As the year draws to a close, Slator has assembled some of the most notable quotes of 2022 — a year of change and challenges in the language services and technology industry.
The list covers a variety of topics; from language technology, M&A, industry growth, machine translation, expert-in-the-loop, interpreting, media localization, and AI dubbing, to large language models (LLMs) and more.
Quotes are selected from Slator’s 2022 news coverage, SlatorCon Remote presentations and SlatorPod interviews with industry leaders.
Language Services
April 28, 2022: Language Industry Hires at e2f, Language I/O, Acolad, and MasterWord
“Many buyers view language services as transactional purchases. It can be challenging for LSPs to convey the overall big picture and value of our services; how a partnership and strategic approach can lead to better outcomes and increased ROI.” — Ryan Foley, Director of Communications, MasterWord
July 12, 2022: A Very Human Thing: Why the Translation Business Continues to Be Resilient
“Going to Mars is less relevant than being understood. Language is the tool to solve all the other problems.” — Marco Trombetti, Co-Founder & CEO, Translated, Pi Campus
July 19, 2022: Language Industry Hires at Language I/O, DigitalTolk, Appen, Blend, Unbabel
“As technology platforms and tools mature, many people are recognizing the significant role language plays for customers. Language has become more relevant. A lot of people are seeing how massive this market is right now, and the unique opportunities it presents to help enterprises truly operationalize language more efficiently and at scale.” — Alex Cobb – Unbabel, Chief Product Officer
August 8, 2022: How Asana and Qualtrics Use Data to Craft Localization Strategy
“The more we talk about metrics as an industry and as professionals, the more we will identify and measure what really matters. There’s no point deciding to localize in 25 languages if you have not proven that localization moves the needle for that specific content piece and initiative.” — Giulia Tarditi, Manager, Global Experience, Qualtrics
M&A
May 20, 2022: Welocalize CEO Smith Yewell on Scaling a Language Industry Super Agency
“There’s been a lot of consolidation, but there’s still an enormous amount of fragmentation and you’ll see that consolidation continue and we want to be one of those consolidation leaders.” — Smith Yewell, Co-founder and CEO, Welocalize
October 28, 2022: Language Industry Hires at Toppan, TransPerfect, BLEND, and United Language Group
“It appears that growth via consolidation is a priority to the top players in the industry. Given that the bulk of LSPs are founder-owned and operated, the improvement in the market as the world heals from the pandemic will see all of those that were waiting to retire begin to test the market.” — Edgar Vargas Castañeda – TransPerfect, VP of Growth Strategies
October 28, 2022: Language Industry Hires at Toppan, TransPerfect, BLEND, and United Language Group
“PE funds will want to balance their portfolios, so you’ll see many PE-owned LSPs also hit the market. In general, expect high M&A activity this year and next. After that, the M&A cycle will begin to normalize as the broader industry trends drive behavior.” — Edgar Vargas Castañeda, TransPerfect, VP of Growth Strategies
Media Localization
Jan 21, 2022: Netflix COO Reveals Scale of Dubbing and Subtitling Operations
“We’re still learning how to bring stories to a global audience in increasingly effective ways. And it’s simple things like subtitling and dubbing. We’ve subtitled 7 million run-time minutes in 2021 and dubbed 5 million run-time minutes. But at that scale, we’re learning how to do that better and how to make localization more compelling to our members.” — Gregory K. Peters, COO & Chief Product Officer, Netflix
July 1, 2022: SlatorCon Remote Showcases Resilient Language Industry
“We love the fact that there are huge volumes, but it’s putting pressure on the supply chain.” — Mark Howorth, President, Iyuno-SDI Group
July 7, 2022: Zoo Digital’s Media Localization Revenues More Than Double on Dubbing Rebound
“The record levels of investment across the entertainment industry in new original content is creating unprecedented demand for localization and media services.” — Stuart Green, CEO, Zoo Digital
December 13, 2022: Deluxe Media Tucks in English Dubbing Specialist Post Haste Digital
“Localization of media content is a specialized skill. Content needs to be localized in a way that engages and resonates with cultures around the world. There is limited capacity in the industry to be able to localize content with the quality that consumers expect and, consequently, the demand for localization services is very high.” — Chris Reynolds, EVP and GM of WW Localization and Fulfillment, Deluxe Media
December 14, 2022: The Art of Dubbing: As Demand Rises, Creativity Remains Key
“Quality is, I would argue, more important than it’s ever been because there are now so many critical eyes on it.” — Simon Constable SVP, Global Language Services, Visual Data
December 14, 2022: The Art of Dubbing: As Demand Rises, Creativity Remains Key
“We’re seeing younger audiences preferring shorter content in which there is a greater percentage of dialogue. So you’re going to use more resources per minute of content to localize that. And that has a very direct impact on the use of resources and on the cost of the localization.” — Manel Carreras, Chief Commercial Officer, EVA Group
Interpreting
April 13, 2022: Demand for Interpreting Grows Despite Uncertainty — Here’s How Companies Respond
“What has really happened for the past couple of years is the accelerated adoption, not just of remote interpretation, but the boom of all of these events and event technologies that are now available.” — Richard Roocroft, Global Head, Strategic Alliances, Interprefy
May 13, 2022: Jeenie CEO Kirsten Brecht Baker on Raising a Series A for Healthcare Interpreting
“Migrant patterns — in addition to increased trade and increased global communication — are going to make it more and more necessary that we’re all communicating with people who speak other languages and coming from other cultures.” — Kirsten Brecht Baker, Co-founder and CEO, Jeenie
June 28, 2022: Some UN Interpreters Push Back Hard Against Remote Interpretation
“After working with RSI for two years, we have seen that the quality of the sound we receive from remote participants via the platforms is simply not up to the standard we need in order both to do our job to the best of our ability and to protect our hearing.” — Amy Brady and Martin Pickles, Interpreters, United Nations
August 15, 2022: Propio Acquires Telelanguage as CEO Sees Remote Interpreting at ‘All-Time High’
“Remote interpreting is at an all-time high. In certain areas [of interpreting services] demand remains at 50–70% of pre-pandemic levels but in general, the market has recovered and has now passed pre-Covid levels as a whole.” — Marco Assis, CEO, Propio
September 23, 2022: US Secretary of State Praises Interpreting Service as Vital for Diplomacy
“What I found remarkable about the interpreters is you’re somehow actually able to capture not just the words themselves, but the feeling, the meaning, and the emphasis behind them. It’s amazing how you’re able to, quite literally, do it simultaneously. It’s a remarkable skill, and I can tell you we can’t do our diplomacy without it.” — Antony Blinken, US Secretary of State
September 27, 2022: How the European Commission Is Tackling the New Era of Interpreting
“We need to prepare for new generations to come into the system. We see that there is less interest in working in linguistic professions from young people. We are investing to bridge the gap to create interest in young generations and bridge the gap between university training and the labor market.” — Genoveva Ruiz Calavera, Director-General for Interpretation, European Commission
October 19, 2022: European Parliament Gets Reprieve From Striking Interpreters Via ‘Interim Agreement’
“The interpreters are on strike. They will not interpret remote interventions due to the potentially harmful effect of non-compliant sound on health and the lack of adapted working conditions.” — Joint General Assembly of EU interpreters
October 28, 2022: DigitalTolk CEO Virpal Singh on Booking an Interpreter in Seconds
“We live in an era where at the tap of a button you can have a car outside within three minutes. It doesn’t make sense for it to take 40, 50 minutes just to get an interpreter.” — Virpal Singh, Co-founder and CEO, DigitalTolk
Language Technology
March 15, 2022: The Results Are In: 2022 European Language Industry Survey
[On SaaS language technology platforms] “The medium-sized and even tiny companies have caught up with the big ones in virtually all technology areas. Big companies have lost their technological advantage.” — Rudy Tirry, Co-ordinator, European Language Industry Survey 2022
June 10, 2022: Leading TransPerfect’s Technology Division With Matt Hauser
“Building and running a technology company or a technology division within another company is definitely a challenge. If you don’t have a structure around that, what happens is you create these different silos where you have technologies that don’t communicate with each other, or it creates a disjointed experience for clients.” — Matt Hauser, Senior Vice President, TransPerfect
October 12, 2022: Google Just Launched Translation Hub, Its Enterprise-Scale Translation Service
[On Google Translation Hub] “It not only preserves layouts and formatting, but also provides granular management controls such as support for human-in-the-loop feedback and document review.” — June Yang, VP Google Cloud AI and Industry Solutions
December 14, 2022: Smartling’s Bryan Murphy on How Translation Creates Growth as Budgets Become Tight
“AI and MT are tools for you to drive growth, allowing you to stop rationing content and moving to exploiting content.” — Bryan Murphy, CEO, Smartling
Machine Translation
February 4, 2022: The Machine Translation Literacy Project with Lynne Bowker
“People with a background in translation bring a very different perspective to using machine translation than people who don’t.” — Lynne Bowker, Professor, University of Ottawa
March 25, 2022: A New Way to Post-Edit MT
“The mistakes that the machine translation makes are getting more and more subtle and they’re harder to detect.” — Josef van Genabith, Scientific Director Multilingual Technologies, DFKI
April 8, 2022: Scaling Website Localization with Weglot CEO Augustin Prot
“If you are an online e-commerce store and you have hundreds of thousands of products, it’s not going to be possible to do manual human translations. Generally speaking, e-commerce tends to use machine translations by default, and then iterate on the most profitable or seen or most important pages.” — Augustin Prot, Co-founder and CEO, Weglot
August 19, 2022: Translation Pricing With Joseph Lambert and Callum Walker
“Clients are often presented with this image of machine translation that looks great, so it’s quite hard to justify the need for professional translation. They don’t often understand what goes into a professional translation as well.” — Joseph Lambert, Lecturer in Translation Studies, Cardiff University
September 2, 2022: Yasmin Moslem on Using Large Language Models to Custom Train Machine Translation
“Not every LSP should do this [build custom MT models] themselves. This is completely different than 20 years ago. Nowadays there are at least 100 companies that offer machine translation services. We expect language service providers to maybe invest in this.” — Yasmin Moslem, Machine Translation Researcher, ADAPT Centre
Translators
June 3, 2022: Academic Translation and Author Services as Growth Markets With ALE CEO, Avi Staiman
“As a norm, the translator is very much invisible. I don’t see any reason why translators shouldn’t be given full credit if the illustrator and the designer and the typography guy are all given credit.” — Avi Staiman, CEO, Academic Language Experts
August 29, 2022: Translation Pricing With Joseph Lambert and Callum Walker
“80% of the translators who worked with LSPs cited low rates of pay as the leading challenge. Whereas for respondents who worked with direct clients, they said that higher rates of pay was a key benefit.” — Joseph Lambert, Lecturer in Translation Studies, Cardiff University
Expert-in-the-Loop
March 4, 2022: Automating Language Evaluation With Emmersion CEO Brigham Tomco
“Human empathy needs to be involved with jobs that require language. I view AI and technology as a way to enhance the human component of what we do. We can remove the basic things so that the highly trained and highly paid people can focus on more important, high-level activities.” — Brigham Tomco, CEO, Emmersion
March 18, 2022: Meta VP Iris Orriss Announces Shift from Community Translation to Single-Language Vendors
“There always will be translation by humans, but the need to have translation everywhere ubiquitously is going to force us to have it also by machines. It’s going to force us to think about how we contribute to this shift to the spoken word. Getting that [speech] translated seamlessly.” — Iris Orriss, VP of Internationalization, Product Quality, and Product Experience, Meta
March 25, 2022: A New Way to Post-Edit MT
“How can we really improve the collaboration between the human translator and language technologies? We explored other interaction modalities — smartphones, touch, tablets, speech interfaces. We thought: let’s try that out for post-editing. As well as more fancy stuff like hand gestures and eye-tracking.” — Nico Herbig, Researcher Engineer, natif.ai
May 27, 2022: RWS Chief Language Officer Maria Schnell on the Value of Linguistic Expertise
“Nobody loves a robot. If clients want to be loved and want true engagement with their end-customers, you need a human to take the pre-translated content and make it relevant to the end-customer.” — Maria Schnell, Chief Language Officer, RWS
Roles in Localization
March 30, 2022: SlatorCon Keynote Speakers Discuss Translation Innovation, Media Localization Trends
“The explosion in local language content production means job growth as well as more and better jobs in every region around the world. There has never been a better time to find work in the LSP sector of the entertainment industry.” — Cyril Drabinsky, Chief Executive Officer, Deluxe Entertainment Services
March 30, 2022: How the Role of the Localization Manager Is Evolving
“Supported by the trends, I’ve seen localization managers get more and more influence, more and more responsibility and, of course, more and more challenges. And with massive responsibility comes also the chance for massive recognition and success.” — Mark Hjerpe, VP of Global Revenue, Intento
April 28, 2022: Language Industry Hires at e2f, Language I/O, Acolad, and MasterWord
“[There is] an increased permeability between industries which allows language industry personnel not only to move from vendor to customer and vice versa, but also to very successfully take their skills to different industries. This makes the recruiting of talented individuals more competitive.” — Arnaud Daix, COO, e2f
July 19, 2022: Language Industry Hires at Language I/O, DigitalTolk, Appen, Blend, Unbabel
“The competition over talent is huge and employee retention becomes more important than ever.” — Noa Menko, VP of Human Resources, Blend
Data-for-AI
October 18, 2022: Summa Linguae Buys Poland-Based Life Sciences LSP Get It
“This service line is very attractive. It keeps growing much faster than traditional localization. We are experiencing 30–40% growth in organic demand in the category and it has already become the majority of our revenue. This is very difficult to achieve from a much more mature and established localization client base.” — Krzysztof Zdanowski, CEO, Summa Linguae
AI Dubbing
June 9, 2022: AI Dubbing Startup, Papercup, Raises USD 20 Million in Series A
“[There is a] large market of suppressed demand, where video content is locked into one language, and dubbing through traditional methods for this type of content is just not feasible.” — Amir Jirbandey, Head of Growth, Papercup
July 22, 2022: Dubverse’s Anuja Dhawan on AI Dubbing for YouTubers, TikTokers and Content Creators
“Imagine if you, as a TikTok user, upload a ten-second video which is only in English, but that can be uploaded in five different languages on the go. That’s the future that we imagine with all of these different applications. Your addressable market is tenfold, twentyfold depending on the number of languages you publish it in.” — Anuja Dhawan, Co-founder, Dubverse
Speech Tech
July 14, 2022: thebigword Owner Susquehanna Leads Speechmatics’ USD 62m Series B
“Our view is that voice will become the increasingly dominant human-machine interface.” — Robert Whitby-Smith, Partner, AlbionVC
AI-Generated Content
April 28, 2022: Language Industry Hires at e2f, Language I/O, Acolad, and MasterWord
“Looking beyond the next two years, I think technologies such as automated content generation, semantic search, and speech-to-speech translation are likely to gain traction fast for many use cases.” — Diego Bartolome, CTO, Language I/O
May 11, 2022: In SEO, Google Says AI-Generated Content Is ‘Spam’
“Maybe the quality of [AI-generated] content is a little bit better than the old-school tools. But for us, it’s still automatically-generated content and that means it’s against the Webmaster Guide. So we would consider that to be spam.” — John Mueller, Senior Webmaster Trends Analyst, Google
Large Language Models
April 22, 2022: The Great Language Model Scale Off: Google’s PaLM
“We see that increasing the model size gives more capabilities, some of which cannot be predicted in advance. So it’s worth probing the frontier to understand what is possible.” — Grigory Sapunov, CTO, Intento
“The future is definitely bright and many new products and services will emerge.” — Grigory Sapunov, CTO, Intento
October 7, 2022: Cohere Co-founder Nick Frosst on Building the NLP Platform of the Future
“There’s an opportunity here for a company to make really, really, really big neural networks that are very good at language and provide companies access to them.” — Nick Frosst, Co-founder, Cohere
November 4, 2022: Deepgram: From Dark Matter to Deep Learning Speech API With Scott Stephenson
“[Open AI] Whisper is great and what we expect is for lots more people to latch on to Whisper to start building things. It captures the imagination now for people to say, wait a minute, we have gotten to a new level, and so I expect all speech recognition companies to up their game now and learn something from it as well. — Scott Stephenson, CEO, Deepgram
November 11, 2022: Intento CEO Konstantin Savenkov on Best-Fit MT, Google Translation Hub, Generative AI
“GPT and other pre-trained models enable us and other technology providers to go outside machine translation. This is great because a company like ours, it would take lots of time while we got resources to build such models from scratch ourselves. Now we can build on top.” — Konstantin Savenkov, Co-founder and CEO, Intento
November 22, 2022: How Good Are Large Language Models at Machine Translation?
“We find that, although impressive, the sentence-level translation capacity of LLMs still significantly lags that of competition-grade start-of-the-art systems.” — Markus Freitag, Research Scientist, Google Translate
December 6, 2022: We Asked ChatGPT Questions About the Language Industry…It Had a Lot to Say
“It’s difficult to predict the exact future of the translation industry, but it’s likely that AI will play a larger role in the industry as AI technology continues to improve. This could mean that machine translation will become more accurate and more widely used, potentially reducing the need for human translators in some cases. However, it’s also possible that the use of AI will complement the work of human translators and make their job easier, allowing them to focus on more complex tasks.” — ChatGPT, an AI chatbot released by Open AI
2023 Outlook
August 12, 2022: At Fisher Investments, the Chairman as Localization Champion
“Localization is critical to our ability to deliver tailored, native-language investor education around the world. It is particularly important in periods of heightened market volatility, like this year, when people look to us for expertise and guidance.” — Naj Srinivas, SVP of Corporate Communications and Head of Diversity and Inclusion at Fisher Investments
September 21, 2022: Big Language Solutions Gets a New CEO as Jeff Brink Becomes Chairman
“We are seeing some general softness driven by inflation, market uncertainty, and the war in Europe. It’s still early to form conclusions, but generally speaking many clients are operating with caution and managing budgets more closely.” — Jeff Brink, CEO Big Language Solutions
November 30, 2022: Language Industry Hires at Unbabel, LinguaLinx, Lilt, and Pangeanic
“We expect organizations to be conservative and maintain focus on scaling back to what’s critical.” — Jennifer Bers, Chief Revenue Officer, Unbabel
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