Slator - Language Industry News

What Is Translation as a Feature? Translation as a Feature (TaaF) means that translation capabilities are built directly into the tools and platforms you already use—such as content management systems, customer support portals, or collaboration apps. Instead of exporting content to translate separately, users can translate instantly within the same environment. Key Advantages Saves time by reducing manual steps. Lowers costs by streamlining workflows. Makes multilingual content creation scalable. Why TaaF Matters for Modern Enterprises In a global market, businesses often juggle multiple languages across marketing, documentation, and customer service. With TaaF: Teams can deliver content in multiple languages without slowing down projects. Users across departments can access translation tools without needing specialist knowledge. Organizations can respond faster to international opportunities. What Businesses Can Learn from TaaF The growing adoption of built-in translat...

Known as much for its flagship write-assist offering as for ubiquitous advertising, the  Grammarly  Editor platform raised USD 1bn from  General Catalyst ‘s Customer Value Fund. The funds will operate like a loan or credit line with capped returns tied to revenue, rather than an equity stake. The financing,  announced  on X on May 29, 2025, by the company’s current CEO, Shishir Mehrotra, is structured in a way that allows General Catalyst to increase their investment in Grammarly without diluting ownership by issuing new shares to other investors — according to  Reuters . The Reuters article also said the capital is intended to support and accelerate Grammarly’s growth through increased spending on sales, marketing, and strategic acquisitions. The investment is also expected to allow 16-year-old Grammarly to reallocate funds towards product development, particularly expanding its AI-driven offerings with communication-centric tools and integrated external a...

  Almost two years after the first formal petition, Spain once again pushed for its three co-official languages, Catalan, Basque, and Galician, to be added as official languages within the  European Union  (EU). On May 27, 2025, the EU postponed any decision on the matter for a second time. The first time the proposal was rejected was in September 2023, a little over a month after the Spanish Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares,  requested  for the Council of the European Union to include the languages.  At the time, Spain presided over the EU government, which communicated that  it had discussed  the matter but needed more information, and deferred making a decision on whether to bring it to a vote. This time, with Poland in the presidency, the EU has once again postponed any decision on the matter after at least ten countries, including Finland, Italy, and Germany, threatened to reject the proposal if it was brought to a vote. Swede...

  A June 2024 meta-analysis published in   BMJ Quality & Safety   was recently brought back into the spotlight by Dr. Lucy Shi, who discussed its findings in   an article   for   The Hospitalist . The study, conducted by Chu et al., examined the link between language discordance and unplanned hospital or emergency department (ED) readmissions. US Study Finds that Language Discordance Increases Risk of Hospital Readmissions The researchers also evaluated whether  interpretation  services could help reduce disparities in these outcomes between patients who speak a non-dominant language and those who do not. Their analysis was based on a literature search of PubMed, Embase, and Google Scholar, initially conducted on January 21, 2021, and updated on October 27, 2022. Extensive research has shown that patients and families with non-dominant language preferences often face challenges in communication, understanding medical information, and accessing...

Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week, breaking down Slator’s  2025 Language Service Provider Index  (LSPI), which features nearly 300 LSPs and reports 6.6% combined growth in 2024 revenues, totaling USD 8.4bn. Florian touches on a surprise USD 10m donation from private equity executive Mario Giannini to  launch a new MA translation and interpreting program  at California State University, Long Beach. The duo talks about  McKinsey’s State of AI report , which continues to classify translators as AI-related roles and shows that hiring them has become slightly easier. In Esther’s M&A corner,  TransPerfect  announced two acquisitions, Technicolor Games and Blu Digital Group, further expanding its presence in gaming and media localization. In Israel,  BlueLion and GATS merged  to form TransNarrative, and Brazilian providers Korn Translations and Zaum Langs  joined forces  under the Idlewild Burg group. Me...

Amid growing uncertainty about translation careers due to AI advancements and sensationalized headlines, one California university is celebrating a transformative donation. On March 11, 2025, California State University, Long Beach (CSULB) announced that Mario Giannini, Executive Co-Chairman of private equity firm Hamilton Lane, has gifted $10 million to establish a Master of Arts program in Translation and Interpreting. The program is set to launch in the fall of 2026. This isn’t Giannini’s first significant contribution to CSULB. In January 2017, he donated $1.75 million to establish The Clorinda Donato Center for Global Romance Languages and Translation Studies, named after its current director. CSULB Center Expands Translation Studies with Additional $5.25M Gift Housed within CSULB’s College of Liberal Arts, The Clorinda Donato Center for Global Romance Languages and Translation Studies serves as a hub for both pedagogical research and instruction in Romance languages. Students c...

  A Pinch, a Twitch , and Everything in Between: Pinch’s Christian Safka and Twitch’s Susan Maria Howard were among the top language industry leaders who joined hundreds of attendees on March 18, 2025, for the first SlatorCon Remote conference of the year. Kicking off the day’s events, Slator’s Head of Advisory , Esther Bond, welcomed attendees and invited Managing Director Florian Faes to share the latest findings and insights in his highly anticipated 'industry health check. In his presentation, Faes began by reflecting on the challenges of 2024. He discussed data from Slator’s 2025 Language Service Provider Index (LSPI) and highlighted the growth of interpreting-focused companies, contrasted with the struggles faced by small, undifferentiated agencies and the rapid rise of language AI, driven by companies like ElevenLabs and DeepL . Faes also highlighted key findings from Slator’s 2025 Localization Buyer Survey , including the challenges buyers face in implementing AI and the ...

Joe Corkery , MD, CEO and Co-Founder of  Jaide Health , joins SlatorPod to discuss how Jaide Health is driving medical interpreting and translation with  AI , bridging communication gaps for limited English proficiency ( LEP ) patients and improving healthcare accessibility. With a background in computer science, medicine, and AI product leadership at Google, Joe co-founded Jaide Health with Julie Wilner, RN, in 2023 to address a long-standing need for real-time, interactive communication for the  LEP  patient population. Unlike older machine translation models, which worked sentence by sentence without context, Joe shares how generative AI can maintain coherence, track gender references, and infer meaning from prior context — crucial in medical settings. The CEO remains pragmatic about  Trump’s executive order  designating English as the US’s official language and revoking previous language access mandates. He argues that such policies will not change the ...

In a February 20, 2025   paper , researchers Danni Liu and Jan Niehues from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology proposed a way to improve how large language models (LLMs) perform across different languages. New Research Explores How to Boost Large Language Models’ Multilingual Performance They explained that LLMs like Llama 3 and Qwen 2.5, show strong performance in tasks like machine translation (MT) but often struggle with low-resource languages due to limited available data. Current fine-tuning processes do not effectively bridge the performance gaps across diverse languages, making it difficult for models to generalize effectively beyond high-resource settings. The researchers focus on leveraging the middle layers of LLMs to enable better cross-lingual transfer across multiple tasks, including MT. LLMs consist of multiple layers . The early (or bottom) layers handle basic patterns like individual words, while the final (or top) layers focus on producing a response. The midd...