Our Analysts' Insights

Most online customer journeys mapped by brands begin with search. Yet many international brands tell us their implementation and processes for SEO remain unorganized and half-hearted. For most, international SEO is a future goal, while teams are “still working out” how to proceed with English or another home-market language. Virtually all companies say they are not doing enough. Here’s what you need to know.

It wasn't new handsets or mobile services that garnered the most attention at the recent Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Instead, it was automobiles: Intel's 5G-enabled autonomous car, Peugeot's Instinct concept vehicle, and flying car prototypes such as the AeroMobil. If any industry exemplifies disruptive change these days, it's the car industry.

While often complex and costly, localization is a well-established practice at many companies. CSA Research's interviews and surveys with both Global 3000 companies and language service providers show that the best of these organizations have tamed the rhythm of localization – processes and schedules are understood and under control. Many plan to throttle back their localization budgets as they work to optimize their current processes and tools for the 10 or 20 languages they support before...

Successful globalization requires commitment across the enterprise. Even high-performing localization teams must lobby other corporate functions to support international markets. They don't have the power to mandate fully localized e-commerce infrastructure, local data security compliance, or appropriate in-country hiring practices without buy-in from marketing, IT, and human resources. Yet, without these functions in place at the right time, your local audiences will do business with your c...

Situations where individuals don’t speak the same language abound. Settings for interpreting range from courts, to health care, immigration, public safety, tourism, and trade. CSA Research tracks interpreting technologies that support the coordination and delivery of interpreting services. Changes are happening rapidly in this growing market sector, with new offerings constantly modifying the technology landscape. Let’s look at four developments that are paving the way.

Language services today stand on the cusp of a disruptive transformation that will redefine how professional linguists work. This shift will come from the availability of ubiquitous artificial intelligence (AI) that extends their reach and capability and makes them far more efficient than they could otherwise be.

Recent advances in neural machine translation (NMT) represent a significant step forward in machine translation capabilities. Although most media coverage has significantly oversold the technology, one of Google’s announcements may actually be the most important one in the long run – the first successful deployment of zero-shot translation (ZST).

Increasingly, B2B and B2C companies alike provide an app-like experience for their brand websites. Today, more than 50% of searches, globally, take place on mobile devices. Sure, people that carry handhelds still download apps for handling frequently repeated tasks, like checking the weather, but otherwise expect to perform app functions via their mobile web browser. How did we get to this point?

By now, most language professionals have seen that claims that neural machine translation (NMT) is delivering results as good – or almost as good – as human translation. If these claims – which have been repeated in the mainstream tech press without much examination – are accurate, it is only a matter of time before human translators will be out of work.

The "yes" vote on Brexit and the election of Donald Trump surprised many media outlets, pollsters, analysts, and political experts. Those that predicted a different result emerged as the biggest losers of public confidence in their forecasting ability. Meanwhile, the U.S. election added the memes of fake news, fauxtos, and foreign interference to the discourse. Commentators across the political spectrum now debate a "post-fact" or "post-truth" world that would be fa...