Our Analysts' Insights

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...

Multimedia, transcribed audio, and AI-generated content in all the world’s digital languages join more traditional content types in filling up data centers. Together they create challenges and opportunities across organizations, raise the alarm for more oversight of content, and further the case for aligning enterprise content strategies, investment, and operations.

Large language models have been in the news a lot in November and December and the coverage has been mixed, to put it mildly. Meta posted its Galactica model on November 15 but took it down just three days later in the face of intense criticism. By contrast, when OpenAI released ChatGPT two weeks later, on November 30, the response was much more positive. Examining why the reactions were so different provides insight into the potential and limitations of machine translation (MT) as well as cauti...

Done right, website localization involves extending brand voice and all its attributes to leverage common content and shared assets such as style guides, glossaries, formal terminology management, and, of course, smart software to automate processes that keep global sites correct, current, and consistent. But what about extending that to a local experience across multiple written, spoken, and visual channels as required by each country and level – informational, localized, or hyperlocal?

As part of an ongoing investigation into multimedia localization tools and practices, CSA Research is examining enterprises’ global use of video. A combination of professional interest while researching marketing content and personal interest because I’ve just moved, led me to view several TV ads and online videos by international energy providers, including EDF and E.ON. These marketing videos took me down the proverbial rabbit hole, trying to figure out the source and target languages. Which...

Technology developments tend to follow a typical pattern of improvement over time, known as an S-curve. Although it is a familiar pattern, it is worth unpacking its five phases and considering how they apply to language technology and forecasts about it. Examining how they have played out with successive generations of machine translation points to a future in which other advanced natural language processing technologies have tremendous potential to deliver useful and innovative capabilities.

Last week, the Washington Post published an article about Blake Lemoine’s claim that his employer Google’s LaMDA language model/chatbot system had achieved sentience and had a “soul.” Lemoine, an engineer in the company’s responsible AI group, based his assertion on a dialogue in which LaMDA expressed human-seeming sentiments and concepts. Google placed Lemoine on leave, thereby sparking renewed discussion about what machine sentience is and what it means. What can the experience of the lan...

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...

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.