Our Analysts' Insights

Are you already fielding multiple requests related to switching from machine translation (MT) to generative AI (GenAI) to reduce costs? Or maybe an executive or two has asked about your plans to integrate artificial intelligence to increase team efficiency? If not, your time is coming. Here are six ways to prepare to handle these queries, based on a recent full-day symposium on generative AI (GenAI) for the Global Leadership Council facilitated by CSA Research.

During our research into multimedia localization – and all the new AI-enhanced tools that are sprouting up like toadstools after summer rain – we found many new offerings, some good or excellent, and many not-so. Startup companies with an excellent product may struggle with business processes and strategies; some are already leaders in a brand new field, unimagined a year ago; but too many others are aiming to get-rich-quick based on a worldwide appetite for tools that make everything possible...

Will GenAI enable LSPS to become strategic global content service providers (GCSPs)? We first described the evolution of GCSPs in “The Language Services Market: 2017” report and introduced it to our CEO Leadership Council members at the Boston Summit in 2018. In this blog we discuss the journey that some of our clients have been taking toward this new role despite the obstacle of procurement departments commoditizing their value to the price per word. One critical question remains – will tech...

It is incredible to think that, less than eight years after the first publicly available neural machine translation (NMT) systems appeared on the scene, some media coverage already sees NMT as so 2015. As generative AI (GenAI) really exploded into public view in 2022, it wasn’t surprising that an overactive tech press’ imagination would see it as the be-all and end-all of technology. Our recent survey with freelance linguists certainly reflects this view, with many language workers expressing ...

May is Mental Health Awareness Month. During this period, organizations seek to raise awareness of trauma and the impact it can have on physical, emotional, and mental well-being. What does it mean for the language services industry? What are the negative effects of working as an interpreter, translator, project manager, or in any other role in the industry? With this blog, we hope to shed some light on the work-induced mental trauma that language professionals may experience and strategies to h...

There hasn’t been much discussion of what the Titanium Economy might be able to learn from the localization industry – language service providers or buy-side localization teams – as it relates to easing and speeding up the globalization journeys of the firms that make up this sector of industry. Obviously, fulfilling their translation and interpreting needs is one requirement, but there are three other areas that have a much bigger influence on determining success outside of their domestic ma...

We’ve all been entertained by spells going wrong in the Harry Potter books and movies. What does any of it have to do with generative AI? If you think of artificial intelligence as the magic, then the prompt is the spell you use to invoke the magic. And not all spells – or prompts – are created equal.

Businesses in general, and localization teams in particular, are under pressure to determine how quickly to transfer (new) staff to new roles or to reskill existing ones – while supporting them remotely in effective ways. This requires the HR function to be much nimbler as it’s tasked with developing the guardrails for hybrid work models to support this evolution in roles and responsibilities.

National variants of multinational languages such as English, French, and Spanish underscore the challenges to a government or business of providing readable content to any citizen or customer, prospect, or employee. They face what sociolinguists call varieties – that is, dialects, registers, styles, lexicons, and gender conventions – in both written and spoken language. Furthermore, usage and comprehension issues extend deep into any interaction, further affected by payment systems, regulatio...

The explosion of interest in generative AI technology like ChatGPT has led to general calls for the regulation of artificial intelligence – these will also affect the language industry. Although today it is unclear who would be responsible for a critical mistranslation stemming from MT on a company’s website, CSA Research predicts that within a year some unlucky company will become the textbook case that decides this matter. This post explores how current and proposed regulation of artificial ...