Our Analysts' Insights

In languages worldwide, the word “recession” is being used with increasing frequency on financial news websites and Twitter. Google searches for “recession” peaked in mid-August and remain higher than at any point in the past five years. Economists have their indicators for the broad economy and CSA Research has ours for the language services and technology market. The data from our mid-year business confidence survey shows that LSPs should prepare for a potential slowdown.

Already over 3,700 linguists have completed CSA Research’s large-scale survey of translators and interpreters and many more have started it. We designed the survey to gain insights into the factors and issues that affect professional language workers. A preliminary analysis of the data from the survey already reveals some interesting patterns.

Ensuring that audiences in various parts of East and Southeast Asia fall in love with the games you create means adapting the characters – and the dialects they speak – appropriately for the region. Your goal is to avoid comical at best, or disastrous at worst, results for your gaming franchise.

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.

Enterprises looking to extend their international footprint face many challenges. Selecting the languages that will give them the best market opportunities is one of these. Every year CSA Research publishes a ranking of the top online languages as determined by their economic opportunity (eGDP). Although this listing – based on macroeconomic factors – is a good predictor of overall investment, the choices individual organizations make are more complex.

Buyers of language services often focus too closely on their immediate translation and interpreting needs, missing the wider picture – the underlying knowledge that allows the delivery of written and spoken content in multiple languages. But why should buyers and providers care about this short-sightedness?

Organizations usually don’t invest much money or energy incorporating their knowledge bases (KBs) into the global customer experience (CX) – whether it’s for an original language or a localized version for other markets. This is despite the fact that each KB interaction can increase or decrease the value of your brand in customers’ eyes and thus plays a key role in cementing their loyalty. Based on extensive interviews with 36 global firms about how they create and manage multilingual KB con...

Do you ever get the sense that your progress toward best practices in localization takes a step forward, only to be followed by two steps back? You’re not alone in this shuffle. One problem that we see in our localization maturity assessments is that some companies abandon their hard-won best practices and return to an earlier, less evolved level of expertise and technology. Some companies even reverse direction, going from wise old localization sage to naïve infant as did Brad Pitt in the titl...

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...

Has the productivity of translators increased? Are career translators willing to post-edit machine translation output? Do they feel translation memories are sufficiently maintained? Are interpreters increasingly working remotely? Do linguists struggle with the number of vendor portals they have to log into? Are they likely to still be working in the profession five years from now?