Our Analysts' Insights

Would you encourage a colleague, a friend, or your children to work in a profession that is extremely damaging to their mental health? No, I didn’t think so. However, that’s exactly what we’re doing when hiring people to moderate extremely high volumes of (multilingual) web and social media content, hour after hour, day after day. Being a content moderator (sometimes called a “process executive”) has been cited as “the worst job in technology,” whether you’re contracted at arm’s length ...

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 our last piece on this topic, we examined some of the technology challenges that stymy enterprises as they try to build conversation agents, such as chatbots, for multilingual audiences. Many developers express a pessimistic outlook about their ability to deliver them in multiple languages. One of the largest developers stated that it assigned the likelihood of success for these projects at less than 30%. In this installment, we discuss some of the business and conceptual difficulties that en...

Chatbots, machine-authored text, and automated information retrieval and summarization are increasingly important to global businesses seeking to interact more efficiently with customers and meet their needs. Recent developments in this area have been spectacular and AI-driven intelligent agents (chatbots and virtual digital assistants, such as Siri, Cortana, and Alexa) are among the most visible success cases for machine-generated content. Enterprises look to these applications as ways to reduc...

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...

Localization industry veterans may recall when the OSCAR standards group in the now-defunct Localization Industry Standards Association introduced TermBase eXchange (TBX) way back in 2002, based on earlier work from 1999. Released in the early days of XML, it promised to be a major step forward for making terminological data useful. After it was adopted as an international standard (ISO 30042) in 2008, it seemed that it had reached maturity and a firm place as a star among language industry stan...

What’s pushing even slower-moving companies to jump on the digital transformation bandwagon? There are several reasons, but one of the biggest is that their competition at the level of digital customer experience now includes competitors outside of their own industries in the form of Amazon, Facebook, their local equivalents, and similar companies. Prospects and customers perceive firms to be lagging behind if they don’t measure up in terms of one-click payment, voice-activation, chatbots, and...

Intelligent or smart content has been a dream since the late 1990s. The concept refers to text, data, and audio-visual materials that contains machine-interpretable information describing its structure, giving some guidance as to its meaning, and defining its relationship to other content. Various technologies have tried to deliver on the promise of content that machines can act upon. Today some approaches are beginning to bear fruit, but significant hurdles remain in the base technologies and t...

User-generated content (UGC) has garnered a lot of attention due to the challenges it poses for localization, such as an abundance of spelling errors, the extent to which its meaning depends on context, a lack of consistency, and time sensitivity. But even as enterprises and language service providers (LSPs) struggle to deal with it, another type of generated content has been quietly swelling into a looming tsunami: machine-generated content (MGC). Today, increasing quantities of content appear ...

It’s almost impossible to open one’s email or social media feed without skimming one or more messages entreating the reader to “follow the path to digital transformation” or to “recognize how artificial intelligence (AI) is changing digital transformation.” But how much attention should LSPs pay to what’s going on in this area? CSA Research recently launched an initiative to find out. In the meantime, here’s what our preliminary results show.