Our Analysts' Insights

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...

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.

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...

Artificial intelligence has become the new buzzword in the language services industry, with countless technology vendors and LSPs proclaiming that their AI efforts will revolutionize the field. Providers are scrambling to keep up with the fast pace of development to understand how it will affect their business and how to remain relevant in a world full of automation. Buyers are trying to figure out what it means for both their own processes and when they purchase services from vendors. Humans at...

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...

In recent months, we have increasingly heard from enterprise localization groups that their executives are pushing for the adoption of neural machine translation (NMT), driven largely by a very successful public relations campaign from Google that has touted the very real improvements in NMT over the past two years. Unfortunately, some business leaders have seen media coverage and concluded that they no longer need language professionals and can simply replace translators with the “magic” of AI.

Microsoft decided to up its public relations game around machine translation. A recent blog post trumpeted that the company’s neural machine translation (NMT) system has reached parity with human translators for Chinese-English news text.

Multilingual knowledge bases (MLKBs) are an essential component for many organizations in today’s global economy. Many companies still try to adapt their legacy word-based repository into searchable documents online. However, this is not enough to meet the agile-ized, mobile-ized, and personalized requirements of their customers and prospects. These forces, along with current strides in AI, are blowing up traditional monolingual models for digital product content delivery, which will in turn af...

As companies come to terms with the central role that content plays in the customer journey – from building awareness through purchase and onto customer care – their digital marketing teams and localization groups are tasked with content creation, adaptation, and rollout at the global level.

Based on press coverage of recent advances in machine translation (MT), it may seem as if all the major developments happen in the United States. However, since the 1980s, much of the basic research in this area has either happened in European projects or been headed by alumni of groups in the region such as the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), University of Aachen, and the University of Edinburgh.