English 
ディーターさん、これまでのご経歴と、Boostlingoでの現在の役割についてお聞かせいただけますか？
My path has been anything but linear but upon closer inspection you can see a through-line that reveals a common theme. I’ve always pursued opportunities in business and innovation that have placed me at the intersection of technology and communication which has been something I have always been deeply passionate about. This has had a profound impact on a career trajectory and has sent me to many exciting parts of the planet, providing me with interesting roles that have ignited my other big passion which is international business.
Following my undergraduate studies, I began my professional life in the film and media production industry in the San Francisco/Bay Area, California. I became deeply involved in the burgeoning interactive CD-ROM and later internet and web media production space. I was very fortunate to find myself in San Francisco during the peak of the dot com boom era which inspired me in so many ways. From there I moved to the east coast completing a master’s degree in the Educational Psychology program at McGill University in Montreal. I continued in the interactive media production world for a while in Montreal, deciding after the ice-storm of 1998, to thaw out at an e-learning start-up in the warmest place I could find which was Phoenix Arizona. This experience was something that initially got me hooked on and addicted to the startup tech company vibe. The company was called Learning Productions, and we were eventually acquired by a larger e-learning company which lead me to a variety of exciting roles in the training services and educational technology sector. I spent several years running global digital e-learning programs which in part included localization responsibilities for the simultaneous shipment of multilingual global training programs for several enterprise tech company clients. My time in this space was probably the most formative and impactful in shaping and developing my passion for real-time multilingual communications.
Today I’m one of the co-founders at Boostlingo which was originally started in San Francisco and is now headquartered in Austin, Texas. At Boostlingo I am a brand evangelist, and I oversee our global strategy and business development activities. In this role I liaise frequently with and work with our innovation and product teams, our sales and marketing teams and with our language access team. I am involved in building and maintaining partnerships and strategic alliances including planning and implementation of our international growth strategies. Beyond this, I try to contribute regularly to Boostlingo thought leadership activities and to our content development and delivery programs. This includes working on some of our research reports and participating in regular webinars and online conferences as well as attending and presenting at live industry onsite events and conferences. I also host the Boostlingo podcast BoostCast where we are in the second year of production this year.
We started Boostlingo in 2016 with the goal of innovating, improving and redefining the world of remote interpreting delivery, which had always been a challenge for me working at previous language service companies before Boostlingo. In my mind there was a better way to do it and there was an urgent need to democratize the technologies and tools needed to expand language access globally. Ten years on, we’re 3,500+ customers deep and we’ve evolved into an AI-forward language intelligence platform and technology company. Boostlingo technology includes human interpreting, AI interpreting, translation, scheduling, and everything else that rolls up into the end-to-end work that supports global multilingual communications.
Since 2022 Boostlingo has been a 5-time INC 5000 company and a 4-time INC. Best Places to Work company, these are truly special distinctions which fill my heart and would not be possible without the talents of the most amazing team I could ever hope for! We collectively and affectionately call ourselves Boosties! One number I care about deeply each year is when we discover our yearly eNPS score! I tend to gloat here because we consistently rank in the very highest percentiles and our employee retention rate is always (and has been for years) in the mid 90s.
I also do a lot of long-haul travel each year as I split my time traveling from Australia through at least 4-5 continents each year. I spend a fair bit of time in Austin and also on the west coast of the US where many of our technology and product folks are located. I also visit our development and sales teams and our strategic partners across Europe, APAC, and the MENA region. That said, I’m always happy to return to my adopted home by the beach near Sydney in Australia. I can categorically confirm that all this globetrotting each year has served to keep me very honest about how differently the language industry works everywhere and needs to be supported all around the world.
これまでの章で取り上げられた経験のうち、どの経験が、今でもテクノロジーや人間同士のコミュニケーションに対するあなたの考え方に影響を与え続けていますか？
I would say my formative media production years, hands down. When you create film and video content, you learn very fast that the gear (technology) is never the main story, it is the humans on either side of the lens who bring the real magic. Something that I most certainly remind myself about as the evolution of AI tools and technologies have been evolving. My time building digital learning products also informed my approach to technology and communication. Content, and what is being communicated, works best when it is relatable and lands in the learner’s actual context. I have purposed to connect these dots very carefully throughout my career and it was especially component in building the Boostlingo story. Effective interpreting involves the same contextual care and consideration. It is never simply just a language-transfer problem you need to solve. It’s a communication problem that includes context, trust, and timing issues among many other things. That’s part of the reason why I’ve never supported an “AI replaces interpreters” framing. Humans a very much needed in the loop and are critical for effective multilingual communications. Every new technology will bring with it its own mix of detractors and occasional overexuberant pundits, but I’ve learned that the truth always exists somewhere in the middle. I’ve watched tape become digital become streaming become AI. The delivery layers and mechanisms change over time, but the human need and engagement in the mix and underneath has always remained.
『The Remote Interpreter』を共著した当時、あなたが抱いていた信念のうち、その後の経験を通じて考えを改めることになったものは何ですか？
One of the first things that always comes to mind first when I think about the adventures around The Remote Interpreter book, is probably my naivety around the whole process involving book writing and publishing. Nothing could have ever prepared me for the actual level of effort required to get a book out the door! It was an important and ambitious project, and I developed new respect and admiration for authors and book publishers along the way in the process of helping write and promote that book!
This question is great because I have reflected a lot on this recently. It’s been more than 5 years since we began to write that book which released back in the summer of 2023. When we wrote The Remote Interpreter, the fight was still around legitimizing and proving that remote interpreting could stand shoulder to shoulder with onsite. It sounds almost implausible to me today when I think about it, but it was still a thing only 3 years ago. The global pandemic played a big part in establishing remote interpreting as a critical technology which thankfully is globally accepted these days. Back then I believed modality was really the big question and issue to resolve. The thinking was that if you could nail the audio, the video, the bandwidth, the connectivity, the protocols and the training then the rest would sort itself out, and essentially remote interpreting would establish itself as a key solution. However, since then and transitioning through the very recent boom and proliferation of AI tools and technologies around the interpreting space, I’ve needed to readjust and modify my position. It is not about the technology as much as I thought it was. Our State of Interpreting Technology 2026 research showed that the market has quickly become multi-modal with hybrid phone, video, onsite, bilingual staff, and now AI augmented machine interpreting to boot. The modality is no longer the question, and all options are on the table now and accepted. The circumstances of each interpreting encounter will dictate the modality. The main problem, however, is that we are still seeing issues in Interpreter availability. The global demand for language access is growing and demand in fact often far exceeds the number of qualified linguists available and online to support requests at times. Half of our survey respondents still reported a case where an LEP individual needed an interpreter and didn’t get one. So, modality was never really the endgame for us it is still very much availability and fulfilment. AI interpreting has shored up some of this problem but there is still a genuine need for new qualified interpreters across all languages and sectors of business. This will continue to be a challenge for the foreseeable future.
The next big technology frontier ahead of us is the delivery of language orchestration and language ubiquity. This involves building out and refining technology that can streamline the coordination of language around the right resource, right moment, right context. I guess we were somewhat prescient calling the Remote Interpreter book “Volume One”. I think the content still very much holds up well today however a “Volume Two” will likely become necessary very soon and most certainly will need to lean hard into AI augmentation and the transformation of the interpreting space into an integral part of what could be considered language operations (LangOps). Language access is now an infrastructure business and part of a ubiquitous and automated orchestration layer for true multilingual support.
優れた製品以外に、言語技術ビジネスが成功する要因について、外部の人々はどのような点を最もよく誤解しているのでしょうか？
There is a misconception that the product wins the deal. It doesn’t, it just gets you the meeting. The experience and the outcomes are what really matter. The language access and language support industry runs on high stakes, regulated, deeply human moments. It happens in hospitals, courtrooms, and classrooms. Nobody buys interpreting software being solely focused on feature sets and technical prowess. They are purchasing reliability, adherence to governance and regulatory compliance, and the trust and the confidence that there’s someone qualified who will pick up the phone when it matters. The other thing outsiders often miss or don’t immediately understand is that this is very much an ecosystem business. There are Interpreters, LSP partners, technology providers, associations, regulators and buyers and they all talk to each other all the time. It’s a relatively small industry, although revenue wise it is much larger than for example the global film and music industries combined. It is also an industry with a with a very long memory. How you treat your interpreters and technology providers shows up in your enterprise pipeline eventually. We’ve spent ten years focused on building and maintaining confidence and earning trust across the entire ecosystem, and I’d argue that that’s been worth more than any single feature that we’ve ever shipped.
通訳の選択肢を蓄積してきた組織と、成熟した言語アクセス体制を構築してきた組織との違いは何でしょうか。
Discussing options around your interpretation solution and services is mostly a procurement conversation and is very checkbox and utilitarian. Maturity is when an organization is having conversations with you around your operational support and deployment around solution orchestration and reliable outcomes. Our 2026 research, which included 370-plus stakeholders across the interpreting ecosystem, made this point very plain. Nearly everyone selling interpreting services successfully is multi-modal now. Their access has widened and their delivery modalities have expanded, but as I mentioned before, half of the organizations that we spoke with reported unmet interpreter needs. Yes, cost is still the most-cited pain, but the real measure of value begins when the conversation turns to interpreting workflow and coordination. The customers are most concerned about the automation of their scheduling process, around the consistency and quality of the interpretation, and about the efficacy around the administration holding the whole thing together. The accumulators just buy channels and staple them together. The mature operations on the other hand, deploy systems with clear rules for which modality fits which encounter, defines the criteria for when AI is appropriate, has a clear escalation path to qualified professional humans in the mix, and can quickly access the data feeding back into those decisions. You spot the level of maturity in the performance numbers they can confidently cite. How fast someone reaches an interpreter using their system, how consistently the quality holds, and how much staff effort it really takes to keep it all running. It is not in the number of whizz bang features you bring to the table nor the length and names on your vendor and partner lists to achieve any of this. No one cares. Language is everywhere. It is component to the end user experience. It is an operational layer. It is a utility. Today you need to speak and prove yourself around real data and outcomes.
通訳業務のうち、自動化が難しいという理由から、業界が具体的にどの部分を過小評価しているのでしょうか？
I would say there is still an underestimation in the perception, expectations and/or judgment in terms of how things are really happening or should be happening around the process of interpreting. AI is certainly speeding things up and getting genuinely good at converting language, we can’t pretend otherwise. Skilled interpreters however, are doing something else in parallel that people often fail to take into count and it’s not an insignificant thing right? Human interpreters are reading that the patient nodded but didn’t really understand, they are managing the conversation turn-taking, they are flagging a cultural landmine before it goes off, they are knowing when to step outside the script because something in the room or in the call just feels “wrong”. Interpreters have always been the critical communications risk managers. That work is very hard to automate because it isn’t in the transcript, and the industry underestimates it because it never shows up on an invoice, until of course it does, and that’s in the moment and on the day that it was clearly missing. Our 2026 data reflected clearly where people land on this. Even among non-users of AI, about 42% said they figured in low-risk activities AI use is probably acceptable. However, that’s an operative and extremely important concept to underscore! Low risk! Low risk means that everyone intuitively knows the why and where that professional interpreter humans belong. It becomes apparent very quickly when things come off the rails, and that is the thing that buyers are most wary of today.
システムの真の知能は、モデル、ルール、それとも人間によるエスカレーション層のどこに配置すべきでしょうか？
The models will keep getting better and, frankly, increasingly interchangeable. The durable intelligence sits in the layer that decides the orchestration and governance around the model(s). The intelligence asks and solves for what’s this encounter? What’s the risk level? What’s the language pair? Is AI appropriate here and if the situation shifts, how fast can a qualified human interpreter come into play? That’s where trust gets built and lives. Only 16.8% of respondents in our 2026 report currently use AI interpreting, with another 15.9% still evaluating it. So, yes, the appetite is real and growing but it remains conditional. People don’t trust a system because the model sounds fluent. They trust it if it can demonstrate that it knows its limits. Human escalation isn’t a fallback bolted on simply for the optics and peace of mind it’s a deliberate design feature. Arguably it is *the* design feature.
国際的な事業拡大において、企業が当初予想している以上に重要となる傾向があるのは何でしょうか？
Again, I think trust here is the strongest differentiator these days and in the age of AI it is increasing all the time as the single most important decision factor for end users. Buyers are paying close attention to how differently one system is built and how it operates from one market to the next. Compliance and data sovereignty are table stakes just as much, if not more, as the key requisite platform technologies and features are. Systems must show real command of governance and regulatory compliance that you can map directly to the locale and region. At Boostlingo we’ve literally built a set of regional regulatory field guides for exactly that purpose.
What also catches companies off guard in global expansion is the relationship physics. In LATAM and in Asian and Gulf/MENA countries the relationship precedes the transaction. You show up in person, in the language, more than once, before anyone talks contracts. In most parts of APAC, ASEAN countries and in the MENA/Gulf region, credibility routes through partners, associations and government relationships and is far less reliant on a sales and marketing approach. International business and growth can be very nuanced and specific from region to region, and you would be crazy not to include local partners in your go-to-market strategy. Another great example is regional certification. NAATI may mean nothing to an interpreting company in the US or Japan, but in Australia and New Zealand, NAATI credentialing informs and shapes your buyer expectations from day one. There are many similar examples in other countries.
The classic mistake is (and has always been) exporting your own geo-centric go-to-market playbook and expecting it to translate. It really doesn’t. It blows my mind how many organizations operating globally still don’t get this. You won’t scale trust with just an affirmation on your landing page. International business is by its very nature a highly localized activity. To be a global company, you need to behave like one. I highly recommend working with strategic regional partners and consultants and dedicating real business development resources experienced in international growth.
実務家やLSP、あるいは顧客から、テクノロジー業界全体がまだ理解しきれていない点について、最近ますますよく耳にすることは何でしょうか？
From practitioners we frequently hear “We’re not afraid of AI, we’re afraid of having no say in when and how it’s being used.” That comes up constantly. Interpreters aren’t debating whether the technology is impressive. They’re asking who decides appropriateness, what the escalation path is, and whether anyone building these tools has sat through a real medical encounter or courtroom session.
From buyers, it’s a different version of the same message. They say, “Hey, stop selling me yet another feature or function… or channel… and make what I already have work, more reliably for me (and cheaper)”.
The tech world also does itself no favour by talking up replacement economics, especially when the people doing the work rightfully talk about and raise issues around risk, context and workflow. I am hopeful we will be able to close that gap and everything else gets a little easier over time, but it’s definitely going to take time. Right now, there is palpable level of hostility and friction towards some of the current industry transformation but there are also boundless opportunities and a real roadmap towards true universal and ubiquitous multilingualism which we just need to focus on. It is a big part of the reason and motivation for why we publish blogs and research with a regular cadence and produce webinars and podcasts each month. The requirement to advocate and educate around ongoing development, progress and breakthrough in language access and language technology is perpetual and an imperative.
今後5年間で、この業界にとって最も重要な変化は何になるでしょうか。また、その変化を形作る上で、あなたはどのような役割を果たしたいとお考えですか？
I see in the immediate future a transformational moment where language stops being a bolt-on service and becomes embedded infrastructure. It transforms into a native layer inside the platforms where people already communicate. This includes health systems, contact centres, classrooms, events etc. Hybrid AI-human interpreting delivery will become an operating standard rather than a transition state. Orchestration and trust will become the prime differentiators, and unmet demand will ultimately start shrinking because the cost of low-risk access will drop toward near zero. This will free up skilled professional human interpreters for the more complex, context reliant and high-stakes work that they can do best. I tend to be more utopian in that I think that interpreting services will become faster, fairer, and still very human-centric over time, not less human. The role of the interpreter is simply evolving and transforming again, like all professions are.
My role? Boostlingo’s role? Same as it’s always been. We will continue to expand and democratize language access at scale and develop systems that help break down communication barriers everywhere. We will build the partnerships, develop the integrations, strengthen the critical guardrails around safety and privacy, publish the data and innovate and iterate based on our findings and via our conversations and interactions with customers and end users. We’ll host, moderate and join the important conversations and causes, and we’ll keep pushing on what multilingual communication itself can mean. I am personally excited about new cutting-edge delivery modalities like holographic presence interpreting for example, which we’ve already been exploring. I personally embrace the concept of “language is everywhere” aka language ubiquity which will eventually materialize as language access in the internet of things. I envision a time where I will be able to communicate effortlessly with my refrigerator or my rental car in Barcelona or Osaka or anywhere on the planet insert your location here_____. I want to empower and interact with humanoid robots that can speak with me in up to 7,000 languages. Boostlingo is ten years in, and I think we’re still so very very VERY early. Which is exciting actually. We’re just getting started and it’s a new fascinating time of transformation and that’s truly the fun part.
My path has been anything but linear but upon closer inspection you can see a through-line that reveals a common theme. I’ve always pursued opportunities in business and innovation that have placed me at the intersection of technology and communication which has been something I have always been deeply passionate about. This has had a profound impact on a career trajectory and has sent me to many exciting parts of the planet, providing me with interesting roles that have ignited my other big passion which is international business.
Following my undergraduate studies, I began my professional life in the film and media production industry in the San Francisco/Bay Area, California. I became deeply involved in the burgeoning interactive CD-ROM and later internet and web media production space. I was very fortunate to find myself in San Francisco during the peak of the dot com boom era which inspired me in so many ways. From there I moved to the east coast completing a master’s degree in the Educational Psychology program at McGill University in Montreal. I continued in the interactive media production world for a while in Montreal, deciding after the ice-storm of 1998, to thaw out at an e-learning start-up in the warmest place I could find which was Phoenix Arizona. This experience was something that initially got me hooked on and addicted to the startup tech company vibe. The company was called Learning Productions, and we were eventually acquired by a larger e-learning company which lead me to a variety of exciting roles in the training services and educational technology sector. I spent several years running global digital e-learning programs which in part included localization responsibilities for the simultaneous shipment of multilingual global training programs for several enterprise tech company clients. My time in this space was probably the most formative and impactful in shaping and developing my passion for real-time multilingual communications.
Today I’m one of the co-founders at Boostlingo which was originally started in San Francisco and is now headquartered in Austin, Texas. At Boostlingo I am a brand evangelist, and I oversee our global strategy and business development activities. In this role I liaise frequently with and work with our innovation and product teams, our sales and marketing teams and with our language access team. I am involved in building and maintaining partnerships and strategic alliances including planning and implementation of our international growth strategies. Beyond this, I try to contribute regularly to Boostlingo thought leadership activities and to our content development and delivery programs. This includes working on some of our research reports and participating in regular webinars and online conferences as well as attending and presenting at live industry onsite events and conferences. I also host the Boostlingo podcast BoostCast where we are in the second year of production this year.
We started Boostlingo in 2016 with the goal of innovating, improving and redefining the world of remote interpreting delivery, which had always been a challenge for me working at previous language service companies before Boostlingo. In my mind there was a better way to do it and there was an urgent need to democratize the technologies and tools needed to expand language access globally. Ten years on, we’re 3,500+ customers deep and we’ve evolved into an AI-forward language intelligence platform and technology company. Boostlingo technology includes human interpreting, AI interpreting, translation, scheduling, and everything else that rolls up into the end-to-end work that supports global multilingual communications.
Since 2022 Boostlingo has been a 5-time INC 5000 company and a 4-time INC. Best Places to Work company, these are truly special distinctions which fill my heart and would not be possible without the talents of the most amazing team I could ever hope for! We collectively and affectionately call ourselves Boosties! One number I care about deeply each year is when we discover our yearly eNPS score! I tend to gloat here because we consistently rank in the very highest percentiles and our employee retention rate is always (and has been for years) in the mid 90s.
I also do a lot of long-haul travel each year as I split my time traveling from Australia through at least 4-5 continents each year. I spend a fair bit of time in Austin and also on the west coast of the US where many of our technology and product folks are located. I also visit our development and sales teams and our strategic partners across Europe, APAC, and the MENA region. That said, I’m always happy to return to my adopted home by the beach near Sydney in Australia. I can categorically confirm that all this globetrotting each year has served to keep me very honest about how differently the language industry works everywhere and needs to be supported all around the world.
これまでの章で取り上げられた経験のうち、どの経験が、今でもテクノロジーや人間同士のコミュニケーションに対するあなたの考え方に影響を与え続けていますか？
I would say my formative media production years, hands down. When you create film and video content, you learn very fast that the gear (technology) is never the main story, it is the humans on either side of the lens who bring the real magic. Something that I most certainly remind myself about as the evolution of AI tools and technologies have been evolving. My time building digital learning products also informed my approach to technology and communication. Content, and what is being communicated, works best when it is relatable and lands in the learner’s actual context. I have purposed to connect these dots very carefully throughout my career and it was especially component in building the Boostlingo story. Effective interpreting involves the same contextual care and consideration. It is never simply just a language-transfer problem you need to solve. It’s a communication problem that includes context, trust, and timing issues among many other things. That’s part of the reason why I’ve never supported an “AI replaces interpreters” framing. Humans a very much needed in the loop and are critical for effective multilingual communications. Every new technology will bring with it its own mix of detractors and occasional overexuberant pundits, but I’ve learned that the truth always exists somewhere in the middle. I’ve watched tape become digital become streaming become AI. The delivery layers and mechanisms change over time, but the human need and engagement in the mix and underneath has always remained.
『The Remote Interpreter』を共著した当時、あなたが抱いていた信念のうち、その後の経験を通じて考えを改めることになったものは何ですか？
One of the first things that always comes to mind first when I think about the adventures around The Remote Interpreter book, is probably my naivety around the whole process involving book writing and publishing. Nothing could have ever prepared me for the actual level of effort required to get a book out the door! It was an important and ambitious project, and I developed new respect and admiration for authors and book publishers along the way in the process of helping write and promote that book!
This question is great because I have reflected a lot on this recently. It’s been more than 5 years since we began to write that book which released back in the summer of 2023. When we wrote The Remote Interpreter, the fight was still around legitimizing and proving that remote interpreting could stand shoulder to shoulder with onsite. It sounds almost implausible to me today when I think about it, but it was still a thing only 3 years ago. The global pandemic played a big part in establishing remote interpreting as a critical technology which thankfully is globally accepted these days. Back then I believed modality was really the big question and issue to resolve. The thinking was that if you could nail the audio, the video, the bandwidth, the connectivity, the protocols and the training then the rest would sort itself out, and essentially remote interpreting would establish itself as a key solution. However, since then and transitioning through the very recent boom and proliferation of AI tools and technologies around the interpreting space, I’ve needed to readjust and modify my position. It is not about the technology as much as I thought it was. Our State of Interpreting Technology 2026 research showed that the market has quickly become multi-modal with hybrid phone, video, onsite, bilingual staff, and now AI augmented machine interpreting to boot. The modality is no longer the question, and all options are on the table now and accepted. The circumstances of each interpreting encounter will dictate the modality. The main problem, however, is that we are still seeing issues in Interpreter availability. The global demand for language access is growing and demand in fact often far exceeds the number of qualified linguists available and online to support requests at times. Half of our survey respondents still reported a case where an LEP individual needed an interpreter and didn’t get one. So, modality was never really the endgame for us it is still very much availability and fulfilment. AI interpreting has shored up some of this problem but there is still a genuine need for new qualified interpreters across all languages and sectors of business. This will continue to be a challenge for the foreseeable future.
The next big technology frontier ahead of us is the delivery of language orchestration and language ubiquity. This involves building out and refining technology that can streamline the coordination of language around the right resource, right moment, right context. I guess we were somewhat prescient calling the Remote Interpreter book “Volume One”. I think the content still very much holds up well today however a “Volume Two” will likely become necessary very soon and most certainly will need to lean hard into AI augmentation and the transformation of the interpreting space into an integral part of what could be considered language operations (LangOps). Language access is now an infrastructure business and part of a ubiquitous and automated orchestration layer for true multilingual support.
優れた製品以外に、言語技術ビジネスが成功する要因について、外部の人々はどのような点を最もよく誤解しているのでしょうか？
There is a misconception that the product wins the deal. It doesn’t, it just gets you the meeting. The experience and the outcomes are what really matter. The language access and language support industry runs on high stakes, regulated, deeply human moments. It happens in hospitals, courtrooms, and classrooms. Nobody buys interpreting software being solely focused on feature sets and technical prowess. They are purchasing reliability, adherence to governance and regulatory compliance, and the trust and the confidence that there’s someone qualified who will pick up the phone when it matters. The other thing outsiders often miss or don’t immediately understand is that this is very much an ecosystem business. There are Interpreters, LSP partners, technology providers, associations, regulators and buyers and they all talk to each other all the time. It’s a relatively small industry, although revenue wise it is much larger than for example the global film and music industries combined. It is also an industry with a with a very long memory. How you treat your interpreters and technology providers shows up in your enterprise pipeline eventually. We’ve spent ten years focused on building and maintaining confidence and earning trust across the entire ecosystem, and I’d argue that that’s been worth more than any single feature that we’ve ever shipped.
通訳の選択肢を蓄積してきた組織と、成熟した言語アクセス体制を構築してきた組織との違いは何でしょうか。
Discussing options around your interpretation solution and services is mostly a procurement conversation and is very checkbox and utilitarian. Maturity is when an organization is having conversations with you around your operational support and deployment around solution orchestration and reliable outcomes. Our 2026 research, which included 370-plus stakeholders across the interpreting ecosystem, made this point very plain. Nearly everyone selling interpreting services successfully is multi-modal now. Their access has widened and their delivery modalities have expanded, but as I mentioned before, half of the organizations that we spoke with reported unmet interpreter needs. Yes, cost is still the most-cited pain, but the real measure of value begins when the conversation turns to interpreting workflow and coordination. The customers are most concerned about the automation of their scheduling process, around the consistency and quality of the interpretation, and about the efficacy around the administration holding the whole thing together. The accumulators just buy channels and staple them together. The mature operations on the other hand, deploy systems with clear rules for which modality fits which encounter, defines the criteria for when AI is appropriate, has a clear escalation path to qualified professional humans in the mix, and can quickly access the data feeding back into those decisions. You spot the level of maturity in the performance numbers they can confidently cite. How fast someone reaches an interpreter using their system, how consistently the quality holds, and how much staff effort it really takes to keep it all running. It is not in the number of whizz bang features you bring to the table nor the length and names on your vendor and partner lists to achieve any of this. No one cares. Language is everywhere. It is component to the end user experience. It is an operational layer. It is a utility. Today you need to speak and prove yourself around real data and outcomes.
通訳業務のうち、自動化が難しいという理由から、業界が具体的にどの部分を過小評価しているのでしょうか？
I would say there is still an underestimation in the perception, expectations and/or judgment in terms of how things are really happening or should be happening around the process of interpreting. AI is certainly speeding things up and getting genuinely good at converting language, we can’t pretend otherwise. Skilled interpreters however, are doing something else in parallel that people often fail to take into count and it’s not an insignificant thing right? Human interpreters are reading that the patient nodded but didn’t really understand, they are managing the conversation turn-taking, they are flagging a cultural landmine before it goes off, they are knowing when to step outside the script because something in the room or in the call just feels “wrong”. Interpreters have always been the critical communications risk managers. That work is very hard to automate because it isn’t in the transcript, and the industry underestimates it because it never shows up on an invoice, until of course it does, and that’s in the moment and on the day that it was clearly missing. Our 2026 data reflected clearly where people land on this. Even among non-users of AI, about 42% said they figured in low-risk activities AI use is probably acceptable. However, that’s an operative and extremely important concept to underscore! Low risk! Low risk means that everyone intuitively knows the why and where that professional interpreter humans belong. It becomes apparent very quickly when things come off the rails, and that is the thing that buyers are most wary of today.
システムの真の知能は、モデル、ルール、それとも人間によるエスカレーション層のどこに配置すべきでしょうか？
The models will keep getting better and, frankly, increasingly interchangeable. The durable intelligence sits in the layer that decides the orchestration and governance around the model(s). The intelligence asks and solves for what’s this encounter? What’s the risk level? What’s the language pair? Is AI appropriate here and if the situation shifts, how fast can a qualified human interpreter come into play? That’s where trust gets built and lives. Only 16.8% of respondents in our 2026 report currently use AI interpreting, with another 15.9% still evaluating it. So, yes, the appetite is real and growing but it remains conditional. People don’t trust a system because the model sounds fluent. They trust it if it can demonstrate that it knows its limits. Human escalation isn’t a fallback bolted on simply for the optics and peace of mind it’s a deliberate design feature. Arguably it is *the* design feature.
国際的な事業拡大において、企業が当初予想している以上に重要となる傾向があるのは何でしょうか？
Again, I think trust here is the strongest differentiator these days and in the age of AI it is increasing all the time as the single most important decision factor for end users. Buyers are paying close attention to how differently one system is built and how it operates from one market to the next. Compliance and data sovereignty are table stakes just as much, if not more, as the key requisite platform technologies and features are. Systems must show real command of governance and regulatory compliance that you can map directly to the locale and region. At Boostlingo we’ve literally built a set of regional regulatory field guides for exactly that purpose.
What also catches companies off guard in global expansion is the relationship physics. In LATAM and in Asian and Gulf/MENA countries the relationship precedes the transaction. You show up in person, in the language, more than once, before anyone talks contracts. In most parts of APAC, ASEAN countries and in the MENA/Gulf region, credibility routes through partners, associations and government relationships and is far less reliant on a sales and marketing approach. International business and growth can be very nuanced and specific from region to region, and you would be crazy not to include local partners in your go-to-market strategy. Another great example is regional certification. NAATI may mean nothing to an interpreting company in the US or Japan, but in Australia and New Zealand, NAATI credentialing informs and shapes your buyer expectations from day one. There are many similar examples in other countries.
The classic mistake is (and has always been) exporting your own geo-centric go-to-market playbook and expecting it to translate. It really doesn’t. It blows my mind how many organizations operating globally still don’t get this. You won’t scale trust with just an affirmation on your landing page. International business is by its very nature a highly localized activity. To be a global company, you need to behave like one. I highly recommend working with strategic regional partners and consultants and dedicating real business development resources experienced in international growth.
実務家やLSP、あるいは顧客から、テクノロジー業界全体がまだ理解しきれていない点について、最近ますますよく耳にすることは何でしょうか？
From practitioners we frequently hear “We’re not afraid of AI, we’re afraid of having no say in when and how it’s being used.” That comes up constantly. Interpreters aren’t debating whether the technology is impressive. They’re asking who decides appropriateness, what the escalation path is, and whether anyone building these tools has sat through a real medical encounter or courtroom session.
From buyers, it’s a different version of the same message. They say, “Hey, stop selling me yet another feature or function… or channel… and make what I already have work, more reliably for me (and cheaper)”.
The tech world also does itself no favour by talking up replacement economics, especially when the people doing the work rightfully talk about and raise issues around risk, context and workflow. I am hopeful we will be able to close that gap and everything else gets a little easier over time, but it’s definitely going to take time. Right now, there is palpable level of hostility and friction towards some of the current industry transformation but there are also boundless opportunities and a real roadmap towards true universal and ubiquitous multilingualism which we just need to focus on. It is a big part of the reason and motivation for why we publish blogs and research with a regular cadence and produce webinars and podcasts each month. The requirement to advocate and educate around ongoing development, progress and breakthrough in language access and language technology is perpetual and an imperative.
今後5年間で、この業界にとって最も重要な変化は何になるでしょうか。また、その変化を形作る上で、あなたはどのような役割を果たしたいとお考えですか？
I see in the immediate future a transformational moment where language stops being a bolt-on service and becomes embedded infrastructure. It transforms into a native layer inside the platforms where people already communicate. This includes health systems, contact centres, classrooms, events etc. Hybrid AI-human interpreting delivery will become an operating standard rather than a transition state. Orchestration and trust will become the prime differentiators, and unmet demand will ultimately start shrinking because the cost of low-risk access will drop toward near zero. This will free up skilled professional human interpreters for the more complex, context reliant and high-stakes work that they can do best. I tend to be more utopian in that I think that interpreting services will become faster, fairer, and still very human-centric over time, not less human. The role of the interpreter is simply evolving and transforming again, like all professions are.
My role? Boostlingo’s role? Same as it’s always been. We will continue to expand and democratize language access at scale and develop systems that help break down communication barriers everywhere. We will build the partnerships, develop the integrations, strengthen the critical guardrails around safety and privacy, publish the data and innovate and iterate based on our findings and via our conversations and interactions with customers and end users. We’ll host, moderate and join the important conversations and causes, and we’ll keep pushing on what multilingual communication itself can mean. I am personally excited about new cutting-edge delivery modalities like holographic presence interpreting for example, which we’ve already been exploring. I personally embrace the concept of “language is everywhere” aka language ubiquity which will eventually materialize as language access in the internet of things. I envision a time where I will be able to communicate effortlessly with my refrigerator or my rental car in Barcelona or Osaka or anywhere on the planet insert your location here_____. I want to empower and interact with humanoid robots that can speak with me in up to 7,000 languages. Boostlingo is ten years in, and I think we’re still so very very VERY early. Which is exciting actually. We’re just getting started and it’s a new fascinating time of transformation and that’s truly the fun part.
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