Our Analysts' Insights

Five or 10 years ago, most enterprises produced support documents, manuals, marketing, websites, videos, and other types of materials they then pushed out to the world for consumption by their audience. Although they might hear back from people who called in to support lines, this content usually disappeared into the ether where it either served its purpose or did not. CSA Research’s data points to a new trend: Content is becoming conversational. It is moving away from a publish-and-forget mode...

In any given year, web and mobile sites add and drop language support in response to a wide variety of macro-economic and business factors. In a detailed analysis of 2,648 global brand websites, CSA Research found that 26% added one or more languages in 2017. However, not all enterprises increased multilingual support. In fact, one in 10 removed at least one language. About 1% removed more than 10 from their roster.

The Japanese market is an attractive prospect for foreign companies that can succeed in it. In 2017, Japan accounted for 7.7% of the world's online economic potential, despite having just 3.2% of the global Internet-connected population ("Digital Opportunity: Top 100 Online Languages for 2017").

How do you decide whether potential employees need to understand, speak, read, and write the same language that’s used at company headquarters? Which criteria should human resources (HR) and hiring managers apply when evaluating potential hires who will work out of regional offices?

In the evolving world of digital marketing, there is a shift happening that can benefit the careers of localization professionals with content backgrounds—and content experts with localization experience. The shift comes about as companies gather the strands of digital marketing, such as e-mail, landing pages, SEO, apps, blogging, click advertising, social, and paid social, into coordinated or integrated campaigns. Coordinated content deployment maximizes both stickiness and virality; creates a...

Automation has come a long way, leading now to its most advanced and buzzworthy state, artificial intelligence. AI refers to technologies that learn from training data and experience to perform tasks that would otherwise require human intelligence. When applied to a PM’s job, AI enables “lights-out” project management, in which software handles the project from quoting to invoicing without the need for human interaction. Over the last few years, CSA Research has observed a growing number of L...

The recent CSA Research survey on gender and family in the language services industry reveals a mixed picture. Translation, localization, and related services are a female-dominated field, with about two-thirds of the workers being women. At the same time, the upper echelons of many companies reverse this polarity, with men taking a disproportionate share of seats in the executive suites.

New technology developments are stirring up the language industry, but the buzz mostly centers around neural machine translation (NMT) and artificial intelligence (AI). Something else is afoot that most observers are not discussing: the shift from monolithic to distributed systems. Microservices addressed via REST APIs promise to increase agility by allowing swappable engines. During a recent CSA Research Colloquium at LocWorld, we put this new solution architecture in the context of enterprise ...

As companies come to terms with the central role that content plays in the customer journey – from building awareness through purchase and onto customer care – their digital marketing teams and localization groups are tasked with content creation, adaptation, and rollout at the global level.

Blockchain is a method for concatenating blocks of transactions, which are stored securely using encryption in a distributed system that prevents bad actors from unlawfully changing records. Most media reports focus on blockchain’s use in cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, where it originated. However, the language industry will be more directly affected by the advent of smart contracts, where blockchain methods allow applications to automatically negotiate and enforce transactions; for exampl...