Our Analysts' Insights

I have an interest in 19th-century sporting newspapers and would like to have them in digital form. Unfortunately, these newspapers used almost microscopic fonts, the type was often heavily worn, and their paper has degraded over time. Despite these problems, humans usually don’t have any trouble reading them, but optical character recognition (OCR) is another matter.

Moving content from one support knowledge base (KB) to another is hard enough in one language, let alone in two or more. In our recent interviews with 36 global firms about how they create and manage multilingual support content, KB migration elicited the most spirited discussions. Here are five pieces of advice from our research to improve the chances that your next migration initiative will go as smoothly as possible in one language or many.

Translation technology has reached an inflection point, swept up in the big trends affecting every industry: big data, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence (AI). Language platforms are being renovated or replaced as enterprise buyers and innovative language service providers seek to align their language systems with the rest of their technology stacks. Dated monolithic translation management systems (TMSes) are giving way to microservice- and cloud-based architectures, with machine learn...

Speech-enabled search allows people to access information much faster than they can through typing– particularly in languages such as Chinese, Hindi, and Japanese – and especially when fingers and eyes are occupied with driving or making equipment repairs.Customer expectations are already shifting as people take for granted the ability to give voice instructions to Alexa, Cortana, Siri, and their local equivalents Why shouldn’t they be able to do the same as they place product orders through ...

Intel founder and former CEO Andy Grove wrote that, “Measurement against a standard makes you think through WHY the results were what they were.” Business-savvy organizations live by this dictum. They monitor various datapoints and develop key performance indicators (KPIs) – assessable values that show whether a company is meeting its strategic business objectives.

In addition to weighty issues related to privacy, data security, and transparency, global content is what brought Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg face-to-face with 44 members of the U.S. Senate this week. At the heart of the discussion was how the company plans to police harmful material while at the same time avoiding censorship.

The question – since the earliest days of the computerized language industry – has been whether translation companies are so different than other service business that they can’t use generalized software. The argument was that generalized applications, such as FileMaker or Microsoft Word, with vastly more engineers, features, and user communities, would prove more useful in the end than would industry-specific applications and business platforms with small R&D teams and limited feature sets. ...

Microsoft decided to up its public relations game around machine translation. A recent blog post trumpeted that the company’s neural machine translation (NMT) system has reached parity with human translators for Chinese-English news text.

In October 2017, the heads of six interpreting delivery platforms (IDPs) met on the sidelines of the 6th InterpretAmerica Summit in Washington, D.C. They were determined to address a bottleneck in the development of the IDP market that had been identified over a year earlier in a CSA Research report on the subject – that is, applications designed to support the delivery of spoken-word language services were experiencing vibrant innovation but suffered from a mismatch between product solutions a...

Neural machine translation has recently garnered the lion's share of attention for artificial intelligence (AI) in the language industry. Highly visible applications such as Google Translate and Microsoft Translator rank up there with self-driving cars in the public imagination. In addition, requirements for multilingual content are growing far more quickly than the number of human linguists, which positions NMT as a needed solution. We also identified a lot of interest in the potential fo...