Translation Is Declining. What Comes Next?

In this episode of The Agile Localization Podcast, host Stefan Huyghe sits down with Florian Faes, Managing Director at Slator, to discuss the rapidly transforming language industry ahead of SlatorCon San Francisco (September 3, 2026).

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What You’ll Learn

Why voice AI has become impossible to ignore
How SlatorCon attracts venture capitalists, media executives, and healthcare leaders
What Slator’s data reveals about declining core translation revenues
Why the terms Language Solutions Integrator (LSI) and Language Technology Platform (LTP) are replacing outdated labels
Florian’s view that verification is becoming the industry’s defining activity

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 is widely recognized for shaping industry terminology and for providing candid, data-driven commentary on M&A activity, AI adoption, and the shifting economics of multilingual content production.

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