Our Analysts' Insights

Partnering with localization teams to achieve internationalization compliance on time every time means working closely together – especially as your processes and theirs integrate (Gen)AI. Open an ongoing dialog with localization, testing, and design colleagues. They are sure to have other suggestions for how to close the gap between you and the multilingual products that grow out of original coding. And, if you let them, the localization team may even offer to generate your developer notes aut...

It Depends As your organization pivots toward integrating generative AI (GenAI) into more of its business processes, you may be wondering if it’s time to engage GenAI talent to join your staff. The answer depends on several factors.

Hybrid work models tend to bring issues related to trust, accountability, productivity, and equity to the forefront. All of this adds even more pressure on middle managers to function as the glue to ensure execution of organizational goals. Yet, many companies continue to depend on extremely lean middle management layers. Expecting overworked staff to hold everything together without at least upskilling them to manage remote teams is a recipe for failure.

Whether or not product managers have direct responsibility for the international success of their products, they still want them to do well worldwide and are often held responsible for international revenue numbers. But what if they have little or no international experience, don’t understand how to build the multilingual training data required by their product, or simply lack the resources to research international markets, analyze product functionality, and beta test properly?

Are you already fielding multiple requests related to switching from machine translation (MT) to generative AI (GenAI) to reduce costs? Or maybe an executive or two has asked about your plans to integrate artificial intelligence to increase team efficiency? If not, your time is coming. Here are six ways to prepare to handle these queries, based on a recent full-day symposium on generative AI (GenAI) for the Global Leadership Council facilitated by CSA Research.

There hasn’t been much discussion of what the Titanium Economy might be able to learn from the localization industry – language service providers or buy-side localization teams – as it relates to easing and speeding up the globalization journeys of the firms that make up this sector of industry. Obviously, fulfilling their translation and interpreting needs is one requirement, but there are three other areas that have a much bigger influence on determining success outside of their domestic ma...

Businesses in general, and localization teams in particular, are under pressure to determine how quickly to transfer (new) staff to new roles or to reskill existing ones – while supporting them remotely in effective ways. This requires the HR function to be much nimbler as it’s tasked with developing the guardrails for hybrid work models to support this evolution in roles and responsibilities.

Would you encourage a colleague, a friend, or your children to work in a profession that is extremely damaging to their mental health? No, I didn’t think so. However, that’s exactly what we’re doing when hiring people to moderate extremely high volumes of (multilingual) web and social media content, hour after hour, day after day. Being a content moderator (sometimes called a “process executive”) has been cited as “the worst job in technology,” whether you’re contracted at arm’s length ...

With no standard budgeting model for language teams, budget managers and directors continue to consult CSA Research on how to win more funding and, conversely, how to avoid budget cuts. Many continue to scramble to stretch flat budgets to cover an expanding number of markets, products, and publishing platforms each year. Here are 11 guidelines for budgetmeisters this planning season – and throughout the year.

Organizations often fail to leverage their RFPs as an opportunity to advance their language strategies. Instead, they focus on cost, delivery dates, and punitive measures to be taken if benchmarks aren’t met and thus end up replicating the status quo. But it doesn’t have to be this way year after year. By recognizing underlying goals for launching RFPs and defining specific goals that are tied to corporate-wide initiatives, localization teams can leverage RFPs to advance their strategic object...