Our Analysts' Insights

Translators and interpreters have a complicated relationship with language service providers. They depend greatly on them for revenue, but often just don’t like dealing with an intermediary. In CSA Research’s survey of more than 7,300 linguists, we inquired about the working relationship between freelancers and their LSP customers.

You buy a product or service once. What that means is that your journey from prospective buyer to customer can be a long and fraught passage. However, once you own it, the challenge changes to how to use it when you install it or something goes wrong. In our research on non-Anglophone markets, we stress-test post-sales support by putting ourselves in the shoes of people who don’t speak or read English very well but run into a problem. If a buyer in Bucharest is lucky, there may be documentation...

Consumer and digital marketers have so much to deliver that it often looks as if they’re trying to balance multiple spinning plates in the air. One of the trending initiatives that they must integrate into their strategies is the option of direct-to-consumer (DTC), in which their organizations revert to marketing, selling, and supporting individuals – rather than filtering them through third-party marketplaces such as Alibaba, Amazon, or Rakuten. This is a major shift for many medium- to large...

Far too many companies rely on anecdotal data; rough measures based on GDP, and the number of people who speak languages, or even less precise guides such as executive gut feel or a knee-jerk reaction to loud or political feedback. These methods risk making ineffective decisions for language strategy, instead of using the linguistic portfolio to grow business, increase revenue, and make advances over the competition. Shifting to data for language ROI helps set up realistic expectations and goals...

In our last piece on this topic, we examined some of the technology challenges that stymy enterprises as they try to build conversation agents, such as chatbots, for multilingual audiences. Many developers express a pessimistic outlook about their ability to deliver them in multiple languages. One of the largest developers stated that it assigned the likelihood of success for these projects at less than 30%. In this installment, we discuss some of the business and conceptual difficulties that en...

CSA Research conducted a large-scale survey of over 7,300 translators and interpreters in all corners of the world. Our goal was to characterize the demographics, behaviors, attitudes, and challenges of translators and interpreters to understand the present reality − and likely future − for linguists. In this blog, we’ll explore some of their responses tied to earnings and career focus.

A reporter at a major business magazine recently asked CSA Research, “Which of the mega-tech companies won the AI war? Which of them will likely prevail in the battle over the next 10 years?” Our answer was that their users were the real victors – and those users typically run apps from Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. But we broaden the AI discussion beyond Amazon and Microsoft to language technology developers data and machine learning to eliminate unnecessary labor and operations.

Are you leaving customers in the lurch when it comes to discovering the most relevant entries when asking questions of your localized knowledge base? Our research confirms that organizations tend to spend a lot of money creating a great deal of support content in its original form, along with subsequent multilingual versions. However, they oftentimes invest very little, if any, effort to analyze how external audiences attempt to access these repositories. As entries begin to calcify into legacy ...

An extremely popular gift for the holiday season is the family history DNA testing kit. Vendors such as MyHeritage and AncestryDNA advertise millions of users, increasing sales, and ever-improving analyses. No doubt, this week many people are eagerly awaiting the results of a test-tube full of saliva; wanting to confirm their expected heritage or to discover ancient roots – and expecting to have an absolute, definitive, and correct analysis of their ancestry. But it’s a bit like expecting a ma...

Every day, nearly three quintillion bytes of digitized data come into being. This daily wave of new content supports interactions and transactions across the entire spectrum of human and machine activity – and localizing it is essential for many international business, governmental, and humanitarian activities. There is no sign of this daily growth in content volume slowing down – and with it comes gigantic projects to transform and translate it for other purposes and markets.