Our Analysts' Insights

In the first episode of an iconic sci-fi television series, a NASA test pilot was seriously injured in the crash of an experimental aircraft. The emergency medical team replaced three of his four limbs and one eye with nuclear-powered bionic implants, while a voiceover intoned, “We can rebuild him. We have the technology. We can make him better than he was. Better...stronger...faster." The resulting six-million-dollar-man worked as a secret agent, using his now superhuman powers to battle ...

In 2017, CSA Research introduced the concept of “augmented translation,” a technology-centric approach to amplifying the capabilities of human translators. Although companies such as Lilt, SDL, and Unbabel had already implemented portions of this model – namely the tight integration of human and machine capabilities, we predicted that more technologies would be folded in over time to create an AI-driven platform for linguists that would make them far more efficient and capable by offloading r...

What do Barsoomian, Esperanto, Klingon, Ku, Na’vi, and Tenctonese have in common? They’re all languages created for sci-fi films, except for Esperanto, whose developer, Ludwig Zamenhof, sought to create a universal means of communication. They all represent a human desire to explore or undo the effects of Babel. Although they seem to be a thoroughly modern project, they are actually part of a scholarly project that has been underway since at least the Middle Ages. This research spawned a whole...

In the last year, CSA Research has been covering a new paradigm for translator productivity, one we call “augmented translation.” The term comes from “augmented reality”: applications that overlay images of the world with relevant information.

Language services today stand on the cusp of a disruptive transformation that will redefine how professional linguists work. This shift will come from the availability of ubiquitous artificial intelligence (AI) that extends their reach and capability and makes them far more efficient than they could otherwise be.

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...