Our Analysts' Insights

By now, most language professionals have seen that claims that neural machine translation (NMT) is delivering results as good – or almost as good – as human translation. If these claims – which have been repeated in the mainstream tech press without much examination – are accurate, it is only a matter of time before human translators will be out of work.

The "yes" vote on Brexit and the election of Donald Trump surprised many media outlets, pollsters, analysts, and political experts. Those that predicted a different result emerged as the biggest losers of public confidence in their forecasting ability. Meanwhile, the U.S. election added the memes of fake news, fauxtos, and foreign interference to the discourse. Commentators across the political spectrum now debate a "post-fact" or "post-truth" world that would be fa...

Users of interpreting services don’t like gambling with unproven talent. It’s a lot easier – and a lot less risky – to rely on resources that you already trust rather than try out new ones. This aversion to risk makes it really hard for recent graduates of interpreting programs to break into the profession. Recognizing its own challenges with newbies, one language service provider is trying a new approach with it “Cadence Cares Fellowship.”

To address even half the online opportunity, it already takes four languages. To capture 98% of the online audience – and 99% of the entire world online wallet – requires 64 languages. However, in 2017, building multilingual websites to serve those markets will take a company only so far. Why? Visitors and customers expect more than a simple website. What they want is what they’re getting from the most innovative brands in the world – immersive experiences and ongoing interactions both with ...

While linguists may not be as popular as doctors or lawyers on the big screen, they make a regular appearance in a supporting role. Occasionally, they even land the lead role with big-name stars like Amy Adams in the recently-released “The Arrival” or Nicole Kidman in “The Interpreter.”

Are you wasting sales and marketing resources going after the wrong leads? Many language service providers (LSPs) aren’t sure which prospects to pursue, so they market to a broad spectrum of buyers, with little in common, and which cross company sizes, industries, geographies, and countless other attributes. The more LSPs struggle to grow in a predictable fashion, the more they talk about hiring additional salespeople, redesigning incentive plans, and going after any prospect – good or bad.

SYSTRAN announced the beta test of its Pure Neural Machine Translation (PNMT) software with 30 language pairs (18 with English, 12 with French), a dozen corporate clients in diverse industries, and online public access to its software. This beta program caps a year of industry and media attention to deep learning, artificial intelligence, and more recently neural MT (NMT). SYSTRAN announced its PNMT product in August with this October beta. Google revealed its single-pair NMT solution in late Se...

Does your site support Chinese, German, French, Spanish, or other major languages? What about Albanian, Arabic, Azeri, and Mongolian? Could you be missing out on opportunities for increased sales because you are targeting the wrong languages? Probably, but you aren’t alone.

There’s been lots of hand-wringing among marketers and brands about how to reach the next generation of consumers and employees, as if they are so different than those who came before. At last week’s Brand2Global conference in Silicon Valley, many of the most interesting talks were by Millennial thought leaders, weighing-in on this very topic. Representatives of major brands such as Nim de Swardt of Bacardi and Nigel Nikitovich of Dark Rift Entertainment came with bon mots like “from me to w...

Recent technological advances have led to an explosion of interpreting delivery platform (IDP) options that enable remote, video, telephone, and even machine interpretation. In theory, first-movers should occupy a prominent position in the market. However, many products haven’t moved much past the starting line due to poor go-to-market strategies, limited marketing budgets, and insufficient experience in selling to desirable verticals and audiences. Through in-depth research and 45 interviews a...