Our Analysts' Insights

An extremely popular gift for the holiday season is the family history DNA testing kit. Vendors such as MyHeritage and AncestryDNA advertise millions of users, increasing sales, and ever-improving analyses. No doubt, this week many people are eagerly awaiting the results of a test-tube full of saliva; wanting to confirm their expected heritage or to discover ancient roots – and expecting to have an absolute, definitive, and correct analysis of their ancestry. But it’s a bit like expecting a ma...

Every day, nearly three quintillion bytes of digitized data come into being. This daily wave of new content supports interactions and transactions across the entire spectrum of human and machine activity – and localizing it is essential for many international business, governmental, and humanitarian activities. There is no sign of this daily growth in content volume slowing down – and with it comes gigantic projects to transform and translate it for other purposes and markets.

Chatbots, machine-authored text, and automated information retrieval and summarization are increasingly important to global businesses seeking to interact more efficiently with customers and meet their needs. Recent developments in this area have been spectacular and AI-driven intelligent agents (chatbots and virtual digital assistants, such as Siri, Cortana, and Alexa) are among the most visible success cases for machine-generated content. Enterprises look to these applications as ways to reduc...

Many executives and their functional managers view international business issues as “special” and outside the parameters of the processes for which they are directly responsible. They assume that translation alone takes care of everything international. On the other hand, mid-level managers reporting to those executives often understand intuitively that global success comes from delivering a relevant digital experience that involves so much more than translation. They want to do it right, but ...

What does global customer experience or GCX mean for your organization? It encompasses the approach and the set of capabilities required to drive customer-centric transformation across an organization that operates in more than one country. GCX drives an ongoing cycle of improvement to the customer experience in local markets as part of a unified vision for the enterprise. It can include enhancements to existing products, services, and interactions, or the introduction of new ones. GCX represent...

Did you know that the language of flowers is not universal? We don’t mean the scientific classification or the Latin name, but rather the cultural implications. If you include florals in your marketing images for international content, be sure to consider them to avoid offending or off-putting intended audiences. This extends from the symbolism attached to specific flowers to even, in some markets, the color or number of individual blooms – there may be hidden implications.

What do Barsoomian, Esperanto, Klingon, Ku, Na’vi, and Tenctonese have in common? They’re all languages created for sci-fi films, except for Esperanto, whose developer, Ludwig Zamenhof, sought to create a universal means of communication. They all represent a human desire to explore or undo the effects of Babel. Although they seem to be a thoroughly modern project, they are actually part of a scholarly project that has been underway since at least the Middle Ages. This research spawned a whole...

When was the last time your strategic planners or management team reviewed what you’re doing in China − and why? If it hasn’t been within the last 12 months, here are three reasons why it’s time for an assessment, along with recommended actions to take.

Making information available at your fingertips has long been the goal of computing. In the beginning there was a “user” – that was what computer companies back in the 1970s started calling the person sitting in front of monitors with their fingers on keyboards. As technology streamed into our everyday lives, that user could be anywhere – at a PC, gaming console, kiosk, bed, car, airplane, wherever there’s human-computer interaction. Enter translation and localization to make the user exper...

Running a survey is a tough exercise for research analysts. You never know if enough people will have an interest in responding and whether they will enter reliable responses. Yet, we rely on representative samples of good data to be able to run all of the frequencies and correlations that we wish share with our readers. The results of our large-scale survey of translators and interpreters all over the world prove that with a network of partners that helped promote the survey, we were able to ac...