise. Fortunately, because of the investments we’ve made over the years, such in our sales force and in our technology products, we are not dependent on M&A to drive growth” — Phil Shawe, CEO, TransPerfect
“I believe the timing is good to aggregate small to medium-size LSPs because rapid technology advancements are making it increasingly difficult for these companies to compete on their own, and some owners are uncertain what the technology landscape will look like several years out. There’s a whole generation of LSP business owners who have built nice lifestyle businesses that have morphed into something larger, and now they’re trying to determine how and when to exit” — Jeff Brink, CEO, Big Language Solutions
“Gaming is one of the most highly specialized areas of the localization market. Only a few key players have truly made the investments necessary to compete at scale” — Phil Shawe, CEO, Transperfect
“We believe that the need for producing high quality, in-language media content represents a significant growth opportunity for TransPerfect” — Phil Shawe, CEO, Transperfect
Slator 2021 Video Localization Report
45-pages on subtitling, dubbing, RSI, and captioning for media & entertainment, training & education, meetings & events.
“Value creation in a successful buy-and-build strategy is highly correlated to the success of the integration” — Dave Perlman, CFO, Big Language Solutions
“This is one of our long-term strategic investments, so we don’t expect it to follow the investment horizon that is common to venture investments” — Oleksii Vitchenko, founding partner, Digital Future
“I absolutely think that over the course of the next five years, there will be a tremendous amount of pricing pressure in the language translation market [in areas such as] high-quality translations for healthcare, financial services, and legal, etc. But I think it is going to be more than made up for by the fact that technology is going to make possible a whole lot of new cases. As a result, the best companies are not going to shrink, they are actually going to grow, because they suddenly are able to deliver far more to an enterprise customer than what they were delivering before” — Sri Chandrasekar, Partner, Point 72 Ventures
“I think NMT will actually price at a premium to humans. So there will be a deflationary force — lots of content where you can have some marginal error and that’s going to commoditize, and it’s going to go from 24 cents a word to 15 cents a word, maybe 10 cents a word. But, I think there’s going to be a category of translation where it absolutely has to be right and it absolutely has to be consistent, and machines are way better at doing repetitive work than humans are” — Tomasz Tunguz, Partner and Managing Director, Redpoint Ventures
“It’s a really exciting industry that has the best kinds of customers; the stickiest kinds of customers, who spend a lot of money. And those are all things that we as venture investors love to look at” — Sri Chandrasekar, Partner, Point 72 Ventures
Featured
Partner spotlight
Boost Language Access
Improve health outcomes and ensure compliance for individuals with LEP