Slator - Language Industry News

Bryan Forrester , Co-founder and CEO of  Boostlingo , returns to SlatorPod for round 2 to talk about the company’s growth, the US  interpreting  market, and the evolving role of  AI . Bryan shares how the company has tripled in size since he  last appeared on the pod , driven by strategic acquisitions, including  VoiceBoxer and Interpreter Intelligence , and a  rebranding effort  to unify its product portfolio. Bryan explains how   Boostlingo   balances innovation with practicality, ensuring that new features align with customer needs. He highlights the company’s three-pronged strategy: retaining existing customers, enabling growth, and making long-term bets on emerging trends. While tools like real-time captions and transcription enhance efficiency, Bryan stresses that AI alone cannot replace human interpreters in complex industries like healthcare. He highlights privacy, compliance, and the nuanced expertise of human interpreters as cr...

Slator's Pro Guide: AI in Interpreting is an absolute must-read for all providers of interpreting services and solutions. Here, the authors give a quick snapshot of what the newest applications of AI and large language models (LLMs) look like in interpreting. This Slator Pro Guide will bring you up to speed on what value AI can bring to your company and the new interpreting workflows, service models, and speech AI capabilities now available to you. The guide covers 10 one-page, actionable case studies-thematically designed and presented as vibrant infographics drawn from research and interviews with some of the leading interpreting service providers in the industry. The ten use cases highlight new areas of growth, innovative models for service delivery, and novel workflows in interpretation made possible by the recent developments in LLMs, speech-to-text, and speech synthesis. We will illustrate how AI speech translation solutions are being leveraged to open up language acc...

On  7  January  2025, LinkedIn News UK  released  its  " Job trends 2025: The 25 fastest-growing jobs in the UK " ,  and  the  interpreters   find   themselves   at #22. LinkedIn calls  this   " Jobs on the Rise "   -   positions that it  considers  to   be   pointers  of areas of career opportunity based on data collected over the  past  three years. In   the list, it names  both spoken and sign language interpreters   and states  the  skills   typical   for a professional in the field as:  interpreting, translation, and consecutive interpretation .   The  professionals   are  thus   mainly  in demand in translation and localization, museums, historical sites, zoos, and interestingly  enough , transportation equipment manufacturing. The LinkedIn data points to London, Manchester, and Glasgow as the ...

The  United States  government has issued an unusual  RFP for translation  services: The target languages are all indigenous to the US. The contracting agency is the Office of Indian Economic Development (OIED), which falls under the Bureau of Indian Affairs that governs programs concerning federally recognized American Indian Tribes. OIED has allied with the Department of Agriculture, or USDA, in this contract. This will provide a means whereby diverse agencies can request translation into Native languages. The  RFP  features a  set-aside for Indian Small Business Economic Enterprises , meaning that only companies meeting certain revenue and ownership requirements may apply. OIED would prefer to award a single contractor work for all four languages. "This is a one-year project that will respond to federal agency requests for ongoing...

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 ...

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 techno...

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 firm...