Our Analysts' Insights

Language constantly evolves. We all know words from our childhood that today’s kids don’t understand (or laugh at), and teens constantly introduce us to new slang and acronyms. Marketers develop new concepts; community and culture drive changes in what is current, acceptable, or outdated. People working in localization know that this translates to human effort in finding the right way to convey the same concept in a multitude of languages.

Four noteworthy announcements over the last two weeks provide several object lessons in how the language services and technology industry works and is evolving: Smartling and Lokalise both received substantial infusions of venture capital (VC), while Summa Linguae Technologies and Unbabel each revealed an acquisition (M&A). Although each announcement was individually interesting, in aggregate they are instructive. In this post we focus on global content management and full-service LSPs, tying th...

In October 1991, Unicode 1.0 was first released. In the 30 years since that publication an entire generation of language workers have been educated and started work, never having had to know the “joys” of trying to ungarble text that had gone through multiple encodings. The introduction of Unicode has simplified life for many of us and allowed millions and millions of people to access digital resources in their own languages.

Delivering an integrated customer experience wherever an organization operates means more than translating your website, setting up a few servers outside your borders, and offering extended hours for customer care. It involves reviewing an array of business requirements that begin with the age-old IT mandates of reliability, availability, scalability, and security – or RAS2 for short. Enter localization teams, LSPs, and translation management vendors. Their experience pulling and pushing conten...

Early in my career, my wife and I lived a few houses down from a truly extraordinary woman named Lorna Call Alder. Born in 1906, Lorna was the first person to develop a now-ubiquitous approach to foreign-language education that emphasizes the deliberate and careful introduction of vocabulary in context and repetition in use within instructional materials. Almost every translator today who has learned a language through formal education owes a small debt of gratitude to this humble woman, who pas...

CSA Research’s recent survey-based examinations of machine translation deployment at language service providers, enterprises, government agencies, and among freelancers revealed an ever-widening engagement with the technology. Although it didn’t surprise us, we also found widespread skepticism of claims that MT has reached human parity with numerous calls in open-ended survey comments for “truth in advertising.” Just as significantly, we saw widespread desire for MT to be more suitable for t...

A dashboard – in a vehicle – is familiar to every one of us. So familiar that we don’t even think about it. You never just sit and stare at it. You don’t spend hours reading it and figuring out what all the numbers mean. Instead, you see and understand it, and your body and brain adjust and take action based on what the display shows – from speeding up or slowing down to pulling into the next service station for fuel or to add air to your tires.

CSA Research recently released our list of the 100 largest LSPs and langtech providers, along with eight regional lists that add more than 80 firms. The rankings are based on our annual survey of more than 450 companies around the globe with revenue and business data supplied by the companies themselves and validated by their executives. Here’s a map of CSA Research’s 10 largest LSPs for 2021 – follow the lines to see the journeys of these companies over 17 years to their current positions. B...

Recent advances in machine translation (MT) have been truly astounding. Even if claims that the technology has reached parity with human translators are premature and an artifact of particular methods of evaluation, it is clear that the results are much more useful than they were even a few years ago. Now researchers are pursing approaches similar to MT to facilitate communication with animals. In April, National Geographic described Project CETI, an attempt to use the same fundamental technolog...

As language service providers start to mature, they invest in hiring either marketers, salespeople, or account managers, and eventually staff all of these functions. These groups often operate in silos with minimal coordination across their activities. Yet, in an ideal world, a close collaboration ensures marketing brings in qualified leads that are interested in hearing the pitch of your sales team and then warms up these leads so that the sales messaging is more effective. When you break down ...