The language industry has spent decades built on a simple premise: someone writes something, someone else translates it. According to Florian Faes, Managing Director at Slator, that foundation is cracking, and what’s emerging from underneath looks almost nothing like the industry people signed up for.
In this episode of The Agile Localization Podcast, host Stefan Huyghe sits down with Florian ahead of SlatorCon San Francisco (September 3, 2026) to talk through what Slator’s data is actually showing, and where the money, the talent, and the opportunity are headed next.
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The uncomfortable truth in the data
Asked about the most uncomfortable market truth Slator’s data currently suggests, Florian didn’t sugarcoat it: top-line revenue for core translation and localization activity is declining. The work that defined this industry for decades is being automated fast, and the numbers reflect it.
That’s a statement few industry insiders are willing to make publicly. If the bread-and-butter activity is shrinking, where does growth come from?
Florian points to adjacent markets as the areas where language companies are expanding. Slator has literally been redrawing its market definition to capture these new revenue streams, and companies that aren’t doing the same risk being left behind.
Voice AI: the topic you can’t ignore
One subject forced its way onto the SlatorCon agenda this year: voice.
Florian admitted he was initially underwhelmed by things like YouTube’s AI dubbing launch.
"Why would you guys launch this? Nobody’s gonna watch this.
A year later, he was watching it for half an hour at a stretch, conceding the quality had become good enough to sit through. Platforms like ElevenLabs have pushed the multilingual voice space forward fast enough to catch even seasoned industry watchers off guard. It’s the one development that made him rethink his own assumptions about the market.
Verification is the new core activity
Strip away the jargon and look at what humans actually do in today’s language workflows, and it comes down to one thing: verification.
You could call it machine translation post-editing (MTPE). But in practice, the job is verifying AI output. Florian estimates that 95% of workflows involving humans are now verification workflows. The old ways still exist in pockets, but it’s clear where things are headed.
Florian went further, predicting that by 2028, verification could become an entirely new category that redefines how the industry thinks about itself. Forget translation management — the central question becomes: is this AI output good enough?
New names for a new reality
Calling a company doing tens of millions in revenue a “language service provider” in 2026 is, Florian says, a misnomer. These companies employ developers, maintain dozens of system connectors, and integrate complex, tech-heavy workflows.
Slator introduced two new terms:
- Language Solutions Integrator (LSI)
- Language Technology Platform (LTP)
The industry’s biggest players have started adopting them. The distinction matters because it reflects a real shift in what these companies do and where their value lies. LSIs retain pricing power not because of the words they translate, but because they maintain expert networks of human verifiers who can plug into complex, AI-driven pipelines. That human expertise layer is what keeps the large integrators in business.
A conference that mirrors a market in flux
The SlatorCon speaker lineup itself tells a story: venture capitalists, healthcare executives, media CEOs, voice technology startups. It’s a roster that would have seemed odd at a localization conference five years ago.
Florian estimates that maybe half of SlatorCon attendees consider themselves part of the same industry. The other half find each other’s worlds completely unfamiliar, and that mix is the point.
He shared an anecdote from his pre-Slator days working for an LSP in Asia: he didn’t even know localization conferences existed, because his world revolved around legal, finance, and pharma events. Bringing those peripheral players to the table is, he argues, where the real insights happen.
Florian’s background
Florian Faes is the Managing Director at Slator, the leading business media and advisory firm for the global language industry, which he launched in 2015 after spending nearly a decade in Asia heading regional operations for CLS Communication, a Swiss-headquartered language service provider. Based in Zurich, he oversees Slator’s research reports, its weekly newsletter reaching over 15,000 subscribers, the SlatorPod podcast, the LocJobs.com job board, and the SlatorCon conference series, which brings together enterprise leaders, technology companies, and investors in cities like San Francisco and London. Florian has become known for shaping industry terminology, and for his candid, data-driven takes on M&A activity, AI adoption, and the shifting economics of multilingual content production.
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Yuliia Makarenko
Yuliia Makarenko is a marketing specialist with over a decade of experience, and she’s all about creating content that readers will love. She’s a pro at using her skills in SEO, research, and data analysis to write useful content. When she’s not diving into content creation, you can find her reading a good thriller, practicing some yoga, or simply enjoying playtime with her little one.