Our Analysts' Insights

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 market for outsourced language services and supporting technology grew 7.99% to US$46.52 billion from $43.08 between 2017 and 2018. When CSA Research analyzed 531 responses to our annual global market survey, we computed that 64% of respondents experienced an increase in revenue. However, all providers don’t share the same experience.

In the past two years, most organizations interacting with CSA Research have undertaken some form of global digital transformation – whether it’s reimagining the entire company from top to bottom, or a narrow focus on re-vamping particular phases of the customer journey. One of our findings is the lack of attention paid to post-sales support content as an essential component for brand building, customer retention, and up-selling potential in international markets. We find firms guilty of this ...

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...

In the 1980s, the American rock band Van Halen became famous for including a requirement in contracts with concert venues that they provide a bowl of M&Ms candy with all of the brown ones removed. At the time, this was widely seen as an example of how out of touch rock musicians were with reality, but it actually served a purpose. The band’s manager explained that if venues took care of the small details, he could be reasonably certain that they had also addressed more important things. However...

In January 2018, CSA Research reported on the business outlook on 2017 and early 2018 based on a survey of 85 CEOs of the language service providers in our list of top 100 providers. In August and September 2018, we surveyed respondents on their mid-year results and their predictions for the rest of the year.

Offering a website, mobile app, or enterprise application in another language can require a laborious and costly development project with specialized translation technology, workflows, and personnel. Some major brands have taken a simpler approach, instead relying on a translation proxy server that works alongside their websites or apps. In this model, the proxy intercepts requests to the application, determines the language, and then turns to a database of stored translations or to machine t...