Our Analysts' Insights

Artificial intelligence has become the new buzzword in the language services industry, with countless technology vendors and LSPs proclaiming that their AI efforts will revolutionize the field. Providers are scrambling to keep up with the fast pace of development to understand how it will affect their business and how to remain relevant in a world full of automation. Buyers are trying to figure out what it means for both their own processes and when they purchase services from vendors. Humans at...

Neural machine translation has recently garnered the lion's share of attention for artificial intelligence (AI) in the language industry. Highly visible applications such as Google Translate and Microsoft Translator rank up there with self-driving cars in the public imagination. In addition, requirements for multilingual content are growing far more quickly than the number of human linguists, which positions NMT as a needed solution. We also identified a lot of interest in the potential fo...

Buyers of language services crave the ability to measure translation quality in an objective way, get easy-to-digest reports on how it is tracking over time, and be able to drill down as needed for process improvement. However, quality control remains a mostly human-driven process – even when supported by QA technology – because humans have to sift through the reports these tools produce. What if there was another way to approach quality?

In the last year, CSA Research has been covering a new paradigm for translator productivity, one we call “augmented translation.” The term comes from “augmented reality”: applications that overlay images of the world with relevant information.

Language services today stand on the cusp of a disruptive transformation that will redefine how professional linguists work. This shift will come from the availability of ubiquitous artificial intelligence (AI) that extends their reach and capability and makes them far more efficient than they could otherwise be.