Our Analysts' Insights

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...

What’s pushing even slower-moving companies to jump on the digital transformation bandwagon? There are several reasons, but one of the biggest is that their competition at the level of digital customer experience now includes competitors outside of their own industries in the form of Amazon, Facebook, their local equivalents, and similar companies. Prospects and customers perceive firms to be lagging behind if they don’t measure up in terms of one-click payment, voice-activation, chatbots, and...

Growth is an evergreen topic for language service providers (LSPs). Those that struggle to increase revenue want to figure out how to formalize their sales function, while those that already have positive sales numbers want to grow more or do it more sustainably. The fourth quarter is sales and marketing prime-time. Not only it is a critical to finish the year strong, but it’s also the perfect time to focus on the year ahead.

Language service providers often tell CSA Research that they struggle to get visibility and brand recognition. They feel that their marketing and sales efforts fall on deaf ears so meeting sales targets becomes difficult.

Only months after rising up to squelch a product being developed by Google for the U.S. military, employees of the tech giant are protesting again, this time after reports surfaced about a Google Search product being readied for the China market. The new Android phone app would automatically filter out results from blocked websites, return blank results for blacklisted search terms, and meet government surveillance requirements. According to The Intercept’s reporting, CEO Sundar Pichai asked hi...

Last month the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) announced its new Internationalization Initiative as a way to boost its long-running activity in this area. CSA Research spoke with Richard Ishida, who leads these efforts, to learn more about its plans and what they mean for the language industry. He described an ambitious effort to identify – and resolve – technological barriers that keep the web from living up to the world wide part of its name. However, the success of this effort will rely on ...

In Ernest Hemingway's novel The Sun Also Rises, Bill asks, "How did you go bankrupt?" Mike answers, "Gradually and then suddenly." Both buyers and suppliers of language services and technology have had a similar experience with the evolution of artificial intelligence. After decades of science-fiction depictions of AI and fits and stops in the actual science, the last few years have seen a rapid move toward incorporating artificial intelligence in a broad range of process...

In 2017, CSA Research conducted the first large-scale, pro-bono, survey-based research on gender issues in language services. With over 2,000 respondents, the findings provided objective and reliable information about how women and men involved in the industry perceive these issues. On the eve of the #metoo movement, the report kicked off industry-wide discussion on the role gender plays. It provided detailed – and surprising – results for North America and Europe.

It’s rare to go for more than 24 hours without receiving an e-mail that references “digital transformation” in some way. Organizations of all types – commercial, government, NGOs, non-profits, and educational institutions – spend a lot of time discussing the challenges and changes required by digitalization. But who’s taking responsibility for the global ramifications of these initiatives? How are companies measuring success or failure? How will global content evolve as a result? CSA Rese...