Translated Awards $100,000 in Imminent Research Grants to Pioneering Projects in Language AI

A new call for applications to fund research at the intersection of language and AI is now open until October 15, 2025.

Rome, July 24, 2025 – Translated, a global leader in AI-powered language solutions, has awarded €100,000 to five cutting-edge research projects through its research center, Imminent. The Imminent Research Grants support interdisciplinary efforts across three continents to advance the frontiers of language technology and services.

This year’s selected projects span a wide range of topics, including localizing multimodal content with generative AI, preserving low-resource languages, and developing Africa’s first unified multilingual dictionary, all within five domains:

  • Language Economics
  • Language Data
  • Machine-Learning Algorithms for Translation
  • Human-Computer Interaction
  • Neuroscience of Language. 

Here are the Grant winners and the projects they’ll be working on:

  • Philip Akoda – Nkanda Project (Nigeria)
    Creating the first unified multilingual dictionary for African languages.
  • Francesca Ferroni and Stefana Garello – University of Parma & Roma Tre (Italy)
    Studying how metaphorical language is processed in a second language using neuroscientific techniques.
  • Mirco Ravanelli – University of Montreal (Canada)
    Expanding SpeechBrain into a comprehensive open-source framework for state-of-the-art speech models.
  • Simran Khanuja – Carnegie Mellon University (USA)
    Localizing multimodal content using generative AI.
  • Barbara Plank – Ludwig Maximilian University Munich (Germany)
    Building the first multilingual, multi-annotator natural language inference benchmark with ecologically valid explanations.

The winning projects were presented during the kickoff event of the DVPS project, a major European Union-funded research initiative coordinated by Translated and promoted by 20 leading research and scientific partners from 9 European countries. DVPS embodies broader, interdisciplinary AI research in the area of Physical AI, aiming to create a new class of systems capable of acquiring a grounded understanding through direct interaction with the physical world.

“With the Imminent Research Grants, we are proud to support the development of research projects around the world with both local and potentially global impact. It is a way of supporting some of the most innovative research in the fields of language, translation, and artificial intelligence, which, in many cases, can also have a significant social impact. For us, this is part of a significant research investment we have been making over the last twenty years, and one we now want to bring to the next level, beginning with the DVPS project,” said Marco Trombetti, CEO of Translated.

The open call for the 5th edition of the Imminent Research Grants is now live, with submissions due by October 15, 2025. Researchers and innovators are invited to apply with projects that align with Imminent’s mission: to make it easier for everyone in our multilingual world to understand and be understood by others in their own language. 

More detailed information on the current winners and the 2025 Open Call can be found at imminent.translated.com. 

 

About Translated

Translated is a leading language services provider and a pioneer in using artificial intelligence (AI) to assist professional translators. The company was founded in 1999 by linguist Isabelle Andrieu and computer scientist Marco Trombetti with the mission of allowing everyone to understand and be understood in their own language. In pursuit of its mission, Translated invented context-adaptive machine translation (MT) in 2012. Translated’s work is trusted by the largest translation buyers in the world and has been recognized as leading in AI-powered translation technology by IDC Marketscape, CSA Research, and Gartner.

In 2024, Translated launched Lara, a breakthrough translation AI that outperforms leading machine translation and approaches the quality of top-tier professional translators. With Lara, Translated combines the sensitivity of over 500,000 native-speaking professional translators with the speed and capability of machines, making it possible to tackle once-unimaginable localization projects. Today, Translated delivers fast, consistent, high-quality translations to over 300,000 customers in 200 languages and over 40 subject areas. Through its research center Imminent, Translated fosters the global conversation on language and AI. It supports companies in localization, funds language data research, and rewards the best initiatives that advance technology and creativity for international communication.