Our Analysts' Insights

Language is the one of the most personal components of the customer journey. Ideally, you would be able to use a single variant of any language for any country where it's spoken, but the reality is that sociocultural and political facts require supporting the right dialect of a language in your target markets. The starting point for most planners is, "Which language do they use in a given country?"

Only months after rising up to squelch a product being developed by Google for the U.S. military, employees of the tech giant are protesting again, this time after reports surfaced about a Google Search product being readied for the China market. The new Android phone app would automatically filter out results from blocked websites, return blank results for blacklisted search terms, and meet government surveillance requirements. According to The Intercept’s reporting, CEO Sundar Pichai asked hi...

Apple recently made headlines as it became the first U.S. firm to achieve a market value of a trillion dollars. Why didn’t companies such as Microsoft – once Apple’s fiercest competitor – beat it to the punch? Apple’s resounding success is in part due to its long-standing commitment to excellent internationalization that has allowed it to meet local market expectations since the early 1980’s.

Last month the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) announced its new Internationalization Initiative as a way to boost its long-running activity in this area. CSA Research spoke with Richard Ishida, who leads these efforts, to learn more about its plans and what they mean for the language industry. He described an ambitious effort to identify – and resolve – technological barriers that keep the web from living up to the world wide part of its name. However, the success of this effort will rely on ...

In Ernest Hemingway's novel The Sun Also Rises, Bill asks, "How did you go bankrupt?" Mike answers, "Gradually and then suddenly." Both buyers and suppliers of language services and technology have had a similar experience with the evolution of artificial intelligence. After decades of science-fiction depictions of AI and fits and stops in the actual science, the last few years have seen a rapid move toward incorporating artificial intelligence in a broad range of process...

In 2017, CSA Research conducted the first large-scale, pro-bono, survey-based research on gender issues in language services. With over 2,000 respondents, the findings provided objective and reliable information about how women and men involved in the industry perceive these issues. On the eve of the #metoo movement, the report kicked off industry-wide discussion on the role gender plays. It provided detailed – and surprising – results for North America and Europe.

Need help with building effective business cases and presentations that lead to increased investment to drive global growth? CSA Research recently analyzed data from 20 global companies to determine what works and what does not when making the case in front of executives. Here are six actions you can take to improve the likelihood that your next investment proposal will be accepted.

It’s rare to go for more than 24 hours without receiving an e-mail that references “digital transformation” in some way. Organizations of all types – commercial, government, NGOs, non-profits, and educational institutions – spend a lot of time discussing the challenges and changes required by digitalization. But who’s taking responsibility for the global ramifications of these initiatives? How are companies measuring success or failure? How will global content evolve as a result? CSA Rese...

In recent months, we have increasingly heard from enterprise localization groups that their executives are pushing for the adoption of neural machine translation (NMT), driven largely by a very successful public relations campaign from Google that has touted the very real improvements in NMT over the past two years. Unfortunately, some business leaders have seen media coverage and concluded that they no longer need language professionals and can simply replace translators with the “magic” of AI.

In January, the World Bank observed that, "for the first time since the global financial crisis, all major regions of the world are experiencing an uptick in economic growth." CSA Research's 14th annual study of the language services and technology market demonstrated that the language sector has benefited from that good fortune. It grew at 7.99% over the past year to reach a projected US$46.52 billion in revenue for 2018. Read about our survey and research process here.