Our Analysts' Insights

In the 1980s, the American rock band Van Halen became famous for including a requirement in contracts with concert venues that they provide a bowl of M&Ms candy with all of the brown ones removed. At the time, this was widely seen as an example of how out of touch rock musicians were with reality, but it actually served a purpose. The band’s manager explained that if venues took care of the small details, he could be reasonably certain that they had also addressed more important things. However...

Intelligent or smart content has been a dream since the late 1990s. The concept refers to text, data, and audio-visual materials that contains machine-interpretable information describing its structure, giving some guidance as to its meaning, and defining its relationship to other content. Various technologies have tried to deliver on the promise of content that machines can act upon. Today some approaches are beginning to bear fruit, but significant hurdles remain in the base technologies and t...

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 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.

User-generated content (UGC) has garnered a lot of attention due to the challenges it poses for localization, such as an abundance of spelling errors, the extent to which its meaning depends on context, a lack of consistency, and time sensitivity. But even as enterprises and language service providers (LSPs) struggle to deal with it, another type of generated content has been quietly swelling into a looming tsunami: machine-generated content (MGC). Today, increasing quantities of content appear ...

I have an interest in 19th-century sporting newspapers and would like to have them in digital form. Unfortunately, these newspapers used almost microscopic fonts, the type was often heavily worn, and their paper has degraded over time. Despite these problems, humans usually don’t have any trouble reading them, but optical character recognition (OCR) is another matter.

Chatbots are rapidly becoming ubiquitous in marketing and support. The potential for brands to interact with customers using natural language – and perhaps a bit of personality – without needing an army of paid human agents is driving major investment from enterprises. Tech giants – from Google to Facebook and IBM and Weibo to Microsoft – have started a virtual race to dominate this field. However, what is missing in this picture so far is serious attention to multilingual needs. Amazon, App...

Last year, CSA Research investigated 137 languages with measurable internet activity to identify those with the top online economic potential. We divided languages into four tiers based on the share of the “world online wallet” they commanded. This examination revealed that as internet penetration, populations, and GDP rise, the number of tongues needed to reach a given percentage of the market also increases and the mix changes. Recently, we used economic, population, and technology forecasts...

Microsoft decided to up its public relations game around machine translation. A recent blog post trumpeted that the company’s neural machine translation (NMT) system has reached parity with human translators for Chinese-English news text.

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...