Our Analysts' Insights

Last week, the Washington Post published an article about Blake Lemoine’s claim that his employer Google’s LaMDA language model/chatbot system had achieved sentience and had a “soul.” Lemoine, an engineer in the company’s responsible AI group, based his assertion on a dialogue in which LaMDA expressed human-seeming sentiments and concepts. Google placed Lemoine on leave, thereby sparking renewed discussion about what machine sentience is and what it means. What can the experience of the lan...

“Digital transformation” has become an inescapable buzzword. The COVID-19 pandemic sped up the shift to everything digital – even for predominantly paper-based language service providers. However, what LSPs call digital transformation (DX) ranges from eliminating every scrap of paper in their business to reinventing their whole business model. As a result, providers are all on a different step in their journey.

For the last few months pundits across the political spectrum have written op-ed columns and long articles questioning whether geopolitical events such as war and polarized politics signal the end of globalization. This post considers those concerns of policymakers but contends that activities to address the growing complexity of a de-globalizing planet raises the bar for any organization operating in multiple countries – and that this reality will create new opportunities for anyone who can ma...

In the late 19th century my great-grandfather, Otto, smuggled the culture for Gruyère cheese from Switzerland to the United States. Thinking about him reminds me of the “Swiss Cheese Model,” an approach to accident prevention that focuses on putting up multiple barriers that should collectively prevent major mishaps even if one or more of them has a hole in it. A similar “Reverse Swiss Cheese Model” applies to international customer experience. To see how, imagine an English-centric company ...

To put it bluntly, your latest and greatest product feature or code fix may only be applicable for a minority of your customers. If your company’s international revenue is approaching or has already surpassed 50% – but customers outside of the home market cannot use all product functions – there’s a problem. The product that you work so hard to perfect can’t be considered world-class until the world beyond your primary market can gain 100% access to features that make sense for their user e...

Cold emailing is the equivalent of cold calling – the solicitation of a potential customer who had no prior interaction with a salesperson – and is simply handled by email. It means you reach out to a sales target without them having made the first move. And that’s why it amounts to shooting an arrow in the dark. Why? The prospect doesn’t know you. Your email may land in a spam filter or remain unread even if it was delivered. Cold emailing is a tough exercise. Sometimes your arrow will hit,...

In recent years, there’s been a lot of buzz around “headless” systems – whether for content creation and management or for the translation workflows that feed the global customer experience. The concept being that rather than having a traditional front- and back-end (publishing and creation), these systems allow content to be magically managed, extracted, repurposed, and delivered through a myriad of end points, from mobile apps to corporate websites integrated with a partner’s own custom p...

“Would you pay more for a localized product?” That’s been a core question in CSA Research’s long-running “Can’t Read, Won’t Buy” (CRWB) series of survey-driven reports. Since our first analysis in 2006 we’ve seen a strong preference for local language and localization, even if it costs the buyer more. That partiality for a user experience persisted in our 2020 survey for B2B buyers of technology products but was less of a factor for our B2C respondents whom we quizzed on more than 20 pu...

Last August when I delivered the opening keynote at the MT Summit on “responsive MT,” one trend that I identified was the emergence of MT as a platform-level service provided by creators of enterprise ecosystems. Although this move has just started, it will be one of the biggest drivers for growth of language services in the coming years as it creates an expectation of ubiquitous multilingualism across a wide variety of services.

CSA Research is well-known for its Localization Maturity Model™ (LMM) and Localization Maturity Assessments, based on 15 years of longitudinal data collection and analysis from observing organizational behavior around the translation and localization functions within global organizations. The LMM has enjoyed widespread usage and validation ever since its release as evidenced by its many references and adaptations throughout the localization industry. We have enhanced the original model based on...