Our Analysts' Insights

“Would you pay more for a localized product?” That’s been a core question in CSA Research’s long-running “Can’t Read, Won’t Buy” (CRWB) series of survey-driven reports. Since our first analysis in 2006 we’ve seen a strong preference for local language and localization, even if it costs the buyer more. That partiality for a user experience persisted in our 2020 survey for B2B buyers of technology products but was less of a factor for our B2C respondents whom we quizzed on more than 20 pu...

Last August when I delivered the opening keynote at the MT Summit on “responsive MT,” one trend that I identified was the emergence of MT as a platform-level service provided by creators of enterprise ecosystems. Although this move has just started, it will be one of the biggest drivers for growth of language services in the coming years as it creates an expectation of ubiquitous multilingualism across a wide variety of services.

In January, language service providers are often busy planning the year ahead. This year, we observed that many are putting special emphasis on improving their client care function. We’ve been busy holding online workshops with LSPs to help them refine their approach. Here’s an overview of the core concepts we typically discuss during these sessions.

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 Marketers develop new concepts; community and culture drive changes in what is current, acceptable, or outdated.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.

So you want to be big in Japan? What does it take to promote your brand in the country and how can you avoid being seen as a sub-par performer in a market widely known for its expectations for excellence? The Japanese market is an attractive prospect for foreign companies. As of 2021, Japan accounts for 5.7% of the world’s online economic potential, despite having just 2.8% of the global Internet-connected population. This post describes seven steps you can take to ensure that your Japanese con...

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...

Do you have low click-through rates on your marketing emails? Do prospects fail to reach out after you’ve sent them what you felt was a compelling call for action? You could attribute the lack of response to a variety of problems, but one commonly identified by our analyst team in interactions with language service providers is that many LSPs lack a targeted approach. A little planning could significantly improve the results of marketing and sales efforts.

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...