Our Analysts' Insights

Language constantly evolves. We all know words from our childhood that today’s kids don’t understand (or laugh at), and teens constantly introduce us to new slang and acronyms. Marketers develop new concepts; community and culture drive changes in what is current, acceptable, or outdated. People working in localization know that this translates to human effort in finding the right way to convey the same concept in a multitude of languages.

At last – though with restrictions – international travel is starting up again. Whether for business, vacations, or long-awaited reunions with family and friends, people are beginning to cross borders and visit locations outside their home country. This of course means these travelers will spend money on transport, lodging, food, entertainment, and other shopping – if they can! Apps and purchase processes can work well for the local resident but still fail dramatically for international visit...

Delivering an integrated customer experience wherever an organization operates means more than translating your website, setting up a few servers outside your borders, and offering extended hours for customer care. It involves reviewing an array of business requirements that begin with the age-old IT mandates of reliability, availability, scalability, and security – or RAS2 for short. Enter localization teams, LSPs, and translation management vendors. Their experience pulling and pushing conten...

If you’ve ever heard someone tell you that, “The translation is bad!” and yet nobody is able to articulate why, you’re not alone. You have checked the quality that your linguists deliver – all is good. You and your LSPs set up a localization quality assessment (LQA) process and rigorously measure spelling errors, typos, and other errors: you can confidently state that the translation is, in fact, highly accurate. Yet the in-country teams still report poor-quality translation. This is a comm...

To understand the effect of the pandemic on the language industry, CSA Research began quarterly surveys of the CEOs of LSPs in March 2020 and expanded regular primary research to LSPs in China, freelancers, langtech vendors, and enterprises. Here we present datapoints to close out 2020 and identify what to expect in 2021.

During a time of uncertainty, hearing from peers and leaders helps and we have been sharing feedback from multiple constituents to help organizations focus on what really matters as well as find opportunities in the middle of a crisis and get ready for the re-entry phase and growth in the post Covid-19 economy. In this final post of 2020, we share analysts’ thoughts on the toughest year to date, and what to carry with us into 2021.

As we look back at the annus horribilis that was 2020, what are some things we can learn and take forward to improve 2021 and come back stronger than ever? In this post, I summarize some of the lessons CSA Research has learned from our conversations with professionals working in enterprise localization departments, at LSPs, or as freelance linguists.

Enterprises that used to hold in-person events for customers, employees, partners, or investors have tried to move efficiently to a virtual format over the last few months. Despite the challenges, many organizations succeeded at the conversion, but a disproportionate number were only able to offer prerecorded content with offline subtitling. Companies are now pausing to reflect on the first wave of events and investigate the entire array of alternatives available for supporting these multilingua...

For those who have worked within the localization industry for a while, the concept of “writing for translation” might feel old school, already-learned-and-forgotten-about: something that technical authors take for granted. Just like developers always think about internationalization of software code and processes, right? (We know how well that works!) That’s why a refresher course in how to write content in a way that optimizes the global customer experience is a really good idea – especial...

Consumers prefer accessing information, making online purchases, and getting technical support in their own language. That’s not a big surprise, but data from our third edition of “Can’t Read, Won’t Buy—B2C”, combined with our other research on website language support, highlights the fact that many consumers don’t have access to sites in their language, that localized websites often have major flaws, and that many must rely on English to get things they want or need.