Our Analysts' Insights

Artificial intelligence (AI) and caring people are together bringing life-changing services for accessibility and communication, but you must look past the hype and the deep fakes to find them.

Companies all over the world are experimenting with breaking away from the traditional five-day work week to move to a more condensed or shortened one. My husband, an HR manager, has implemented 4x10 (4 days of 10 hours each) at his company for over two years now and I have had countless discussions with him on whether language service providers could switch to such a model. I originally had some reservations because LSPs need to be there for their clients at a minimum of five days a week – if ...

Multimedia, transcribed audio, and AI-generated content in all the world’s digital languages join more traditional content types in filling up data centers. Together they create challenges and opportunities across organizations, raise the alarm for more oversight of content, and further the case for aligning enterprise content strategies, investment, and operations.

Large language models have been in the news a lot in November and December and the coverage has been mixed, to put it mildly. Meta posted its Galactica model on November 15 but took it down just three days later in the face of intense criticism. By contrast, when OpenAI released ChatGPT two weeks later, on November 30, the response was much more positive. Examining why the reactions were so different provides insight into the potential and limitations of machine translation (MT) as well as cauti...

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 ...

FOMO – the fear of missing out – relates to the anxiety people feel when they are worried about missing out on opportunities. Companies are not immune to this phenomenon. And many LSPs have a bad case of it – even if they aren’t aware of it.

Done right, website localization involves extending brand voice and all its attributes to leverage common content and shared assets such as style guides, glossaries, formal terminology management, and, of course, smart software to automate processes that keep global sites correct, current, and consistent. But what about extending that to a local experience across multiple written, spoken, and visual channels as required by each country and level – informational, localized, or hyperlocal?

All companies have many regulations and business requirements to comply with today – plus additional scrutiny from enforcers and public commentary alike. It may seem like a never-ending list: doing what’s right for the business, humanity, and the planet. Corporate websites have sections for accessibility; commitment to employees; measures for diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI); global corporate responsibility; ecological sustainability; and more. Many are striving to find ways to use inclu...

As part of an ongoing investigation into multimedia localization tools and practices, CSA Research is examining enterprises’ global use of video. A combination of professional interest while researching marketing content and personal interest because I’ve just moved, led me to view several TV ads and online videos by international energy providers, including EDF and E.ON. These marketing videos took me down the proverbial rabbit hole, trying to figure out the source and target languages. Which...

2020 disrupted nearly every human activity on the planet. The pandemic, lockdowns, and economic consequences blocked the expected growth in language services that we forecast for that year (“The Language Services Market (2021)”). In stark contrast, 2021 was a year of recovery for most of the language services and technology companies that responded to the survey for the 18th CSA Research Global Market Study. They got back on track from the pandemic body slam, optimized and rethought their busi...