Here’s What Happened at the 21st ALC Annual Summit in Portland
Attendees returned to the organization’s hometown of Portland to discuss big-picture challenges, advocacy and policy needs, and professional development.
SlatorCon Zurich is now SOLD OUT — See you on October 4th!
Seyma Albarino
Senior Staff Writer at Slator. Trained interpreter and aspiring minimalist. Fan of dystopian fiction, not headlines. Based in Chicago.
Non-Freelance US Interpreter and Translator Salaries Rose 9% in 2022
US Bureau of Labor Statistics 2022 Occupational Outlook Handbook updates figures on language professionals’ hourly and annual wages, plus estimates for future industry growth.
Spotify Launches Voice Translation in Podcasting Push
Spotify introduces Voice Translation feature with a bundle of Spanish-translated podcast episodes, potentially creating demand for expert-in-the-loop podcast localization.
Speech Wikimedia Drops a 200GB Audio Dataset to Train ASR and Speech Translation
Researchers from NVIDIA, Factored.ai, Talon Voice, and others open-source a properly licensed dataset of 1,780 hours of speech in 77 different languages, plus transcriptions.
Tracing Meta’s Path to Text and Speech Translation Model SeamlessM4T
Meta introduced SeamlessM4T after months of research and numerous expansive multilingual models. How does the “next big thing” fit into future projects, and the language industry?
Slator Pro Guide: Subtitling and Captioning
Pro Guide for buyers and LSPs on how to leverage captions and subtitles for video content to grow viewership and improve engagement. Features 10 x 1-page use cases.
Voice Actors Win Battle, But Face War on Voice Cloning in Gaming
As tech catches up with the growing demand of an increasingly international gaming market, voice actors object to overreaching contracts and potential manipulation of their work.
Australian Certified Translation Platform AcudocX Acquires Translato.ai in IP Deal
AcudocX plans to streamline its self-service translation portals for speed and accuracy. Translato.ai founder Kyle Corbitt, ex-Googler and a Y Combinator director, will serve as advisor.
Meta Debuts SeamlessM4T, the Swiss Army Knife of Translation Models
Meta continues to pour resources into multimodal translation capabilities as it launches SeamlessM4T, capable of translating speech and text and trained on hundreds of thousands of hours of data.
Germany’s Transline Appoints Maximilian Lachnit as New CEO
Lachnit replaces Katja Schabert, who had been with Transline since 2015. He credits his “profound experience” in finance with winning over Transline shareholder Blue Cap.
ChatGPT as a Multilingual Tourist Aid for Travel in India Still Has a Ways to Go
New paper shows OpenAI’s generative model outperforms in English-Hindi translation, but requires more work in Kannada and Telugu; future research may compare Apple, Google.
New York Interpreters Allege Discrimination by Court System in Underpayment Lawsuit
Twenty-nine interpreters, all employees of the court, argue inordinately low pay and “dysfunction of Justice” for limited English proficiency New Yorkers violate the 14th Amendment.
Plot Twist: Hollywood Strikes May Boost Demand for (Some) Localization
Streaming giant Netflix bets on films and TV series produced outside the US to keep American audiences engaged; viewing hours of non-English series jumped 30% in seven weeks.
Multilingual Customer Support SaaS Provider Language I/O Raises USD 8M in Series A1
Led by Joint Effects, the round brings total raised to date to USD 22.4m; company plans to use funds to grow machine learning team and integrate generative AI tech into existing platform.
15 US Attorneys General Object to Human-Free Machine Translation of Emergency Alerts
Federal Communications Commission’s proposal to expand language access is a good start, officials from 15 states say, but should include (human) translation into 25 languages.
Keywords Studios Shares Drop Over 10% on ‘Pronounced Moderation’ in Localization
Fresh off the acquisition of two game development studios and two digital marketing agencies, Irish game localizer Keywords Studios reports H1 2023 revenue growth but outlook disappoints.
The Fairwork Project Takes a Critical Look at Crowdsourcing Platforms
The Fairwork Project releases its 2023 report ranking the labor practices of 15 digital work platforms; some, including data-for-AI leader Appen, adopt the report's recommendations.
California Court Interpreters Urge Lawmakers to Oppose Two Proposed Bills
As California courts struggle to retain qualified interpreters, union-backed AB 1032 could degrade quality standards, while AB 432 pitches an unnecessary new training program.
Phrase Scores EUR 12M in Debt Financing From CIBC Innovation Banking
Localization tech platform Phrase plans to dedicate funds to AI-driven advancements, having rolled out a new machine translation engine in November 2022, and hints at an upcoming release.
Now Europeans Get to Enjoy Google Bard’s Linguistic Overconfidence
Just two months after Bard’s limited release in May 2023, the large language model is now available in more than 40 languages —10x more than its original English, Japanese, and Korean.
AI Entertainment Localizer XL8 Acquires Transcription and Translation Provider AHT
Silicon Valley-headquartered startup expands client base from media to include government agencies, plans to work with human transcribers to improve speech-to-text tech.
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