LATEST ISSUE

January 2025

The New Language Industry Workforce: Remote, Resilient, and Redefined

What will the future of language work look like? From finding balance in remote settings to adapting to new job responsibilities, this issue of MultiLingual discusses the skills industry professionals need to thrive in 2025 and beyond.

Post Editing

elcome to 2025! The holidays are over, and hopefully you’ve had the chance to spend them with people you love. As we emerge from the food comas and consider timelines for taking down the decorations, a thought lurks in the back of our minds: doing our jobs for another year to the best of our abilities.

MultiLingual magazine’s first issue of the year puts jobs and careers in the spotlight. It’s a topic worth contemplation, considering all the changes we’ve been reckoning with over the past few years. Not only has artificial intelligence (AI) transformed our professional lives, but remote work has also become the norm. Who can believe it was only five years ago that 2020 dawned, bringing with it a global pandemic months later?

Work from home is now a permanent feature for many — particularly in language work, when teams are often scattered across the globe. This month, we examine the home office arrangement five years later to learn how it’s changed our lives. Additionally, this issue investigates the changing roles for linguists as we enter another year of AI development and integration.

This new year may well prove as transformative as its predecessor. But while times and technologies change, the fundamental satisfaction of a job well done remains the same — so let’s all aspire to make the most of 2025. Cheers!

Event Recap

Nordic Translation & Interpretation Forum 2024

The 14th edition of the Nordic Translation & Interpretation Forum was held in Malmö, Sweden. Delegates from all over Europe convened to discuss how the industry can stay relevant in a world increasingly influenced by artificial intelligence. In parallel to the conference, a song contest took place in which participants were invited to create an AI-generated, Eurovision-style tribute to the event.

LangTalent 2024

Conversations shaping the future of language professionals

Hosted by MultiLingual Media, LangTalent 2024 united experts and aspiring professionals in a unique, two-day virtual event dedicated to exploring careers, skills, and the future of work in the language industry.

Column

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The Nomad Script

By Tim Brookes

Tim Brookes discusses the survival of the Mongolian language and script, the decrease in their use over the past century, and the art and beauty of Mongolian calligraphy. He highlights the work of Tamir Samandbadraa Purev, an award-winning calligrapher who has dedicated his life to preserving his native script.

BUSINESS

Navigating Remote Work in a Post-Pandemic Landscape

What does the future hold for working from home?

By Cameron Rasmusson

Remote work has cemented itself as a highly desired workplace perk across industries. Moving into 2025, the biggest outstanding question is whether employers will continue their quest to kill remote work in the cradle.

How Language Industry Jobs Are “Shifting Left”

From translation to orchestration

By Agustín Da Fieno Delucchi, Alfredo de Almeida, and Jorge Russo dos Santos

Traditional localization roles are morphing to meet the demands of an AI-powered, omnichannel world. In this article, the authors argue that successful localization professionals will find ways to meld their linguistic and cultural expertise with technical literacy to maximize the power of AI.

Language Access

Language Rights as Human Rights

Perspectives on the fight for global language justice

By Mimi Moore

In this interview, the organizers of Global Language Advocacy Days discuss their dedication to creating a world where language is valued as a fundamental right — central to identity, community, and access to essential services.

Fabio Minazzi

The Gift of Voice

Supported by LocWorld

People with vocal disabilities often use digital speech synthesizers that feature standard, robotic-sounding voices. Translated’s Fabio Minazzi hopes to change that through an innovative voice donation platform and expressive AI voice rendering — an initiative that won him the top prize at LocWorld 52’s Process Innovation Challenge.

Meet Lara, the New AI Architecture for Translation

Supported by Translated

Lara surpasses traditional machine translation by blending accuracy with the fluency, reasoning, and contextual understanding of large language models. It delivers quality approaching that of the best professional translators, explaining its translation choices to ensure clarity and alignment with the user’s intent.

Uber’s Generative AI System for Mobile Testing Cuts Costs and Improves Quality

Supported by LocWorld

Called DragonCrawl, the code- and maintenance-free GenAI tool boasts “the intuition of a human,” winning Uber’s Senior Localization Experience Program Manager Carolina Freire second place in LocWorld 52’s Process Innovation Challenge.

Get the Most Out of AI Linguistic Quality Assessment With ContentQuo

Supported by LocWorld

ContentQuo has launched a platform meant to enable AI LQA deployment and allow localization teams to monitor its performance over time. The company’s co-founder and CEO Kirill Soloviev came in third place at LocWorld 52’s Process Innovation Challenge.

The Localization Landscape in 2025

Why ecosystems and AI are the future

Supported by Phrase

Language technology company Phrase delves into the best ways to utilize AI for localization — advising companies to embrace partner ecosystems, scale personalization, adopt hyperautomation, and move localization into content production pipelines.