Our Analysts' Insights

Whether for the right reasons, or the wrong ones, voters in the United Kingdom rocked the world's business and political status quo on June 23 when they voted to pull out of the European Union. At CSA Research, we waited for reaction from the global companies we work with to gauge the impact. We think there may be a silver lining for organizations considering expansion into the E.U. following the Brexiteer win. The same applies to European and Asian companies making the choice for where to r...

Machine translation (MT) has caught the public eye once again. The Wall Street Journal recently predicted that “the language barrier is about to fall” – within 10 years. We might note that this is one barrier that has been “about to fall” for far longer than the actual Berlin Wall stayed up, and that it’s been an awfully long 10 years since the first such claims were made in the 1950s.

The interpreting field is a hotbed of creativity due to technological advances and the desire from large-scale buyers to spend their budgets wisely. In this blog post, we explore two new solutions for medical patients with limited language proficiency (LLP), which can substitute for on-site or remote interpreters in select healthcare settings – patient registration and office visits.

The digital universe grows by a massive amount of structured and unstructured content every day. This flood of data comes in a broad range of standardized and proprietary formats and languages for uncounted application needs around the planet. Much of this data never leaves the silo for which it was created, but business analysts and information scientists have long researched how it might be useful in other applications, markets, and languages. For example, tagging the topics or categories of d...

In our recent research on quoting practices at LSPs, we found two recurring themes: 1) the increasing price pressure caused by clients driving the race to the bottom (see our recent blog post on that topic); and 2) the drastic reduction in timelines to conduct projects. In this post, we’ll explore this second issue.

The interpreting technology front has been particularly active lately. After LanguageLine announced the release of a new video remote interpreting solution, thebigword launched a new interpreting management product called IMS Direct. Announced today, the software-as-a-service solution (SaaS) is for buy-side organizations and addresses the need for automation in interpreter assignments.

In their search for the best possible deal, prospects and clients put tremendous pressure on language service providers to reduce their prices. In our recent series of interviews on quoting, we inquired how LSPs decide when to cave in and offer a big discount – or simply walk away from the deal. It’s no easy decision. Not all buyer demands should result in discounts. But holding the line on pricing is a tough gamble because clients or prospects may actually try a new provider. They will come b...

Selecting the right translation management technology can mean the difference between growth and stagnation for language service providers. But choosing a TMS to manage their myriad business, process, and linguistic functions requires a lot of work. LSPs have to evaluate both the features and functionality of shortlisted products and assess the software developers’ ability to sustain and improve their position in the market.

CSA Research just launched the survey for our twelfth annual review of the language services and technology market. Click here to take the survey – or paste https://goo.gl/UkPcFw into your browser.

Language service providers come in all shapes and sizes — no single element defines the best LSP. Buyers often ask CSA Research how to identify the most appropriate vendors for their needs and what they can do to assist suppliers that seek to meet evolving requirements and expectations.