Our Analysts' Insights

It was the memo heard around the world, the one that led Google’s CEO to cut short his vacation to deal with a firestorm of criticism, and the one that reignited the perennial and fiery debate about sexism, women’s role in the tech industry, and political correctness.

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?

Today CSA Research released the first in a series of reports that examine gender and family issues in the language industry. Based on our survey of 2,195 professionals who work with language services, this free report provides insights into the role gender and family plays in the field. We developed this pro bono research with the support of GALA and Women and Localization in order to understand how language workers compare to other industries. The report shines light on topics ranging from pay ...

Technology is crucial for language service providers (LSPs), not just for growth but even for survival in a rapidly changing market landscape. Earlier this year, we reviewed technology survey answers for 728 providers and interviewed a cross-section of 30 translation and interpreting companies in 12 countries. Using this combination of quantitative and qualitative data, CSA Research wanted to see how aligning the LSP Metrix™ maturity model and the Tech-Savvy typology – originally published in ...

For several years, the field of quality checking tools has been largely stagnant, with incremental updates to established tools. Recently, TAUS’ Dynamic Quality Framework (DQF) and the EU’s Multidimensional Quality Metrics (MQM) have set the stage for new developments in quality assessment methods thanks to their new methods and push for standardization. In this blog, we’ll review three new market entrants that are hoping to shake up this area.

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...

Imagine yourself in a café in Paris or on a beach in Cancún, running into some gorgeous human specimen you just can’t help but approach. You walk up to the person, offer them a hearing device, and point for them to put it in their ear while you pop one in yourself. Then you launch an app on your smartphone and start communicating via the help of machine interpreting, hoping the app will accurately translate your best pick-up line.

Every new development in the field of machine translation (MT) is accompanied by a set of numbers that purport to show dramatic improvement in terms of quality, usually BLEU or METEOR scores. These measures use a scale from 0 to 100 to quantify how similar the MT output is to one or more human translations of the same source text based on a mechanical analysis of how many of the same words show up and how likely they are to appear in the same order.

Most online customer journeys mapped by brands begin with search. Yet many international brands tell us their implementation and processes for SEO remain unorganized and half-hearted. For most, international SEO is a future goal, while teams are “still working out” how to proceed with English or another home-market language. Virtually all companies say they are not doing enough. Here’s what you need to know.

It wasn't new handsets or mobile services that garnered the most attention at the recent Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Instead, it was automobiles: Intel's 5G-enabled autonomous car, Peugeot's Instinct concept vehicle, and flying car prototypes such as the AeroMobil. If any industry exemplifies disruptive change these days, it's the car industry.