Our Analysts' Insights

Our recent research shows that global digital transformation initiatives and unrelenting competition are two of the most common drivers pushing organizations to invest in globalizing business processes across all teams. However, many firms still lag behind in this area. What keeps them from advancing faster and what can localization teams do to enable their organizations to maneuver more quickly around the roadblocks?

With M&A a more frequent occurrence in the language sector, the type of ownership is changing. Traditionally four types have dominated the language services market: 1) privately-held agencies, many of them owner-operator; 2) firms owned by private equity groups (PEG); 3) publicly-traded LSPs; and 4) divisions of larger corporations, all of them with the majority of their revenue originating outside the language sector. With acquisitions in the language sector a regular occurrence, we can expect ...

If your organization is in the process of implementing a digital transformation initiative – whether limited to the global customer journey or expanded to reboot your entire business model – you know that it’s difficult and even overwhelming at times. CSA Research conducted C-level executive interviews at buy-side organizations and ran a survey earlier this year to pinpoint the specific reasons why companies still struggle with global digital transformation. We share three of them below.

The history of standards for data and file exchange formats in the language industry goes back to the Localization Industry Standards Association (LISA) in the 1990s, which spearheaded the efforts around TBX, TMX, and GMX. The Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) organized the DITA, ebXML, XLIFF, and many other business data exchange standards. Linport is yet another initiative for localization data exchange. Most recently, GALA has been coordinating a ne...

In his short story “Library of Babel,” Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges describes a building of seemingly limitless extent that contains, in no particular order, every possible 410-page book that can be written using Roman letters. Stephen L. Peck’s novella A Short Stay in Hell is the narrative of an individual who has been condemned to wander a literal version of the library in search of the single book that best describes his life: When he finds it, he will be liberated from hell and allo...

In the past two years, most organizations interacting with CSA Research have undertaken some form of global digital transformation – whether it’s reimagining the entire company from top to bottom, or a narrow focus on re-vamping particular phases of the customer journey. One of our findings is the lack of attention paid to post-sales support content as an essential component for brand building, customer retention, and up-selling potential in international markets. We find firms guilty of this ...

The Museu Nacional inferno in September shows how easily physical artifacts disappear. The famous museum’s 20 million artifacts included not only insects and fossils, but garments, tools, and documents of indigenous peoples collected over hundreds of years. Tragically for anthropologists, linguists, and musicologists, it also contained recordings of conversation, ceremonies, and songs that were not duplicated in any other collection: Interviews etched on century-old wax cylinders; indigenous mu...

Many readers of this blog are gearing up to work on strategy development and budget forecasting for next year – whether they work in the B2C, B2B, or non-profit sectors. To support you in that endeavor, below we provide three datapoints that will resonate with financial, marketing, and engineering executives as you present your ROI proposal for language investment.

In the 1980s, the American rock band Van Halen became famous for including a requirement in contracts with concert venues that they provide a bowl of M&Ms candy with all of the brown ones removed. At the time, this was widely seen as an example of how out of touch rock musicians were with reality, but it actually served a purpose. The band’s manager explained that if venues took care of the small details, he could be reasonably certain that they had also addressed more important things. However...

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.