Our Analysts' Insights

Language constantly evolves. We all know words from our childhood that today’s kids don’t understand (or laugh at), and teens constantly introduce us to new slang and acronyms. Marketers develop new concepts; community and culture drive changes in what is current, acceptable, or outdated. People working in localization know that this translates to human effort in finding the right way to convey the same concept in a multitude of languages.

Four noteworthy announcements over the last two weeks provide several object lessons in how the language services and technology industry works and is evolving: Smartling and Lokalise both received substantial infusions of venture capital (VC), while Summa Linguae Technologies and Unbabel each revealed an acquisition (M&A). Although each announcement was individually interesting, in aggregate they are instructive. In this post we focus on global content management and full-service LSPs, tying th...

In October 1991, Unicode 1.0 was first released. In the 30 years since that publication an entire generation of language workers have been educated and started work, never having had to know the “joys” of trying to ungarble text that had gone through multiple encodings. The introduction of Unicode has simplified life for many of us and allowed millions and millions of people to access digital resources in their own languages.

Are you ready to implement language as a feature at the platform level? Do you know how to gain executive approval for the business case to achieve that? Do you even know what I’m talking about?! Read on to find out how Airbnb did it and the questions to ask your team to find out if you’re ready to embark on the same journey.

So you want to be big in Japan? What does it take to promote your brand in the country and how can you avoid being seen as a sub-par performer in a market widely known for its expectations for excellence? The Japanese market is an attractive prospect for foreign companies. As of 2021, Japan accounts for 5.7% of the world’s online economic potential, despite having just 2.8% of the global Internet-connected population. This post describes seven steps you can take to ensure that your Japanese con...

At last – though with restrictions – international travel is starting up again. Whether for business, vacations, or long-awaited reunions with family and friends, people are beginning to cross borders and visit locations outside their home country. This of course means these travelers will spend money on transport, lodging, food, entertainment, and other shopping – if they can! Apps and purchase processes can work well for the local resident but still fail dramatically for international visit...

Delivering an integrated customer experience wherever an organization operates means more than translating your website, setting up a few servers outside your borders, and offering extended hours for customer care. It involves reviewing an array of business requirements that begin with the age-old IT mandates of reliability, availability, scalability, and security – or RAS2 for short. Enter localization teams, LSPs, and translation management vendors. Their experience pulling and pushing conten...

Early in my career, my wife and I lived a few houses down from a truly extraordinary woman named Lorna Call Alder. Born in 1906, Lorna was the first person to develop a now-ubiquitous approach to foreign-language education that emphasizes the deliberate and careful introduction of vocabulary in context and repetition in use within instructional materials. Almost every translator today who has learned a language through formal education owes a small debt of gratitude to this humble woman, who pas...

Your language service providers might ask you to think again. Localization teams frequently jump – or are pushed – headfirst into implementing or optimizing their continuous localization models. They are often in such a hurry that they don’t realize that their language service and technology providers are a rich source of guidance. That’s because these partners work with clients that run the gamut from “Frankenstein-esque” frameworks based on half-manual/half-automated processes to fully a...

As long as human beings have used spoken language, someone has needed to interpret when people with different tongues want to communicate. Whether in friendly situations or in times of strife; by trained and professional linguists or simply someone who happens to speak two or more languages, individuals, businesses, organizations, and the military rely on the human skill of hearing one language and speaking another.