Apotierioluwa Owoade had a problem he could not stop thinking about.
He had spent time working at Aforevo, a local streaming and dubbing firm in Lagos, Nigeria, and his experience stayed with him. During his time at the company, from 2022 to 2023, he saw firsthand how cost-prohibitive the dubbing industry could be.
Translating a film into another language costs upwards of $500,000 for a full production, according to Owoade.
Yet, beyond the cost, something frustrated him even more: the lack of nuance that most translators failed to capture in the local tongue. Voice actors, overstretched and underpaid, flattened the emotional texture of scenes they were recording. The existing software tools were no better.
He had seen Yoruba rendered so poorly that the phrase “I am pregnant” came out flatly as “I have a ball,” he explained, his face visibly grimacing over our video call.
He wanted to fix it. He called his friend David Mac-Asore, who was a Computer Engineering undergraduate at the time and a software developer.
Owoade and Mac-Asore had known each other for years, a friendship anchored partly through shared work at Living Faith Church Worldwide International, one of Nigeria’s largest churches. Since 2022, the two have collaborated on projects to bridge the language divide between the church’s English and French-speaking congregations at its headquarters in Ota, Ogun State, in south-western Nigeria, said Mac-Asore.
When Owoade pitched his idea, Mac-Asore was in, but they agreed they needed someone steeped in machine learning.
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