Our Analysts' Insights

What return on investment should you expect from engaging with customers in their own language? Ever since our first report in 2002 on the benefits of localizing the user experience, CSA Research has found that demonstrating the ROI for localization is a challenging exercise. Localization managers spend an inordinate amount of their time working with colleagues in other departments to make the business case for international and domestic multicultural marketing, sales, and support activities. I...

Two years ago, CSA Research determined that the language sector faced a perfect storm as industry players incrementally improved efficiency, innovated services and processes built on newer technology and streamlined practices, and confronted disruptive intrinsic and external changes that were transforming the market.

Last week Luxembourg-based AMPLEXOR (#9 on CSA Research's 2016 list of largest LSPs) acquired U.S.-based Sajan (#30) for US$28.5 million. This amounts to US$5.83 per share for publicly-traded Sajan, a 46% premium over the current share price. Because Sajan will go private, it has substantial disclosure and shareholder protection requirements under the U.S. Security and Exchange Commission's Rule 13e-3 Rule. That regulation also limits what it or AMPLEXOR can say now about the deal beyond...

Turning something that's perceived as cheap or ugly into a more valuable or beautiful object has been the goal of alchemists through the centuries. Many languages have expressions that echo their quest to turn lead into gold. An English proverb maintains that you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. The French take a different animal to task, "On ne saurait faire d'une buse un épervier" – you can't turn a buzzard into a sparrow hawk. And a Russian might say ...

The language services and technology market is US$40 billion and is growing at 5.52% per year. Business media such as Fast Company and Inc. cite these figures, as do language industry publications, trade associations, supplier websites and press releases, business books, and academic articles. These numbers are also referenced in bank loan applications, pitches to venture capitalists and private equity groups, and government reports around the world.

While often complex and costly, localization is a well-established practice at many companies. CSA Research's interviews and surveys with both Global 3000 companies and language service providers show that the best of these organizations have tamed the rhythm of localization – processes and schedules are understood and under control. Many plan to throttle back their localization budgets as they work to optimize their current processes and tools for the 10 or 20 languages they support before...

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.

The "yes" vote on Brexit and the election of Donald Trump surprised many media outlets, pollsters, analysts, and political experts. Those that predicted a different result emerged as the biggest losers of public confidence in their forecasting ability. Meanwhile, the U.S. election added the memes of fake news, fauxtos, and foreign interference to the discourse. Commentators across the political spectrum now debate a "post-fact" or "post-truth" world that would be fa...

SYSTRAN announced the beta test of its Pure Neural Machine Translation (PNMT) software with 30 language pairs (18 with English, 12 with French), a dozen corporate clients in diverse industries, and online public access to its software. This beta program caps a year of industry and media attention to deep learning, artificial intelligence, and more recently neural MT (NMT). SYSTRAN announced its PNMT product in August with this October beta. Google revealed its single-pair NMT solution in late Se...

The digital universe grows by a massive amount of structured and unstructured content every day. This flood of data comes in a broad range of standardized and proprietary formats and languages for uncounted application needs around the planet. Much of this data never leaves the silo for which it was created, but business analysts and information scientists have long researched how it might be useful in other applications, markets, and languages. For example, tagging the topics or categories of d...