M+E Europe

Updates on the Language Metadata Table (LMT) and localisation industry were provided on May 22, at the Hollywood Innovation & Transformation Summit (HITS), during the panel session “Birds of a Feather: Localization and LMT.”

Following an LMT update, localisation experts discussed the status of the localisation industry, how the industry is expected to perform this year, and how it is expected to navigate the continued advancements in voice technologies while retaining that human creative element that is so crucial in retaining the true essence and authenticity of the original.

Localised content is responsible for a significant share of the revenues that are generated for a film or TV series and its importance cannot be underestimated.

“LMT is there because we need to really make sure that the source codes and the target codes match up,” Yonah Levenson, LMT founder and co-chair, told attendees.

“I don’t know if any of you in the room have ever had that” experience in which maybe the information provided for a title says it’s in English “but it’s really in Spanish,” she said.

“What happens … when you have those mismatches [is that] somebody has to correct it, and that becomes time and money that can delay the production or the distribution of the content,” she explained.

LMT has “been around since 2016, when I was at HBO, in charge of metadata and taxonomy strategy,” and it was discovered that there were multiple kinds of codes within a single language such as Spanish, she recalled.

The goal to clean that language data up has been done by the industry ever since, she said.

“We’re up to 330 different languages” and 50 language groups included in LMT now, she went on to say.

LMT “just got a request” from Disney for the Ojibwe Native American language “because they’re making a movie in Ojibwe,” she pointed out. “If you have a use case [and] legit content, we will add LMT in there. We were [trying] to make LMT a standard,” she added.

The LMT Working Group, meanwhile, has been meeting since about 2016, and “we meet periodically depending on what the needs are,” she said.

She added: “The really exciting news that we have going on is that there is now” an application programming interface (API) that will “authenticate the language metadata codes. We will be getting that up on the website soon.”

Also taking part in the panel were moderator Caroline Baines, director of the Content Localisation Council (CLC); Nicky McBride, chief revenue officer for Iyuno and CLC vendor chair; and Scott Rose, chief technology officer at VSI and CLC technical director.

The CLC strives to bring the community together on a regular basis to raise awareness and share learnings across the global media and entertainment sector.

To download the presentation, click here.

To view the presentation, click here.

HITS Spring was presented by Box, with sponsorship by Fortinet, SHIB, AMD, Brightspot, Grant Thornton, MicroStrategy, the Trusted Partner Network, the Content Delivery & Security Association (CDSA) and EIDR, and was produced by MESA in partnership with the Pepperdine Graziadio School of Business.