Our Analysts' Insights

Localization industry veterans may recall when the OSCAR standards group in the now-defunct Localization Industry Standards Association introduced TermBase eXchange (TBX) way back in 2002, based on earlier work from 1999. Released in the early days of XML, it promised to be a major step forward for making terminological data useful. After it was adopted as an international standard (ISO 30042) in 2008, it seemed that it had reached maturity and a firm place as a star among language industry stan...

Has the productivity of translators increased? Are career translators willing to post-edit machine translation output? Do they feel translation memories are sufficiently maintained? Are interpreters increasingly working remotely? Do linguists struggle with the number of vendor portals they have to log into? Are they likely to still be working in the profession five years from now?

Did you know that companies have access to subtitling in real-time or that riders can access in-app translation to enable their ride-hailing-service drivers to find them on the left corner of the intersection, rather than on the right? If not, check out what Amazon Web Services presented at the most recent LocWorld in Lisbon, Portugal. Platform providers such as Alibaba, Amazon, Baidu, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft continue pouring money and people-hours into harnessing artificial intelligence...

Last week, CSA Research was in Estoril: a beautiful location in Portugal for this year’s European LocWorld conference. This meet-up of buyers of language services and technology, LSPs, and technology vendors is an opportunity to share ideas and challenges, learn about inventive changes – such as through the Process Innovation Challenge, a sort of a Dragon’s Den for the localization industry - capture information, and to catch up with friends, old and new.

Reliable market research and industry sizing is a science. CSA Research’s annual market sizing project benefits language service and technology providers by producing reliable and actionable data they can use in their planning. Buyers of these services, whether enterprises or governmental agencies, use this data to educate themselves on the market. Investors and the media rely on it to frame and evaluate the potential of the sector.

Great content drives experience and commerce. Enterprises constantly ratchet up the amount they need, while global companies demand ever more in additional languages to offer effective customer experiences in other markets. That means language service providers have to localize more content faster than ever before. Human-centric processes can’t keep pace, so the push is on for more automation. But CSA Research finds that adoption rates for the language technologies that could help are lagging a...

One of my guilty pleasures is reading paranoid political and military thrillers. One of the kings of the genre is Lee Child, whose hero, Jack Reacher, is an ex-military drifter who roams the United States, righting wrongs and saving the oppressed, usually with a maximum body count, gallons of strong coffee, and plenty of derring-do along the way. Reacher is like a distillation of American cinematic strong-men, from Charles Bronson to Sylvester Stallone and Bruce Willis. But the author is British...

CSA Research’s 15th annual survey of the language services and technology market demonstrates that new capabilities to analyze and manipulate big data in local markets will continue to push advances and new applications within AI and the machine learning that it drives. Content will continue to morph as it becomes more conversation-centric to support more and more speech-enabled products and services.

A major translation event few language professionals heard of occurred in Xi’an, China on April 27. Sponsored by Xi’an International Studies University (XISU)’s Collaborative Innovation Center for Silk Road Language Services, the 2019 Annual Meeting of Postgraduate Degrees in Translation conference for educators in masters of translation and interpreting (MTI) programs in China brought together approximately 600 professors and localization professionals for a day of discussion about education...

Anywhere you go around the world, you can find traditional sweets or candy – especially in historic towns or cities where old-fashioned sweet shops are part of the heritage, or where street markets are a big part of local life. Think salt water taffy from San Francisco, halva from the souks of Jerusalem, lokum in Istanbul, chocolates in Bruges, or licorice drops in Amsterdam. You can buy them by the pound, the ounce, the kilo, or the gram. In the UK, those who grew up before decimalization stil...