Our Analysts' Insights

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...

To put it bluntly, your latest and greatest product feature or code fix may only be applicable for a minority of your customers. If your company’s international revenue is approaching or has already surpassed 50% – but customers outside of the home market cannot use all product functions – there’s a problem. The product that you work so hard to perfect can’t be considered world-class until the world beyond your primary market can gain 100% access to features that make sense for their user e...

CSA Research is well-known for its Localization Maturity Model™ (LMM) and Localization Maturity Assessments, based on 15 years of longitudinal data collection and analysis from observing organizational behavior around the translation and localization functions within global organizations. The LMM has enjoyed widespread usage and validation ever since its release as evidenced by its many references and adaptations throughout the localization industry. We have enhanced the original model based on...

Are you ready to implement language as a feature at the platform level? Do you know how to gain executive approval for the business case to achieve that? Do you even know what I’m talking about?! Read on to find out how Airbnb did it and the questions to ask your team to find out if you’re ready to embark on the same journey.