Our Analysts' Insights

For language service providers, finding the right way to stand out in a crowded marketplace is a lot like navigating the breakfast cereal aisle at your local grocery store. This aisle is a tapestry of colors, characters, flavors, and promises, each box vying for your attention and attempting to persuade you of its unique benefits. Whether it’s the health-conscious options that emphasize whole grains and fiber, the kid-friendly boxes with cartoon mascot illustrations, or the luxury granolas that...

Every CEO knows they must develop three core elements to business management: a mission statement that explains the fundamental purpose of their company, a vision statement that plots a destination for their business, and core values that represent the fundamental beliefs and principles defining the company and its culture. Executive teams will commonly invest significant time developing these elements, even hiring consultants or advisors to help them. Yet, once satisfied with the results, these...

May is Mental Health Awareness Month. During this period, organizations seek to raise awareness of trauma and the impact it can have on physical, emotional, and mental well-being. What does it mean for the language services industry? What are the negative effects of working as an interpreter, translator, project manager, or in any other role in the industry? With this blog, we hope to shed some light on the work-induced mental trauma that language professionals may experience and strategies to h...

Companies all over the world are experimenting with breaking away from the traditional five-day work week to move to a more condensed or shortened one. My husband, an HR manager, has implemented 4x10 (4 days of 10 hours each) at his company for over two years now and I have had countless discussions with him on whether language service providers could switch to such a model. I originally had some reservations because LSPs need to be there for their clients at a minimum of five days a week – if ...

When competing with large language service providers, small and mid-sized LSPs can feel at a disadvantage when it comes to securing or safeguarding revenue. However, it does not have to be that way. It is not always about size when presenting your company as a successful match for buyers’ needs.

“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.

All too often, LSP salespeople don’t know how to counter the “you’re too expensive” argument, viewing it as the end of the road. But it doesn’t have to be.

Ask people working in the localization industry if the move to working from home affected them, and many will tell you that they were already “remote” – set up to work from home, due to the nature of their jobs. Language service provider have no physical products to ship, no warehouses to store goods, and no fleets of trucks or ships to coordinate for deliveries. Coordinating language services in this day and age is essentially an ebusiness. On the surface, the switch to working from home app...

The COVID-19 pandemic has challenged many LSPs’ abilities to grow. In a January 2021 survey, we found that 44% of them experienced a setback in 2020. But that’s not to say the market overall performed that poorly. On average, despite the losses of many, we calculated a 3% growth from 2019 to 2020 for this group of providers, which has traditionally outpaced the industry as a whole. And they are overall optimistic about 2021, as their sales goal amounts to an average planned increase of 18% ove...

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.