Our Analysts' Insights

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 market for outsourced language services and supporting technology grew 7.99% to US$46.52 billion from $43.08 between 2017 and 2018. When CSA Research analyzed 531 responses to our annual global market survey, we computed that 64% of respondents experienced an increase in revenue. However, all providers don’t share the same experience.

In the past two years, most organizations interacting with CSA Research have undertaken some form of global digital transformation – whether it’s reimagining the entire company from top to bottom, or a narrow focus on re-vamping particular phases of the customer journey. One of our findings is the lack of attention paid to post-sales support content as an essential component for brand building, customer retention, and up-selling potential in international markets. We find firms guilty of this ...

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...

Many readers of this blog are gearing up to work on strategy development and budget forecasting for next year – whether they work in the B2C, B2B, or non-profit sectors. To support you in that endeavor, below we provide three datapoints that will resonate with financial, marketing, and engineering executives as you present your ROI proposal for language investment.

In the 1980s, the American rock band Van Halen became famous for including a requirement in contracts with concert venues that they provide a bowl of M&Ms candy with all of the brown ones removed. At the time, this was widely seen as an example of how out of touch rock musicians were with reality, but it actually served a purpose. The band’s manager explained that if venues took care of the small details, he could be reasonably certain that they had also addressed more important things. However...

In January 2018, CSA Research reported on the business outlook on 2017 and early 2018 based on a survey of 85 CEOs of the language service providers in our list of top 100 providers. In August and September 2018, we surveyed respondents on their mid-year results and their predictions for the rest of the year.

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...

What’s pushing even slower-moving companies to jump on the digital transformation bandwagon? There are several reasons, but one of the biggest is that their competition at the level of digital customer experience now includes competitors outside of their own industries in the form of Amazon, Facebook, their local equivalents, and similar companies. Prospects and customers perceive firms to be lagging behind if they don’t measure up in terms of one-click payment, voice-activation, chatbots, and...

Intelligent or smart content has been a dream since the late 1990s. The concept refers to text, data, and audio-visual materials that contains machine-interpretable information describing its structure, giving some guidance as to its meaning, and defining its relationship to other content. Various technologies have tried to deliver on the promise of content that machines can act upon. Today some approaches are beginning to bear fruit, but significant hurdles remain in the base technologies and t...