Our Analysts' Insights

Back in the day when I first began working in localization, we didn’t have a translation management system (TMS) – they didn’t exist – and our LSP was refusing to use translation memory because it created “too much overhead” for the first venture into producing a customer care website in more than one language. Knowing that the advent of the internet was likely to produce masses of new content in – hopefully – all the languages in which the company operated, we took a huge risk. We found...

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 ...

In recent years, there’s been a lot of buzz around “headless” systems – whether for content creation and management or for the translation workflows that feed the global customer experience. The concept being that rather than having a traditional front- and back-end (publishing and creation), these systems allow content to be magically managed, extracted, repurposed, and delivered through a myriad of end points, from mobile apps to corporate websites integrated with a partner’s own custom p...

Long gone are the days when only the biggest enterprises or language service providers had their own translation management system (TMS) hidden away in a private datacenter. The cloud has made TMSes and machine translation (MT) accessible to all. Technology costs have gone from prohibitive for smaller LSPs to within reach for everyone, including newcomers to the industry. Some commercial solutions even have innovative pricing models that make the technology affordable – or even free – rather t...

A recent examination of how computing power has changed over time calculated how much it would cost today to rent all of the computer capacity that existed at various points in the past. Up until 1968 all the worlds computers’ combined capabilities fell short of what a single server could do in 2018. It was not until 1974 that the then-current capacity (roughly equal to 0.43 teraflops) would exceed £100/month to lease in today’s costs. This exponential drop in the real cost of computing power ...

We have frequently and long been asked who owns translation memories (TMs)?” In today’s COVID-19 environment, the better question might be “Where are my TMs?” If you rely on one or more LSPs to manage and maintain your translation memories, terminology, and other linguistic assets, now is a good time to revisit your disaster and recovery plan (DRP) for technology, and business continuity plan (BCP) for the entire organization’s processes. Even if you host and manage your TMs centrally withi...

The sudden change from office-based to remote workforces forced by the COVID-19 pandemic prompted a rethink of computing strategies at many organizations. For example, businesses and government agencies that so far have distrusted cloud-based information technologies have suddenly and necessarily embraced them to keep operating. Is your translation management system (TMS) immune?

Buying a translation management system (TMS) is like finding a new home. Seriously, both are big investments and exceptionally large commitments. You want to get it right.

Offering a website, mobile app, or enterprise application in another language can require a laborious and costly development project with specialized translation technology, workflows, and personnel. Some major brands have taken a simpler approach, instead relying on a translation proxy server that works alongside their websites or apps. In this model, the proxy intercepts requests to the application, determines the language, and then turns to a database of stored translations or to machine t...

Translation technology has reached an inflection point, swept up in the big trends affecting every industry: big data, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence (AI). Language platforms are being renovated or replaced as enterprise buyers and innovative language service providers seek to align their language systems with the rest of their technology stacks. Dated monolithic translation management systems (TMSes) are giving way to microservice- and cloud-based architectures, with machine learn...