Slator - Language Industry News

On May 6, 2025, open source technology consulting firm Quansight  announced  that it had acquired Cobalt Speech and Language, a provider of  automatic speech recognition  (ASR),  transcription , natural language understanding, and other voice technologies in multiple languages. The deal closed April 10, 2025.  According to Quansight CEO Travis Oliphant, the purchase was for cash, earn-out, and equity in Quansight portfolio companies.  “Quansight builds  AI  systems and has key developers who know how to build the tools behind AI ( PyTorch ,  JAX ,  Tensorflow , and NumPy),” Oliphant told Slator. “Cobalt builds language systems that use these tools.” Oliphant said that Quansight decided to acquire Cobalt, rather than build its own speech technologies in-house, based on the strength of Cobalt’s team, which could help maintain a certain speed of development. Of course, he acknowledged that the prospect of acquiring Cobalt’s customers w...

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...

In response to President Trump’s executive order designating   English as the official language of the US , SlatorPod gathered Dipak Patel , CEO of   GLOBO , and Peter Argondizzo, CEO of   Argo Translation , to discuss its implications for the US language industry. The discussion highlighted that  language access  has long been a key part of US policy, particularly in healthcare, education, and legal services. Dipak pointed out that eliminating language services would create inefficiencies, making it harder for medical professionals to provide accurate care. CEOs React as Trump Declares English the Sole Official Language of the US Peter emphasized the broader uncertainty the order creates as many organizations rely on federal funding for language services, and a lack of clear guidance could lead to reduced support in schools, courts, and public services. Both CEOs acknowledged that while this order presents challenges, the language services industry has historic...

In an December 29, 2024 paper by Sony Research India researchers Pratik Rakesh Singh, Mohammadi Zaki, and Pankaj Wasnik comes a framework specifically designed to "improve entertainment content translations" in Indian languages. They "believe it is the first of its kind," using an amalgamation of context awareness along with style adaptation to produce not only accurate translations but also entertaining for the targeted audience. The researchers explained that traditional machine translation MT systems usually struggle to handle entertainment content because they mostly translate sentences in isolation. It leads to "disconnected" translations that can't really capture the emotional depth or cultural references behind the original dialogue. This has a particular pronounced effect in entertainment, where all these interconnected conversations and subtle cues in the narrative are so vital. The challenge, in entertainment translation, lies in preserving ...

Hosted by Florian Faes and Esther Bond, with guest Anna Wyndham, in their SlatorPod year-end 2024 episode, key language industry trends over the course of the past year, including trends, drivers, and predictions, 2025, will be discussed. First, language industry news of the week: LXT acquired clickworker with the goal of doubling revenues by 2025 by expanding its AI data capabilities. Esther also shares how EzDubs, a speech translation startup, raised USD 4.2m in seed funding . Florian comments that RWS published revenues for 2024 that are stable with £180m from AI-powered products and services. Additionally, YouTube announced the rollout of AI dubbing , enabling content creators to reach new language-speaking audiences, but admitted limitations at this point, including poor voice quality. https://youtu.be/CtrVDikK7lE In their discussion, the trio talked about the UK House of Lords inquiry into court interpreting and translation , highlighting pay issues for interpreters, quality i...

Stoquart, an language services provider  based in Belgium, has acquired Brussels-based ETC Europe, which holds the status of being a translation agency accredited by the European Union and other governmental and international organizations. The transaction was closed on 24 October 2024 after Stoquart's takeover of French competitor Version Internationale in 2023 . The founding managing director of Stoquart Translation Services, Dimitri Stoquart, found contact person ETC Europe General Manager Angelina Janssen due to meetings with the Belgian Association of Translation Companies or BQTA. He stated that Janssen suggested Stoquart form a consortium with ETC Europe and another language service provider, VerbiVis, to respond to the European Commission's TRAD23 RFP . This resulted in Stoquart achieving second place for English-French translation. In 2024, he mentioned that Janssen wanted to step back and suggested that Stoquart assume control of ETC Europe. Before the acquisition, ...

Highlights from SlatorCon Silicon Valley 2024 Slator- Language Industry Intelligence On September 5, 2024, more than 150 language industry and technology leaders gathered at Hotel Nia in Menlo Park, Silicon Valley . The event offered a friendly and relaxed environment, encouraging networking and reconnections among participants. Attendees from over a dozen countries and four continents emphasized the importance of in-person Slator events in addition to virtual ones. The expo hall was also buzzing with activity. Esther Bond , Head of Advisory at Slator, kicked off the event with a warm welcome, outlining the day's presentations and panels, and encouraging delegates to network and engage with each other. Key Takeaways from SlatorCon Silicon Valley 2024 Florian Faes , Managing Director of Slator, opened the sessions by presenting key insights from Slator’s latest research on the language industry's current state. He discussed practical applications of large language models (LLMs)...

Humanless LSP as a Fun Weekend Project Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week, giving a recap of SlatorCon London and exploring some use cases from the Slator Pro Guide: Language AI for Consumers . Florian talks about Andrew Ng’s recent project on agentic machine translation , which involves using large language models ( LLMs ) to create a virtual language service provider (LSP). The duo touched on Apple’s recent Worldwide Developer Conference, where Apple Watch is set to get a translation widget and also recently announced a new translation API. Florian shares RWS’s half-year financial results , where despite declines in revenue, the company’s stock rose by 20%, likely due to investor perception of AI-enabled services and new product offerings like Evolve and HAI gaining traction. Esther talks about DeepL’s USD 300m funding round , which valued the company at USD 2bn, a testament to the growing interest in AI models. She also covers Unbabel’s launch of To...

Here’s a New Dataset for Emotion-Aware Speech Translation Imagine a world where translations don't just convert words but also capture the emotions behind them. This is the promise of MELD-ST, a new dataset introduced in May 2024 by researchers from the Technical University of Munich, Kyoto University, SenseTime, and Japan's National Institute of Informatics. This dataset is designed to revolutionize speech translation by ensuring that emotional context is preserved, enhancing both speech-to-text (S2TT) and speech-to-speech translation (S2ST) systems. Background Emotion plays a critical role in human conversation, yet most translation systems struggle to accurately convey the emotional tone of the original speech. While text-to-text translation (T2TT) has seen some progress in emotion-aware translation, speech translation remains a largely uncharted territory. The introduction of MELD-ST aims to fill this gap. The Creation of MELD-ST MELD-ST builds upon the existing Multimod...