Our Analysts' Insights

An extremely popular gift for the holiday season is the family history DNA testing kit. Vendors such as MyHeritage and AncestryDNA advertise millions of users, increasing sales, and ever-improving analyses. No doubt, this week many people are eagerly awaiting the results of a test-tube full of saliva; wanting to confirm their expected heritage or to discover ancient roots – and expecting to have an absolute, definitive, and correct analysis of their ancestry. But it’s a bit like expecting a ma...

Every day, nearly three quintillion bytes of digitized data come into being. This daily wave of new content supports interactions and transactions across the entire spectrum of human and machine activity – and localizing it is essential for many international business, governmental, and humanitarian activities. There is no sign of this daily growth in content volume slowing down – and with it comes gigantic projects to transform and translate it for other purposes and markets.

Growth is an imperative for LSPs, yet 40% of providers struggle to profitably grow their businesses. The situation is bound to get more complex as CSA Research expects a decrease in market growth rates due to a variety of factors including the overall economic slowdown, the impact of Brexit on business between the United Kingdom and its trading partners, the fallout from trade wars, and the impact of technology such as neural machine translation. But even with all that, the growth rates we forec...

What does global customer experience or GCX mean for your organization? It encompasses the approach and the set of capabilities required to drive customer-centric transformation across an organization that operates in more than one country. GCX drives an ongoing cycle of improvement to the customer experience in local markets as part of a unified vision for the enterprise. It can include enhancements to existing products, services, and interactions, or the introduction of new ones. GCX represent...

Making information available at your fingertips has long been the goal of computing. In the beginning there was a “user” – that was what computer companies back in the 1970s started calling the person sitting in front of monitors with their fingers on keyboards. As technology streamed into our everyday lives, that user could be anywhere – at a PC, gaming console, kiosk, bed, car, airplane, wherever there’s human-computer interaction. Enter translation and localization to make the user exper...

Running a survey is a tough exercise for research analysts. You never know if enough people will have an interest in responding and whether they will enter reliable responses. Yet, we rely on representative samples of good data to be able to run all of the frequencies and correlations that we wish share with our readers. The results of our large-scale survey of translators and interpreters all over the world prove that with a network of partners that helped promote the survey, we were able to ac...

Mention “interoperability” and many localizers think of yet another conference panel about the value of XLIFF, or why they should care about Translation Memory eXchange (TMX), or the arcana of ISO technical committees. The reduction of the topic to technical standards is understandable given the focus these topics have enjoyed over the past two decades since the release of TMX in 1998. However, CSA Research’s examination of the topic has revealed that interoperability is a much bigger issue w...

In languages worldwide, the word “recession” is being used with increasing frequency on financial news websites and Twitter. Google searches for “recession” peaked in mid-August and remain higher than at any point in the past five years. Economists have their indicators for the broad economy and CSA Research has ours for the language services and technology market. The data from our mid-year business confidence survey shows that LSPs should prepare for a potential slowdown.

Already over 3,700 linguists have completed CSA Research’s large-scale survey of translators and interpreters and many more have started it. We designed the survey to gain insights into the factors and issues that affect professional language workers. A preliminary analysis of the data from the survey already reveals some interesting patterns.

Pundits predict that AI and its neural machine translation (NMT) spawn will obsolete an entire industry and put hundreds of thousands of people out of work. That could happen – but only if we postulate a future where the language sector stands by and does nothing. Inaction will result in the wholesale annihilation of many providers, but CSA Research has observed enough tech-enabled LSPs where it’s not business as usual to be more optimistic.