Our Analysts' Insights

Pundits predict that AI and its neural machine translation (NMT) spawn will obsolete an entire industry and put hundreds of thousands of people out of work. That could happen – but only if we postulate a future where the language sector stands by and does nothing. Inaction will result in the wholesale annihilation of many providers, but CSA Research has observed enough tech-enabled LSPs where it’s not business as usual to be more optimistic.

Localization industry veterans may recall when the OSCAR standards group in the now-defunct Localization Industry Standards Association introduced TermBase eXchange (TBX) way back in 2002, based on earlier work from 1999. Released in the early days of XML, it promised to be a major step forward for making terminological data useful. After it was adopted as an international standard (ISO 30042) in 2008, it seemed that it had reached maturity and a firm place as a star among language industry stan...

A major translation event few language professionals heard of occurred in Xi’an, China on April 27. Sponsored by Xi’an International Studies University (XISU)’s Collaborative Innovation Center for Silk Road Language Services, the 2019 Annual Meeting of Postgraduate Degrees in Translation conference for educators in masters of translation and interpreting (MTI) programs in China brought together approximately 600 professors and localization professionals for a day of discussion about education...

The glory days of globetrotting for simultaneous interpreters are slowly fading. First, remote simultaneous interpreting (RSI) eliminated some of their frequent flyer miles. The next technological disruption to the conference interpreting market – real-time on-demand language access powered by machine interpreting – will be even more momentous. The first solutions are now available for conferences and have the potential to start picking up revenue from conference organizers.

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.

The history of standards for data and file exchange formats in the language industry goes back to the Localization Industry Standards Association (LISA) in the 1990s, which spearheaded the efforts around TBX, TMX, and GMX. The Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) organized the DITA, ebXML, XLIFF, and many other business data exchange standards. Linport is yet another initiative for localization data exchange. Most recently, GALA has been coordinating a ne...

In his short story “Library of Babel,” Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges describes a building of seemingly limitless extent that contains, in no particular order, every possible 410-page book that can be written using Roman letters. Stephen L. Peck’s novella A Short Stay in Hell is the narrative of an individual who has been condemned to wander a literal version of the library in search of the single book that best describes his life: When he finds it, he will be liberated from hell and allo...

The Museu Nacional inferno in September shows how easily physical artifacts disappear. The famous museum’s 20 million artifacts included not only insects and fossils, but garments, tools, and documents of indigenous peoples collected over hundreds of years. Tragically for anthropologists, linguists, and musicologists, it also contained recordings of conversation, ceremonies, and songs that were not duplicated in any other collection: Interviews etched on century-old wax cylinders; indigenous mu...

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...