A Pinch, a Twitch, and everything in between: Pinch’s Christian Safka and Twitch’s Susan Maria Howard were just two of the presenters joining other top-notch language industry leaders and hundreds of attendees on March 18, 2025, for the first SlatorCon Remote conference of 2025.
Setting the scene for the day’s events, Slator’s Head of Advisory, Esther Bond, welcomed attendees and invited Managing Director Florian Faes to present some of the latest findings and analyses in his highly anticipated “industry health check.”
In his presentation, Faes first revisited what was a challenging 2024. Touching on data that includes Slator’s 2025 Language Service Provider Index (LSPI), he also highlighted the growth of interpreting-focused companies, in contrast with the apparent distress among small, undifferentiated agencies and the rapid rise of language AI with the likes of ElevenLabs and DeepL.
Faes also addressed some note-worthy results from Slator’s 2025 Localization Buyer Survey, such as the challenges encountered by buyers to implement AI and the need for AI partners to help solve inefficiencies in AI use. He also remarked on the mixed outlook for the industry during the current year.
LLMs Are Only a Beginning
The first expert presentation was delivered by Sara Papi, a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Fondazione Bruno Kessler, who spoke about the current state of research in simultaneous speech-to-text translation.
The speaker pointed out discrepancies between the initial definition and current practices in the speech translation discipline, identified through a review of expert literature, particularly concerning the use of pre-segmented speech and the lack of clarity in terminology.
Slator’s Head of Research, Anna Wyndham, moderated the first panel of the day, which included Simone Bohnenberger-Rich, Chief Product Officer at Phrase, Simon Koranter, Head of Global Production & Engineering at Compass Languages, and Matteo Nonne, Localization Program Manager at On.
The panelists explored the evolving role of generative AI in localization, moving beyond initial experimentation to scalable solutions that drive growth. They shared their perspectives on how AI is transforming localization from a cost center to a strategic function, enabling customized, context-aware content adaptation, and addressing challenges around return on investment (ROI) and stakeholder expectations.
“One of the key features of LLMs is that they’re so easy to use. We’re all turning into AI-savvy coders without being able to code. We just prompt away. And that really generates the perception that an LLM is a point solution, it works out of the box… And for anyone who’s tried to move an LLM into production, you know that that’s just not how it works.” — Simone Bohnenberger-Rich, Chief Product Officer, Phrase
Slator’s Alex Edwards, Senior Research Analyst, moderated another panel discussion centering on the adoption of LLMs for AI translation in enterprise workflows. Panel participants Manuel Herranz, CEO of Pangeanic, and Bruno Bitter, CEO of Blackbird.io looked at whether large language models (LLMs) represent the state of the art.
Herranz and Bitter commented on middleware and techniques like Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) as being more advanced, the importance of fine-tuning smaller, domain-specific models, and the role of orchestration technology in managing diverse AI tools.
In his presentation, Supertext’s CEO Samuel Läubli, echoed some of what other speakers touched on, namely that LLMs generate fluent texts by considering broader context. His discussion delved into the implications of an AI-first era for translation, the emergence of smaller competitive players, and the need to include human expertise.
The new Supertext is the result of a 2024 merger between LSP Supertext and AI translation company Textshuttle, and Läubli commented that he had “been working in this field for 10 years now, but I haven’t seen the system or AI agents that would actually guarantee that a translation is correct in the past 10 years. And I’m quite sure I won’t see this in the next 10 years.”
Teresa Toronjo, Localization Manager at Malt, spoke about collaboration in leaner localization teams: the importance of diverse partnerships, efficient scalability, and quality consistency with cost-effectiveness guided by experts.
If you missed SlatorCon Remote March 2025 in real-time, recordings will be available in due course via our Pro and Enterprise plans.