Our Analysts' Insights

While linguists may not be as popular as doctors or lawyers on the big screen, they make a regular appearance in a supporting role. Occasionally, they even land the lead role with big-name stars like Amy Adams in the recently-released “The Arrival” or Nicole Kidman in “The Interpreter.”

Are you wasting sales and marketing resources going after the wrong leads? Many language service providers (LSPs) aren’t sure which prospects to pursue, so they market to a broad spectrum of buyers, with little in common, and which cross company sizes, industries, geographies, and countless other attributes. The more LSPs struggle to grow in a predictable fashion, the more they talk about hiring additional salespeople, redesigning incentive plans, and going after any prospect – good or bad.

SYSTRAN announced the beta test of its Pure Neural Machine Translation (PNMT) software with 30 language pairs (18 with English, 12 with French), a dozen corporate clients in diverse industries, and online public access to its software. This beta program caps a year of industry and media attention to deep learning, artificial intelligence, and more recently neural MT (NMT). SYSTRAN announced its PNMT product in August with this October beta. Google revealed its single-pair NMT solution in late Se...

Recent technological advances have led to an explosion of interpreting delivery platform (IDP) options that enable remote, video, telephone, and even machine interpretation. In theory, first-movers should occupy a prominent position in the market. However, many products haven’t moved much past the starting line due to poor go-to-market strategies, limited marketing budgets, and insufficient experience in selling to desirable verticals and audiences. Through in-depth research and 45 interviews a...

Interpreting technology has traditionally taken a back seat to translation automation. That situation is changing as developers focus on this next frontier in multilingual communication. This fast-growing sector is vibrant with new solutions, which move some interpreting revenue around, broaden language access, and create fresh sources of income for spoken-language service providers.

Whether for the right reasons, or the wrong ones, voters in the United Kingdom rocked the world's business and political status quo on June 23 when they voted to pull out of the European Union. At CSA Research, we waited for reaction from the global companies we work with to gauge the impact. We think there may be a silver lining for organizations considering expansion into the E.U. following the Brexiteer win. The same applies to European and Asian companies making the choice for where to r...

Machine translation (MT) has caught the public eye once again. The Wall Street Journal recently predicted that “the language barrier is about to fall” – within 10 years. We might note that this is one barrier that has been “about to fall” for far longer than the actual Berlin Wall stayed up, and that it’s been an awfully long 10 years since the first such claims were made in the 1950s.

The interpreting field is a hotbed of creativity due to technological advances and the desire from large-scale buyers to spend their budgets wisely. In this blog post, we explore two new solutions for medical patients with limited language proficiency (LLP), which can substitute for on-site or remote interpreters in select healthcare settings – patient registration and office visits.

The digital universe grows by a massive amount of structured and unstructured content every day. This flood of data comes in a broad range of standardized and proprietary formats and languages for uncounted application needs around the planet. Much of this data never leaves the silo for which it was created, but business analysts and information scientists have long researched how it might be useful in other applications, markets, and languages. For example, tagging the topics or categories of d...

In our recent research on quoting practices at LSPs, we found two recurring themes: 1) the increasing price pressure caused by clients driving the race to the bottom (see our recent blog post on that topic); and 2) the drastic reduction in timelines to conduct projects. In this post, we’ll explore this second issue.