Our Analysts' Insights

When friends and family hear what I’m working on these days, they typically ask: 1) won’t AI eliminate the need for translators and interpreters? and 2) won’t that eradication of the language sector do away with your job, too? The first question has taken the air out of the room in a lot of discussions over the last couple of years, especially given media coverage of humans in the loop that amounts to job descriptions that are little more than janitors cleaning up after bad MT outcomes.

In the streaming adaptation of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation sci-fi novels, Synnax became a water planet due to overmining of its volcanic vents. In Waterworld, the melting of the polar ice caps submerged most of planet Earth. In both cases, as sea levels rose, dry land came to be in ever shorter supply – as were food, potable water, biodiversity, and economic activity other than subsistence fishing and piracy. People migrated in search of life essentials or safer havens. Language, culture, and li...

Will GenAI enable LSPS to become strategic global content service providers (GCSPs)? We first described the evolution of GCSPs in “The Language Services Market: 2017” report and introduced it to our CEO Leadership Council members at the Boston Summit in 2018. In this blog we discuss the journey that some of our clients have been taking toward this new role despite the obstacle of procurement departments commoditizing their value to the price per word. One critical question remains – will tech...

National variants of multinational languages such as English, French, and Spanish underscore the challenges to a government or business of providing readable content to any citizen or customer, prospect, or employee. They face what sociolinguists call varieties – that is, dialects, registers, styles, lexicons, and gender conventions – in both written and spoken language. Furthermore, usage and comprehension issues extend deep into any interaction, further affected by payment systems, regulatio...

Multimedia, transcribed audio, and AI-generated content in all the world’s digital languages join more traditional content types in filling up data centers. Together they create challenges and opportunities across organizations, raise the alarm for more oversight of content, and further the case for aligning enterprise content strategies, investment, and operations.

Done right, website localization involves extending brand voice and all its attributes to leverage common content and shared assets such as style guides, glossaries, formal terminology management, and, of course, smart software to automate processes that keep global sites correct, current, and consistent. But what about extending that to a local experience across multiple written, spoken, and visual channels as required by each country and level – informational, localized, or hyperlocal?

2020 disrupted nearly every human activity on the planet. The pandemic, lockdowns, and economic consequences blocked the expected growth in language services that we forecast for that year (“The Language Services Market (2021)”). In stark contrast, 2021 was a year of recovery for most of the language services and technology companies that responded to the survey for the 18th CSA Research Global Market Study. They got back on track from the pandemic body slam, optimized and rethought their busi...

For the last few months pundits across the political spectrum have written op-ed columns and long articles questioning whether geopolitical events such as war and polarized politics signal the end of globalization. This post considers those concerns of policymakers but contends that activities to address the growing complexity of a de-globalizing planet raises the bar for any organization operating in multiple countries – and that this reality will create new opportunities for anyone who can ma...

“Would you pay more for a localized product?” That’s been a core question in CSA Research’s long-running “Can’t Read, Won’t Buy” (CRWB) series of survey-driven reports. Since our first analysis in 2006 we’ve seen a strong preference for local language and localization, even if it costs the buyer more. That partiality for a user experience persisted in our 2020 survey for B2B buyers of technology products but was less of a factor for our B2C respondents whom we quizzed on more than 20 pu...

Four noteworthy announcements over the last two weeks provide several object lessons in how the language services and technology industry works and is evolving: Smartling and Lokalise both received substantial infusions of venture capital (VC), while Summa Linguae Technologies and Unbabel each revealed an acquisition (M&A). Although each announcement was individually interesting, in aggregate they are instructive. In this post we focus on global content management and full-service LSPs, tying th...