ROME — Days after President Sergio Mattarella named him one of Italy’s 25 new Cavalieri del Lavoro (Knights of Labour), we met Marco Trombetti, the Roman who built translation company Translated from nothing in 1999 with his wife Isabelle Andrieu. Now one of the world’s leading AI translation companies, it supports 237 languages and more than 400,000 clients, among them Google, Airbnb, and Uber. He talked to us about the honour, his start in astrophysics, why people and machines work better together, and why he could only have built this in Italy.