Our Analysts' Insights

The Holy Grail of the language industry has been to standardize the transfer of jobs between the various tools and content management systems – and thus improve the outcomes. Linport, the latest initiative in this area, was born as the Container Project in 2011 at the final meeting of the Localization Industry Standards Initiative (LISA). Despite early promise, Linport has yet to make major inroads into the language industry. Other prospective standards, such as Translation Web Services from OA...

Artificial intelligence has become the new buzzword in the language services industry, with countless technology vendors and LSPs proclaiming that their AI efforts will revolutionize the field. Providers are scrambling to keep up with the fast pace of development to understand how it will affect their business and how to remain relevant in a world full of automation. Buyers are trying to figure out what it means for both their own processes and when they purchase services from vendors. Humans at...

When you clicked on the link that brought you here, you might have thought that someone spoofed Common Sense Advisory’s newsletter and hijacked you away from our blog. No worries. You are indeed at CSA Research, the company formerly known as Common Sense Advisory. This is part of our total redevelopment of our advanced research platform, brand identity, and corporate website.

The start of the new year is synonymous with a review and update of business plans. Successful companies conduct a yearly strategic planning session. Strategic planning is a process for defining a business strategy to shape and guide your operation. It focuses on a vision of the future and what you must do to achieve it. Executives use the technique to make decisions on what the company does, where it is going, which actions are required to make progress, what level budgets and which resources a...

With M&A a more frequent occurrence in the language sector, the type of ownership is changing. Traditionally four types have dominated the language services market: 1) privately-held agencies, many of them owner-operator; 2) firms owned by private equity groups (PEG); 3) publicly-traded LSPs; and 4) divisions of larger corporations, all of them with the majority of their revenue originating outside the language sector. With acquisitions in the language sector a regular occurrence, we can expect ...

Language service providers frequently go out of their way to avoid involving procurement teams at client companies or prospects. They fear that working through such groups will be fraught with delays and challenges, especially if their staff knows nothing about language services or forces providers to lower rates beyond their comfort level.

If your organization is in the process of implementing a digital transformation initiative – whether limited to the global customer journey or expanded to reboot your entire business model – you know that it’s difficult and even overwhelming at times. CSA Research conducted C-level executive interviews at buy-side organizations and ran a survey earlier this year to pinpoint the specific reasons why companies still struggle with global digital transformation. We share three of them below.

The history of standards for data and file exchange formats in the language industry goes back to the Localization Industry Standards Association (LISA) in the 1990s, which spearheaded the efforts around TBX, TMX, and GMX. The Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) organized the DITA, ebXML, XLIFF, and many other business data exchange standards. Linport is yet another initiative for localization data exchange. Most recently, GALA has been coordinating a ne...

In his short story “Library of Babel,” Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges describes a building of seemingly limitless extent that contains, in no particular order, every possible 410-page book that can be written using Roman letters. Stephen L. Peck’s novella A Short Stay in Hell is the narrative of an individual who has been condemned to wander a literal version of the library in search of the single book that best describes his life: When he finds it, he will be liberated from hell and allo...

The Museu Nacional inferno in September shows how easily physical artifacts disappear. The famous museum’s 20 million artifacts included not only insects and fossils, but garments, tools, and documents of indigenous peoples collected over hundreds of years. Tragically for anthropologists, linguists, and musicologists, it also contained recordings of conversation, ceremonies, and songs that were not duplicated in any other collection: Interviews etched on century-old wax cylinders; indigenous mu...