Our Analysts' Insights

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...

In late 2015 most developers still treated Neural Machine Translation (NMT) as a future technology that would come someday, but by the middle of 2016 several developers had released functional neural systems that seemed to outperform even the best statistical MT (SMT) engines. Since that point, momentum has shifted decisively in favor of NMT because it delivered better fluency in its output and seemed to promise the end of incomprehensible MT output. Eventually, this rate of stellar progress slo...

In 2017, CSA Research introduced the concept of “augmented translation,” a technology-centric approach to amplifying the capabilities of human translators. Although companies such as Lilt, SDL, and Unbabel had already implemented portions of this model – namely the tight integration of human and machine capabilities, we predicted that more technologies would be folded in over time to create an AI-driven platform for linguists that would make them far more efficient and capable by offloading r...

Enterprises that used to hold in-person events for customers, employees, partners, or investors have tried to move efficiently to a virtual format over the last few months. Despite the challenges, many organizations succeeded at the conversion, but a disproportionate number were only able to offer prerecorded content with offline subtitling. Companies are now pausing to reflect on the first wave of events and investigate the entire array of alternatives available for supporting these multilingua...

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 ...

On September 21st Paris-based Acolad Group announced that it would acquire Luxembourg-based Amplexor. While the firms did not disclose the terms, their deal combines the 12th- (Amplexor) and 13th-ranked (Acolad Group) companies on CSA Research’s list of 100 largest language service providers. Following the acquisition, Acolad nouveau will have a combined US$307 million based on 2019 revenue (after subtracting about US$41 million in Amplexor revenue that will not be included in the sale). The me...

Remote simultaneous interpreting (RSI) platforms create a virtual booth where interpreters can pass the microphone back and forth as they interpret an event in real-time. They are designed to eliminate communication barriers on calls and in meetings, conferences, and other event types, so that participants who do not speak the same language can still participate in the exchange.

Enterprises that were used to holding in-person events for customers, employees, partners, or investors have been taken by surprise by the social distancing rules and reluctance to travel due to COVID-19. They must figure out – and fast – how to deliver rich participant experiences in a virtual format. And that is a tall order. Many localization teams have been forced to create miracles in short time frames to transition multi-day, on-location extravaganzas to similarly engaging virtual events.

In our early-in-the-pandemic call for action by company leaders, CSA Research recommended that companies “learn from this experience and get ready now for when the crisis ends.” We echoed that advice in our report on the future of language services. Over the last few weeks we’ve been briefed by several LSPs and translation technology vendors about how they have used the slowdown to push new initiatives and projects and, as we suggested, develop new products. They said that the pandemic’s dis...

Most people frown upon the idea of talking to machines, yet they are already encountering them in everyday conversations. For example, when you call a bank or utility company, you probably start the conversation with a bot that triages the request and escalates the conversation to a human call agent when it reaches the limits of its capabilities. There is no longer a need for a human to tell you your credit card balance. Likewise, there is no need for a human interpreter if a nurse checks on the...