Our Analysts' Insights

Language service providers often tell CSA Research that they struggle to get visibility and brand recognition. They feel that their marketing and sales efforts fall on deaf ears so meeting sales targets becomes difficult.

Intel founder and former CEO Andy Grove wrote that, “Measurement against a standard makes you think through WHY the results were what they were.” Business-savvy organizations live by this dictum. They monitor various datapoints and develop key performance indicators (KPIs) – assessable values that show whether a company is meeting its strategic business objectives.

In October 2017, the heads of six interpreting delivery platforms (IDPs) met on the sidelines of the 6th InterpretAmerica Summit in Washington, D.C. They were determined to address a bottleneck in the development of the IDP market that had been identified over a year earlier in a CSA Research report on the subject – that is, applications designed to support the delivery of spoken-word language services were experiencing vibrant innovation but suffered from a mismatch between product solutions a...

Despite the reluctance of some executives to hire and train more salespeople, growth for language service providers is closely tied to developing a high performing sales function.

Interpreters have historically used a variety to tools to prepare themselves for interpreting assignments. However, their technology choices have been limited to an interpreter console, interpreting delivery platform, or glossary. That’s about to change with the emergence of full-fledged computer-aided interpreting (CAI).

Automation has come a long way, leading now to its most advanced and buzzworthy state, artificial intelligence. AI refers to technologies that learn from training data and experience to perform tasks that would otherwise require human intelligence. When applied to a PM’s job, AI enables “lights-out” project management, in which software handles the project from quoting to invoicing without the need for human interaction. Over the last few years, CSA Research has observed a growing number of L...

Finding, qualifying, and testing translators and interpreters represents a sizable investment for most language service providers (LSPs). That challenge is even greater for the fast-growing ones, any venturing into new markets, and those starting new service lines. For most LSPs, that means adding or enhancing the vendor management function to locate, vet, and retain linguists and other specialists. Providers typically introduce vendor manager positions by Stage 2 of the LSP Metrix, CSA Research...

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?

Language service providers (LSPs) – in particular small and mid-sized ones – often ask, “How can we increase sales? Where do we start? How can we build the best sales team?” The smaller ones often have a negative experience as they start formalizing the sales function. Sales training programs, including our own in the past, were just steps in the process – either planning, hiring, cold calling, objection handling, or account management.

CSOFT (#22 on our global list of the 100 largest LSPs) has banked on mobile being a driving force behind language needs. In December 2015, the company released Stepes (pronounced /'steps/), a human-powered mobile translation app designed to mobilize professional translators and Uberize the world’s bilingual population in the process. Last year, the company broadened the offering to support on-demand social media and image translation, again harnessing the power of the crowd. However, 2017 w...