In SlatorPod #57, Fardad Zabetian, Co-Founder and CEO of multilingual conferencing platform KUDO joins us to discuss the world of conferences and interpreting, his vision for KUDO from the get-go, and his company’s explosive growth during the pandemic. 

Fardad, who launched another of his businesses, Conference Rental, in the early 2000s, shares anecdotes from the early days of KUDO, talks about his commitment to removing the friction points in sourcing interpreters for the private sector, and tells us about his experience of securing USD 6m in funding during Covid-19. 

First up, Florian and Esther discuss language industry news from a week that saw virtual event platform Touchcast raise USD 55m, based on a feature list that includes AI- or human-generated captions in real-time, foreign subtitles, and dubbing. 

Esther talks about localization at health tech startup Oura. The Finland-based company, whose flagship product is a wearable smart ring that provides health and sleep insights, hired its first localization expert in 2020. Localization Program Manager Tarja Karjalainen, still a one-person team, oversaw localization into three languages in 2020 and told Slator about her company’s current localization model and plans for language expansion in this buyer feature.

The two discuss the latest Slator Language Industry Job Index (LIJI), which climbed more than four points in February 2021, having seen the usual seasonal dip in January. Florian highlights a story picked up in SlatorSweep this week, as the multilingual TEDx corpus for speech recognition and translation was made available in eight original languages and up to five target languages.