Our Analysts' Insights

The language services industry is in disarray. Engrained ways of providing interpreting services became obsolete in a matter of days due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Organizations that use interpreting services, language service providers, technology vendors, and interpreters are struggling to comprehend the new reality and adapt to it.

The COVID-19 crisis has hit interpreting-focused language service providers particularly hard. Those with a mostly in-person offering are experiencing significant drops in bookings. Many are trying to offset this loss by transitioning customers to remote interpreting technologies or promoting translation services. Even LSPs with a focus on remote services are facing some losses due to the cancellation of nonessential engagements in healthcare, emergency services, and courts.

Translators and interpreters have a complicated relationship with language service providers. They depend greatly on them for revenue, but often just don’t like dealing with an intermediary. In CSA Research’s survey of more than 7,300 linguists, we inquired about the working relationship between freelancers and their LSP customers.

CSA Research conducted a large-scale survey of over 7,300 translators and interpreters in all corners of the world. Our goal was to characterize the demographics, behaviors, attitudes, and challenges of translators and interpreters to understand the present reality − and likely future − for linguists. In this blog, we’ll explore some of their responses tied to earnings and career focus.

At this time of year, many employees at language service providers are getting ready for their performance evaluations and wondering what their raises will be. Meanwhile, executives struggle to allocate their biggest expense – labor cost – in a way that will retain and attract talent.

Growth is an imperative for LSPs, yet 40% of providers struggle to profitably grow their businesses. The situation is bound to get more complex as CSA Research expects a decrease in market growth rates due to a variety of factors including the overall economic slowdown, the impact of Brexit on business between the United Kingdom and its trading partners, the fallout from trade wars, and the impact of technology such as neural machine translation. But even with all that, the growth rates we forec...

Running a survey is a tough exercise for research analysts. You never know if enough people will have an interest in responding and whether they will enter reliable responses. Yet, we rely on representative samples of good data to be able to run all of the frequencies and correlations that we wish share with our readers. The results of our large-scale survey of translators and interpreters all over the world prove that with a network of partners that helped promote the survey, we were able to ac...

Already over 3,700 linguists have completed CSA Research’s large-scale survey of translators and interpreters and many more have started it. We designed the survey to gain insights into the factors and issues that affect professional language workers. A preliminary analysis of the data from the survey already reveals some interesting patterns.

Has the productivity of translators increased? Are career translators willing to post-edit machine translation output? Do they feel translation memories are sufficiently maintained? Are interpreters increasingly working remotely? Do linguists struggle with the number of vendor portals they have to log into? Are they likely to still be working in the profession five years from now?

Great content drives experience and commerce. Enterprises constantly ratchet up the amount they need, while global companies demand ever more in additional languages to offer effective customer experiences in other markets. That means language service providers have to localize more content faster than ever before. Human-centric processes can’t keep pace, so the push is on for more automation. But CSA Research finds that adoption rates for the language technologies that could help are lagging a...