President of Oxford Languages Casper Grathwohl joins the Pod from sunny Florida this week to discuss OUP’s business in lexical data, working with big tech customers, the world’s under-served and low resource languages, and more.

First up, Florian (from snowy Switzerland) and Esther (from lockdown London) talk about Slator’s newly-launched 2020 M&A and Funding report, a 40-page report with in-depth analysis of the 39 M&A transactions and 13 startup rounds covered by Slator in 2020. 

Esther gives an update from the UK, where the Ministry of Defence (MoD) launched a new USD 74m call for expressions of interest for interpreting and translation services, and outsourcing giant Capita put the planned sale of its translation and interpreting division, Capita TI, on hold.

Florian talks about transcription and audio/video editing tool Descript — which raised USD 30m to expand its capabilities for enterprise use — and potential implications/use cases for the language industry. He also shares news from Japan-based MT and human translation provider Rozetta, which grew MT revenues by 40% in the nine months to November 2020.