Slator - Language Industry News

  YouTube  has  announced  that it has rolled out its Multi-Language Audio (MLA) feature to “millions of creators,” enabling them to upload their own audio tracks in multiple languages using human voiceover artists or recordings from other AI tools. The announcement follows YouTube’s decision in June to  roll out automated AI-generated dubs  to 80 million creators worldwide, which creators  slammed  as “too robotic” and “cringe,” triggering some creators to demand access to the MLA tool. YouTube, which made the MLA tool available to a limited number of YouTube creators in  early 2023 ,  stated  that “on average, creators uploading Multi-Language Audio tracks to their videos saw over 25% of their watch time come from views in the video’s non-primary language.” In addition, YouTube commented that MLA tracks “ amplified views by 3x ” on Jamie Oliver’s channel, with one creator, Mark Rober, having the “highest number of MLA dubs uploade...

  Florian and Esther welcome Slator’s Anna Wyndham and Alex Edwards to SlatorPod to explain the rationale behind the new industry framework introduced in the  Slator 2025 Language Industry Market Report . Drawing from the flagship report and echoing the buzz of SlatorCon London, the team explains why the traditional labels, Language Service Providers (LSPs) and Translation Management Systems (TMSs), no longer capture the scope and complexity of the evolving market. Instead, Slator has introduced two new terms:  Language Solutions Integrators  (LSIs) and  Language Technology Platforms  (LTPs). Anna defines  LTPs  as pure-play technology providers that develop language tools, applications, orchestration platforms, and AI models.  LSIs , she explains, are organizations whose core offering is to deliver fit-for-purpose multilingual content solutions by integrating language technology and AI with human experts as part of a fully managed solution. ...

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...

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 ...

Slator’s 30-page 2025 Localization Buyer Survey provides key insights from enterprise buyers of translation and localization services. The survey of 50 enterprise buyers uncovers the challenges buyers expect to face in 2025 and assesses the extent to which they have extracted value from language AI to date. Slator 2025 Localization Buyer Survey The findings offer valuable insights for both buyers and providers. For enterprise buyers, the report serves as a benchmarking tool — buyers can compare their strategies on budgets, AI adoption, and operational challenges with industry peers. For language service providers (LSPs) and translation management system (TMS) providers, the results provide direct insights into where buyers perceive gaps in support. The survey responses shed light on buyer expectations and priorities, helping inform service development, technology investment, and client engagement strategies. Respondents represented a diverse range of industries, offering a broad ...

An  article  on the Android Authority site from March 2025 states that the instant translation function could soon be available as a permanent feature within “Circle to Search.” Android’s Instant Translation Gets Enhanced in ‘Circle to Search’ If enabled, users will be able to translate whatever they select on the screen using Circle to Search on the screen into a device’s supported languages (this varies by device brand and model) without navigating out of the search function. Back in March 2024,  Google  announced the rollout of Language Translation Technology in the “ Circle to Search ” function for Android, which allows users to circle or tap text or an object on their mobile device screen and automatically search for it without switching apps.  So far, users have been able to translate things like menus on photos or PDFs by long-pressing the home button or navigation bar, and then tapping the translate icon.  Google’s  Android XR , the opera...

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...