Welcome to the LOCANUCU blog, your essential source for localization news you can actually use. Today, we're covering major platform launches from heavyweights like Lionbridge and innovative agencies like Attached. We'll also look at a key executive appointment at CQ Fluency, celebrate an award for Smartling, and dive into the serious challenges facing court interpreters in Europe. Stay with us as we unpack what these developments mean for you.
- CQ Fluency has appointed Tameeka Smith as its new Chief Executive Officer, succeeding founder Elisabete Miranda.
- New CQ Fluency CEO Tameeka Smith brings extensive experience from the healthcare sector, notably as CEO of UnitedHealthcare Community Plan of Virginia.
- Elisabete Miranda will transition to the role of Founder and Board Member at CQ Fluency.
- Lionbridge has launched the Content Remix App, an AI-powered solution for creating multilingual marketing content.
- The Lionbridge app aims to generate personalized content for websites, social media, and newsletters simultaneously in multiple languages.
- Smartling won the "Machine Translation Innovation Award" from AI Breakthrough for its LanguageAI™ platform.
- Smartling's award recognizes its AI Translation (AIT) offering, which automates translations at a quality comparable to MTPE.
- Alconost has introduced Alconost.MT/Evaluate, a free experimental tool for assessing translation quality with LLMs.
- Alconost's tool scores translations from 1-100 and provides corrected versions with explanations.
- The agency Attached has launched its Attached AI Suite, featuring four services including an AI Translation Portal and AI dubbing.
- Attached's AI suite includes a quality performance scoring feature to estimate the quality of AI-generated translations.
- Lingoport has added new context enhancements to its Localyzer tool to improve UI translation quality.
- Localyzer's new features include a Figma plugin and a Chrome extension for capturing visual context automatically.
- Elia announced its new 2025 Board of Directors, welcoming Aleksandrina Karabasheva, Maii Abdel-Wahab, and Tony D'Angelo.
- Nenad Andricsek was re-elected to the Elia Board, with the new members officially starting in September 2025.
- Court interpreters in Belgium are protesting low fees, payment delays, and poor working conditions.
- The Belgian Chamber of Translators and Interpreters warns these issues are causing interpreter shortages and impacting justice.
- A BFI report shows the UK's screen sector is rapidly adopting AI for subtitling and dubbing.
- The UK report raises concerns about the cultural impact of AI trained mainly on American English.
- An Elia discussion highlights the industry's shift from being translation providers to becoming AI localization system engineers for clients.
- Industry experts like Stefan Huyghe note this shift suggests new revenue models based on retainers and consulting, not per-word rates.
- Newly elected Elia board member Aneliya Karabasheva reflects on the profound changes AI is bringing to the industry.
Starting with platform developments, Alconost has launched an experimental web-based tool called Alconost.MT/Evaluate. This platform enables language professionals to assess translation quality using large language models like OpenAI's GPT-4 and Anthropic's Claude 3. It provides a detailed quality score from 1-100 and offers corrected versions of translations, aiming to be both an evaluation and an improvement tool.
Lionbridge has introduced its Content Remix App, an AI-powered solution for multilingual content creation. The app allows users to generate personalized content for various channels, such as websites, social media, and newsletters, in multiple languages simultaneously. It aims to reduce content creation cycle times and ensure linguistic accuracy while preserving brand voice.
In the realm of user interface localization, Lingoport has released significant context-related enhancements for its Localyzer tool. New features include a Figma plugin and a Chrome extension that automatically capture and link visual context to UI strings. This integration, compatible with Trados, XTM, Phrase, and Smartling, is designed to reduce ambiguity and improve translation quality by showing linguists exactly how and where text appears in the UI.
Similarly, the language intelligence agency Attached has launched its new Attached AI Suite. This suite includes four services: an AI Translation Portal with quality performance scoring, customized AI engine building, AI-powered subtitling, and AI dubbing. The goal is to provide companies with the speed of AI while maintaining control over brand identity and quality.
On the awards front, Smartling has been recognized with the "Machine Translation Innovation Award" at the 8th annual AI Breakthrough Awards. The award highlights Smartling's LanguageAI platform and its new AI Translation, or AIT, offering. AIT is a hybrid of MT and AI that incorporates LLMs to produce outputs at a quality level comparable to machine translation post-editing, but without the human editing step, aiming to help companies translate more content within the same budget.
In executive movements, CQ Fluency, a provider of language and accessibility services for regulated industries, has appointed Tameeka Smith as its new Chief Executive Officer. Smith, who has an extensive background in healthcare leadership, including as CEO of UnitedHealthcare Community Plan of Virginia, succeeds company founder Elisabete Miranda. Miranda will transition to a role on the board. Smith plans to focus on expanding the company's impact on health equity through innovation and a human-in-the-loop approach to technology.
The European Language Industry Association, Elia, has announced the results of its 2025 Board of Directors election. Aleksandrina Karabasheva, Maii Abdel-Wahab, and Tony D'Angelo are newly elected members, and Nenad Andricsek has been re-elected. They will officially take their seats in September, joining the continuing board members.
Shifting to industry challenges and perspectives, court interpreters in Belgium have joined nationwide justice sector protests. The Belgian Chamber of Translators and Interpreters is denouncing significant payment delays, low fees, and what they describe as unsustainable working conditions. They argue that these issues are leading to interpreter shortages and are undermining the quality of justice in the country's multilingual legal system.
In the United Kingdom, a new report from the British Film Institute highlights the screen sector's rapid adoption of AI for tasks like subtitling, dubbing, and dialogue generation. While this brings efficiency, the report also raises concerns about the dilution of British linguistic identity, as many AI models are trained predominantly on American English.
Industry experts are also weighing in on the broader transformations. In an Elia discussion series article, contributors like Diego Cresceri and Stefan Huyghe explored how the balance between technology and human services is being redefined. The conversation highlights a shift from LSPs acting as translation factories to becoming engineers who design and maintain AI-driven localization systems for clients. This points toward new business models based on engineering time and consulting rather than per-word rates. Aneliya Karabasheva also touched upon this evolving dynamic, questioning the line between our current reality and a future shaped by AI. Bruno Bitter has also previously commented on the strategic shifts occurring within the industry's workflows. These discussions emphasize that while clients are adopting AI, they still need expert guidance on implementation, quality control, and training, signaling a significant evolution in the role of language service providers.
In summary, today's news paints a clear picture of an industry in rapid transition. We've seen a surge in AI-powered tools from Alconost, Lionbridge, Lingoport, and Attached, all designed to make localization faster and more integrated. We congratulate Tameeka Smith on her new role as CEO of CQ Fluency and Smartling for their MT innovation award. At the same time, the protests by Belgian court interpreters and concerns from the UK's screen sector remind us of the critical human element. As experts from Elia and across the industry suggest, the role of the language professional is evolving from executor to expert consultant and system builder. Keep following LOCANUCU for the insights you need to navigate this changing landscape.