Monday, December 30, 2024

The Most Popular Language Industry Stories of 2024

As 2024 comes to a close, it is time to reflect on the most popular stories, trends, innovations, and themes that made the Slator headlines throughout the year, highlighting key developments in the language industry.

Here is a selection of stories that attracted the most attention and engagement from our readers around the world.


Will Large Language Models Edge Linguists Out of the Language Industry?

One of Slator’s most-read stories in 2024 detailed a May 2024 paper from the University of Zurich and Georgetown University that explored the role of linguists in the evolving field of machine translation (MT). The entrance of large language models (LLMs) has reduced the reliance on linguists for grammar and semantic coherence while designing a system. 

However, the authors concluded, there are a number of points in the process where linguistic expertise is still essential. These include building parallel corpora for MT; developing technology for low-resource languages; and identifying linguistic phenomena that may present challenges for a system. Linguists can be especially helpful as humans and machines interface, for example, by designing effective human evaluations and reliably assessing advancements in the field.

Google Translate Ditches Tool for Detailed Human Feedback

Google retired its longstanding human feedback tool, Contribute, which allowed users to press a button and submit an alternative translation. 

Slator reported in April 2024, Google’s announcement, in which the company acknowledged Contribute’s role in improving Google Translate, explained that since launching the tool in 2014, “our systems have significantly evolved, allowing us to phase out Contribute.” 

Users can, however, still submit feedback by rating a given translation “good” or “poor,” and, for the latter, selecting a reason from a drop-down menu — a less involved process that speakers of low-resource languages worry might halt improvement of MT for their languages. 

Live Speech-to-Speech AI Translation Goes Commercial

Just one month into 2024, an increasing number of language AI researchers — from academia to private companies — had already begun to focus on live speech-to-speech translation (S2ST). 

This only accelerated the adoption of live S2ST across multiple commercial applications thanks to LLMs, which kicked off in mid-2023, with models such as Meta’s SeamlessM4T and Google’s AudioPaLM.

Slator’s rundown of real-world use cases included business meetings, where Microsoft Translator, integrated with the Teams meeting app, provides real-time speech translation in more than 30 languages through Azure AI services. KUDO and Interprefy specialize in real-time AI speech translation for live events and conferences.

Even the high-stakes world of healthcare presents an opportunity for expansion, especially for providers already offering voice technology for healthcare clients. Orion Labs, for instance, offers live speech translation via its Push-to-Talk 2.0 platform. 

Introducing Revamped New Translation Quality ISO Standard 5060

Published in February 2024, ISO 5060 applies not only to language services providers (LSPs), but also to in-house translation departments and individual translators. While it specifically provides guidance for human evaluation of translation output, it can be used for workflows involving human and machine translation, with or without subsequent post-editing. 

The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) established a framework based on “bilingual examination of target language content against source language content,” with the goal of standardizing evaluations so they do not differ significantly from rater to rater. 

There are seven main categories of errors, which can be classified as critical, major, or minor: terminology, accuracy, linguistic conventions, style, locale conventions, audience appropriateness, and design and markup. 

Translation AI Agency Lengoo Files for Bankruptcy

In March 2024, Lengoo filed for bankruptcy in a Berlin court, with German news sources pegging Lengoo’s accumulated losses between USD 8-16m.

Christopher Kränzler, Alexander Gigga, and Philipp Koch-Büttner founded Lengoo in 2014, originally as an online platform for automating project management and administrative tasks. 

Starting in 2018, investors such as RedalpineCreathor Ventures, Piton Capital, Inkef Capital, Techstars, and Polipo Ventures expressed confidence in Lengoo’s developing proprietary translation system, with Lengoo raising USD 34m by February 2021 — making it a long way for the LSP to fall.

Amazon Flags Risks of Training LLMs on Web-Scraped MT 

Training LLMs at scale relies on massive amounts of training data scraped from the web. A January 2024 research paper from Amazon investigating the prevalence and quality of MT on the web found that a “shocking amount of the web is machine translated” into many languages. 

And oftentimes, that MT output is low-quality, raising concerns about the quality of training data for LLMs. Researchers also noted a selection bias toward “shorter and more predictable sentences,” potentially from low-quality English content machine translated into many lower-resource languages.

The pervasiveness of low-quality MT in training data, the authors warned, could lead to less fluent models with more hallucinations, particularly for low-resource languages. 

Translators by Any Other Name

Slator’s January 2024 roundup of five polls from 2023 was crowned by the most voted-on — and perhaps introspective — question: Will the term “translator” disappear in the next five years? Close to half of respondents said no, with just over 30% saying it will “definitely” or “possibly” disappear in that time period. 

Inspired by a SlatorPod interview with ASAP-translation.com CEO Jakub Absolon, another poll asked whether readers agreed with Absolon, who suggested the term “full post-editing” should not be used, and should be priced as human translation.

More than 65% of readers agree that the term should not be used, while 18.7% want to keep using it. The remaining 16% are happy to use whatever term the client prefers. 

Other polls touched on inflation, with nearly half of respondents reporting flat rates; ChatGPT, which 80% of readers reporting they do not use it for translation; and the beloved Microsoft Language Portal, used “often” by 46.5% of respondents. 

Real-Time Speech Translation Stars in Biggest OpenAI Release Since ChatGPT

OpenAI has not slowed down since being credited with unleashing accessible AI to the masses. The company’s May 2024 release of GPT-4o offered a range of new or improved capabilities. The single new model was trained end-to-end across text, vision, and audio, with all inputs processed by the same neural network, reportedly with enhanced performance in around 50 languages. 

A demo of GPT-4o featured a brief conversation with OpenAI CTO Mira Murati asking the system a question in Italian, to which GPT-4o responds in English. Cue the hot takes of ‘RIP translators’ and shares in language learning resource Duolingo dipping 3%. OpenAI planned to launch support for GPT-4o’s new audio and video capabilities to a small group of trusted partners in an API within a few weeks.

EU Parliament Issues a New 2024 Call for Tenders for Translation Services

February 2024 notice posted for translation services would cover translation of single and multiple source language documents in 24 languages for four European institutions: the European Parliament’s Directorate-General for Translation; the European Court of Auditors; the Committee of the Regions of the European Union; and the European Economic and Social Committee. 

While the notice did not mention MT, it did specify output metrics for source and target languages, and contracts — with one lot per language, assigned to a primary contractor and up to four secondary contractors — are estimated to last up to 60 months. No specific budget was listed. Once awarded, the contract will become effective January 1, 2025.

Bankrupt Dutch LSP, WCS Group, Quickly Bought by France’s Powerling 

In a provisional January 2024 ruling, a Dutch judge suspended payments by LSP WCS Group to its creditors, appointing an administrator to negotiate until a later hearing a few months later. Of 14 companies under the WCS Group, only one was listed as in “suspension of payment” status; all others are listed under “bankruptcy” status. At the time, WCS Group’s website listed 3,247 active freelancers, whose next steps were unclear. 

Just a few days later, French LSP Powerling acquired WCS Group for an undisclosed amount. Powerling, which already had a presence in the Netherlands — plus France, Hong Kong, and the US — said the move was in line with the company’s goal of clearing EUR 25m in revenues by the end of 2024 through acquisitions in Powerling’s main markets.

Thursday, December 26, 2024

Does the Machine Translation Post-Editing Activity Require a Lot of Time and Effort?

For the language industry, the year 2024 will go down as a year that had multiple developments and innovations at a fast pace, but this growth came with some distinct trends on the technological front that included translation feature as a service (TaaF), the emergence of multimodal AI, and retrieval augmented generation (RAG) and the use of large language models (LLM) enabled applications. 

The integration of AI tools and human skill was in the central place in the deliberations of the industry specialists even as the different size companies had their perspectives. The responses of the readers and viewers as revealed in the weekly Slator polls are snapshots of the sentiments, preferences and scopes across the industry. 

1. Is it Time for Language Service Providers to Change Their Mindset? 

The language service sector has survived difficult times in the past but it was not business as usual for an industry that started 2024 on the wrong foot as reports of some firms filing for bankruptcy around that time surfaced. This is a pointer that the adequate provision of funding and accessing the latest generation of ai tools does guarantee permanence in the business. The German AI company Lengoo, for example, went bankrupt in March 2024 after the WCS Group of Holland went bankrupt in December 2023 (which was purchased by Powerling later).

In the poll carried out by Slator Weekly, a figure of 52.1% of the respondents stated that they believe that there will be more bankruptcies of LSPs, while only 3.4% feel that this is not likely to happen. During the poll, more than half of the respondents in this particular poll held the opinion that there would be an inevitable increase in the number of LSP bankruptcies in 2024. Respondents who expressed the feeling that recruitments would also be impressive but really insufficient were almost close to 31.1%, while 13.4% stated that it was barely possible. 

2. What is Post-editing of Machine Translation in the Market? 

The phrase-matching interpretation of translation, however, is somewhat reduced in importance as MT broadens into more creative areas such as literature and marketing - It stands to reason that the volume of MTPE activities has now eclipsed human translation editing in volume. This statement, made by the Société française des traducteurs (SFT), was not more than a few hours old and was retracted immediately, but not before it acknowledged that 70% of its members regard post editing as unnecessary owing to somewhat the low pay given to the job and the boring nature of the work. 

LawBuilder.ai supports this claim; in the polls of July, 2024, for instance, 61.2% of the participants affirmed that most of the time post editing is just boring and dull work - 23.5% said they do so “once in a while” when they feel it is needed while 10.2% said anything related to MTPE was annoying because the tools were not up to their standard with 5.1% showing even some iota of interest in carrying out the work.

 

3. Would Shakespeare Grudge the Other Bard’s Translations?

 William Shakespeare’s works reflect British culture, and thus his works have not been translated during his lifetime, however, Gemini which was initially called Google Bard is capable of translating all of Shakespeare's works into several foreign languages within minutes. Although in the research of Burns and Swerve translation conducted in the year of 2021 scholars showed a bias in preferring human literation translation, the progress in LLMs technology in January 2024 forecasts a competency switch in different translation techniques and style.

 It is a fact that AI translation is a threat of entering the creative fields of writers and the social media and publishers have begun to speak about its use and even promote it. However, readers were split on their expectations regarding the pace at which AI translation may be effectively deployed in creative works within a period of 2-3 years. To the question of whether MT use will become widespread in literary translation in 2-3 years, about two-thirds (31.9%) of the respondents viewed it as improbable. Around one-fifth (20.2%) held the contrary view leaving the rest to be evenly divided across likely (17.0%), uncertain (16.0%), and unlikely (14.9%). 

4. Is Translation Quality Evaluation a Solved Problem?

Despite the advancement in MT as well as the development and availability of automated metrics like BLEU and COMET, human evaluation is essential to determine the quality of translations. The new ISO 5060 Standard fulfils this need by indicating how translation output may be evaluated by humans regardless of its source.

The standard consists of seven quality categories including terminology and style, while error severity is also allocated to the mistakes. As much as ISO 5060 focuses on the harmonization of approaches toward evaluation, as of February 2024, only 6.8% of polled believe that this is a solved issue, with 72.7% believing the area needs further research and 20.5% who believe the language and the type of text in the translation process.

5. Has ChatGPT Changed Google Search Behavior?

OpenAI launched the prototype of SearchGPT in July 2024, offering a direct AI-powered "answer experience" instead of traditional search results. It, however, raises several questions on the accuracy of answers and self-referencing as AI-generated content becomes a part of search results.

Has this new release changed how Slator readers search? According to our poll, nearly two-thirds of respondents (65.7%) primarily use the Google search engine. Less than a quarter (22.9%) of readers reported using Google Search a bit, and ChatGPT more often. The rest (11.4%) said they mostly use ChatGPT for questions.

6. Has AI (LLMs, etc.) altered your work life over the last 24 months?

In episode #221 of SlatorPod, Spence Green, Lilt CEO, discussed how the need for AI in localization has become increasingly imperative. This involves the potential of custom LLMs, RAG, and AI orchestration to automate tasks, customize content, process huge volumes of data, and increase ROI.

As companies like Reddit truly and materially demonstrate their faith in AI localization, the general adoption and adaptation of the language industry are challenged. According to a Slator poll, more than one in three localization professionals (37.5%) have not introduced AI into their daily work practices yet, while more than one in five, namely 23.6%, have all-in. Two equal cohorts – at 19.4% each – use AI language tech "somewhat" or "a little," respectively. 

7. Will AI increase or decrease demand for language learning in the long term?

OpenAI introduced the multimodal GPT-4o model and demonstrated a live speech-to-speech translation (S2ST) demo with Italian and English. Reactions on X ran a storm, pronouncing an end to translators and language learning as we have known them. Social media jitters turned into quakes and caused some investors to sell shares of the language learning platform, Duolingo.

 

The responses of the readers to the question of whether AI would increase or decrease demand for language learning in the long term were rather split, with more than one-third (36.9%) predicting that demand will increase and another (35.4%) that it will decrease. A little over a quarter (27.7%) believe demand will stay the same.

8. What role would prepare you best to lead an LSP?

The world's largest LSP, TransPerfect, has been growing continuously on the basis of acquisitions and diverse offerings, including technology. But the real engine in the company is, of course, people such as Jin Lee, appointed as co-CEO in January 2024.

At that point, Lee was a 20-year veteran of the company, having joined as a project manager and having been Senior VP for Global Production before his co-CEO appointment. In this light, we asked readers what roles best prepare them for running an LSP, and the largest cohort (46.0%) believes it is project management. Other readers selected sales and language experts (14.3% each), and finance/admin and language ops (11.1% each).

9. Are you experiencing a summer slowdown in business?

There was no traditional summer slowdown for the language industry in 2024 — at least, not in the northern hemisphere. July alone was busy with significant investment activity, from early-stage funding to major acquisitions.

 

Capital kept pouring into some sectors, including AI dubbing and captioning, plus language tech. Yet, when we asked readers if they were seeing a summer slowdown, 40.3% said they were definitely experiencing a cooling period. For the rest, the summer was either fairly stable (33.9%) or busier than ever (25.8%).

 10. How has your business year gone so far?

News of bankruptcies hit the language industry at the start of 2024 and may even have shocked some Slator readers into action to avoid a similar fate. The Language Service Provider Index (LSPI) showed indications of stability for some companies and actual growth for the Super Agencies.

Although the LSPI only includes about 300 companies which volunteer their data for the survey, the February 2024 edition seemed to foreshadow the mixed bag LSPs experienced for the balance of 2024. While some companies were indeed pushed out of business, acceleration in M&A was also clear. Readers self-reported that, as of February 2024, business had thus far been great (27.6%) or good (25.9%), flat (20.7%), not great (15.5%), or bad (10.3%).

Sunday, December 22, 2024

The Year in Review and 2025 Predictions!

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 issues, and how AI is being deployed for quality assurance.

Reflecting on 2024, Anna outlines three major trends: speech-to-speech translation, "translation as a feature," where translation capabilities are integrated into everyday software like project management tools, and the evolution of localization roles toward AI-driven skills.

Looking forward, Anna foresees rapid adoption of AI by the public sector given the cost constraints and the need for scalability, whereas Florian envisions further breakthroughs in machine translation quality estimation and, possibly, IPOs in the language tech industry. Esther predicts higher levels of M&A activity in the industry, where niche providers seek stability and scalability in a competitive market.

Friday, December 20, 2024

Stoquart Buys Peer Belgian LSP ETC Europe

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, shares of ETC Europe were divided among three shareholders; Stoquart has taken over all the shares.

"It was worth joining forces," Stoquart explained. "We have gained both institutional and private clients, along with an increasing number of multilingual projects."

In doing so, ETC Europe further creates new sources of income for Stoquart. The LSP, which now operates as ETC Europe or Stoquart, has recently entered three sizeable contracts with a number of Europe's biggest institutions.

This bodes well for Stoquart, which has faced an accumulated revenue decline of 30% in both 2023 and 2024.

"With this acquisition and the revenues from the European Parliament contract, we will be able to regain our 2022 revenue levels," Stoquart stated. 

Strong In-House Resources and Powerful Brands

Stoquart now has around 50 people working for her globally. Janssen will stay until the end of 2024 and will remain available as needed in the near future. (Besides nearly 30 in-house linguists, Stoquart engages between 150-180 freelancers monthly.)

Similar to Version Internationale, ETC Europe holds a strong reputation in the institutional sector. The company will retain its brand identity and limit integration with Stoquart to the essentials required for seamless operations, focusing primarily on activities in the LSP's main office.

Based on Stoquart's location, a big portion of its work is with all variants of French and Dutch, but the company also handles German, Italian, and Spanish. Stoquart now finds itself branching out into other European languages for institutional work, too.

Most clients are found in the US, Ireland, CzechiaSpainFrance, Belgium, the UKGermany, and Denmark. Stoquart said the LSP specializes in fields where human expertise is required, such as IT, financelegallife sciences, and the defense industry.

Stoquart's technology approach combines off-the-shelf tools, such as Studio and Phrase, and proprietary tools, including an app that allows users to access several machine translation engines. Stoquart is now expanding into additional European languages for institutional work as well.

Thursday, November 21, 2024

New SAG-AFTRA Game Localization Contract Restricts AI Usage in Dubbing

On November 14, 2024, the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) announced an updated version of a previous agreement that covers the localization of video game projects produced in a non-English language.

With approximately 160,000 members, SAG-AFTRA calls itself the “world’s largest union representing performers and broadcasters.” The union also represents voiceover artists, including those who provide dubbing. 

As comics and gaming website Bleeding Cool reported, the new Independent Interactive Localization Agreement is essentially an updated version of the base terms from the union’s Tiered Budget Independent Interactive Media Agreement, plus AI protections.

The new agreement is signed on a project-by-project basis by employers whose project was originally scripted in a language other than English, and whose intellectual property owner is based outside of the United States.

“Many brilliant, beloved games come to market in the U.S. from other countries, projects which need highly skilled localizing performers,” Interactive Media Agreement Negotiating Committee Chair Sarah Elmaleh was quoted as saying in the press release. Elmaleh added that “[m]any such companies have already signed Interim Localization Agreements”. 

The contract was reportedly crafted “based on direct feedback from the community that does this work.”

However, the introduction of the Independent Interactive Localization Agreement does not interrupt an ongoing SAG-AFTRA strike.

The union called for the strike, effective July 26, 2024, in response to stalled negotiations, which began in October 2022. The use of AI still presents a major hurdle, as SAG-AFTRA explained:

“Although agreements have been reached on many issues important to SAG-AFTRA members, the employers refuse to plainly affirm, in clear and enforceable language, that they will protect all performers covered by this contract in their A.I. language.”

The strike applies to over 130 video game projects currently signed to the union’s interim and independent agreements; the goal is for those signatories to sign updated agreements. 

Human-Made Recordings and Digital Replicas

The Interactive Media Agreement, originally introduced in 2017, was extended until 2022. At that point, it was replaced by the Tiered-Budget Independent Interactive Media Agreement along with the Interim Interactive Media Agreement and, most recently, the Independent Interactive Localization Agreement.

Katie Sikkema, a union contracts consultant, explained on LinkedIn that the updated agreement “includes a mandatory buyout of all reuse and integration for an additional 50% of scale, which means the IP owner can use the (original, human-made) recordings for whatever they want with no further fees due (except merchandising/talking toys, which must be separately negotiated).”

The contract describes generative AI (GenAI) as a “subset of AI that learns patterns from data and then produces content based on those patterns.” 

Interestingly, GenAI is considered separate from “digital replicas” of performers, including voice actors, though the term is not defined. To that point, employers are required to provide the union advance notice if they intend to use GenAI to generate material other than digital replicas. 

Employers that want to create GenAI material using prompts including a performer’s name, or a unique character associated with that performer, must get consent from the performer and bargain for the use of GenAI material at a specific minimum rate.

SAG-AFTRA’s strikes have brought attention to the issues GenAI presents for the entertainment industry, an area ripe with opportunities for language AI startups specializing in dubbing. In March 2024, the union ratified the 2023 Television Animation Agreement, which includes “strong protections around the use of artificial intelligence” for voice acting and other performances. 

Tuesday, November 12, 2024

Google Says There’s a Better Way to Create High-Quality Training Data for AI Translation

In an October 14, 2024 paper, Google researchers highlighted the potential of AI translations refined by humans or human translations refined by large language models (LLMs) as alternatives to traditional human-only references.


Talking to Slator, Zhongtao Liu, a Software Engineer at Google, explained that their study addresses a growing challenge in the translation industry: scaling the collection of high-quality data needed for fine-tuning and testing machine translation (MT) systems. 

With translation demand expanding across multiple languages, domains, and use cases, traditional methods that rely solely on human translators have become increasingly expensive, time-consuming, and hard to scale.

To address this challenge, the researchers explored more efficient approaches to collect high-quality translation data. They compared 11 different approaches — including human-only, machine-only, and hybrid methods — to determine the most effective and cost-efficient one.

Human-only workflows involved either a single human translation step or included an additional one or two human review steps. Machine-only workflows ranged from single-step AI translations using top AI systems — MT systems or LLMs — to more complex workflows, where AI translations were refined by an LLM. Hybrid workflows combined human expertise and AI efficiency; in some cases, AI translations were refined by humans (i.e., post-editors), while in others, human translations were refined by LLMs.

They found that combining human expertise and AI efficiency can achieve translation quality comparable to, or even better than, traditional human-only workflows — all while significantly reducing costs. “Our findings demonstrate that human-machine collaboration can match or even exceed human-only translation quality while being more cost-efficient,” the researchers said.

The best combination of quality and cost appears to be human post-editing of AI translations. This approach delivered top-tier quality at only 60% of the cost of traditional human-only methods, while maintaining the same level of quality.

“This indicates that human-machine collaboration can be a faster, more cost-efficient alternative to traditional collection of translations from humans, optimizing both quality and resource allocation by leveraging the strengths of both humans and machines,” they noted.

The researchers emphasized that the quality improvements stem from the complementary strengths of human and AI collaboration, rather than from the superior capability of either the AI or the human (post-editor) alone, underscoring the importance of leveraging both human and AI strengths to achieve optimal translation quality.

They noted that LLMs were less effective than human post-editors at identifying and correcting errors in AI-generated translations. On the other hand, human reviewers tended to make fewer changes when reviewing human-generated translations, possibly overlooking certain errors. Interestingly, even additional rounds of human review did not substantially improve the quality. This observation supports the argument for human-machine collaboration, where each component helps address the other’s blind spots, according to the researchers.

“These findings highlight the complementary strengths of human and machine post-editing methods, indicating that a hybrid method is likely the most effective strategy,” they said.

Authors: Zhongtao Liu, Parker Riley, Daniel Deutsch, Alison Lui, Mengmeng Niu, Apu Shah, and Markus Freitag


Monday, October 28, 2024

Leading Localization from Asia with EC Innovations’ Sijie Wei

Sijie Wei, Co-CEO of language services, technology, and game localization specialist EC Innovations (ECI), joins SlatorPod to talk about his new role as co-CEO and leading one of Asia’s largest LSPs with revenues exceeding USD 50m in 2023.


Sijie describes how ECI's initial focus on assisting Western blue-chip companies to enter China evolved into helping Chinese digital titans like Tencent and ByteDance extend their product offerings internationally.

Sijie emphasized the difficulties facing the Asia-Pacific market, where localization maturity in several verticals still lags behind that of the US and Europe. But as sectors like e-commerce, artificial intelligence, and electric vehicles develop, he sees enormous development potential.

Sijie noted that Chinese businesses want to create their own language AI solutions, which makes the industry extremely competitive. This study helps ECI apply state-of-the-art AI developments to client projects. 

https://youtu.be/PrJkZEWWCN0

In game localization, Sijie continues to see substantial growth potential. He recognizes that localizing games from China to global markets and vice versa is equally challenging due to differences in player preferences, monetization methods, and cultural contexts.

Sijie shared his thoughts on the financial environment, pointing out that the uncertainty surrounding the adoption of AI in several industries, such as localization, is the reason why market values are currently lower.

Sijie addressed the balance between AI and human localization knowledge in her conclusion, stressing that although AI can increase efficiency, human quality is still preferable in many situations.

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