Our Analysts' Insights

In January, language service providers are often busy planning the year ahead. This year, we observed that many are putting special emphasis on improving their client care function. We’ve been busy holding online workshops with LSPs to help them refine their approach. Here’s an overview of the core concepts we typically discuss during these sessions.

Four noteworthy announcements over the last two weeks provide several object lessons in how the language services and technology industry works and is evolving: Smartling and Lokalise both received substantial infusions of venture capital (VC), while Summa Linguae Technologies and Unbabel each revealed an acquisition (M&A). Although each announcement was individually interesting, in aggregate they are instructive. In this post we focus on global content management and full-service LSPs, tying th...

We begin this week’s blog with a call to language services and technology providers to take the survey for our 17th annual Global Market Study – before April 15th. We trimmed the survey so it’s easier and quicker to complete. But you might ask why do we expend so much effort on this survey and ask you to pitch in to provide your company’s data? Read on to find out more about this annual project.

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...

2020 started out with great financial momentum. The MSCI All Country World Index of large-, mid-, and small-cap stocks across 23 developed and 26 developing markets had risen almost 24% over 2018, an ounce of gold was worth 18% more than 12 months prior, and private equity groups had accumulated US$1.5 trillion in funds to invest. Businesses were primed for a stellar 2020, but by March, COVID-19 pushed most of the world to shelter in place. Companies shut down, employees were furloughed, and lif...

On September 21st Paris-based Acolad Group announced that it would acquire Luxembourg-based Amplexor. While the firms did not disclose the terms, their deal combines the 12th- (Amplexor) and 13th-ranked (Acolad Group) companies on CSA Research’s list of 100 largest language service providers. Following the acquisition, Acolad nouveau will have a combined US$307 million based on 2019 revenue (after subtracting about US$41 million in Amplexor revenue that will not be included in the sale). The me...

Growth is an imperative for LSPs, yet 40% of providers struggle to profitably grow their businesses. The situation is bound to get more complex as CSA Research expects a decrease in market growth rates due to a variety of factors including the overall economic slowdown, the impact of Brexit on business between the United Kingdom and its trading partners, the fallout from trade wars, and the impact of technology such as neural machine translation. But even with all that, the growth rates we forec...

Great content drives experience and commerce. Enterprises constantly ratchet up the amount they need, while global companies demand ever more in additional languages to offer effective customer experiences in other markets. That means language service providers have to localize more content faster than ever before. Human-centric processes can’t keep pace, so the push is on for more automation. But CSA Research finds that adoption rates for the language technologies that could help are lagging a...

CSA Research’s 15th annual survey of the language services and technology market demonstrates that new capabilities to analyze and manipulate big data in local markets will continue to push advances and new applications within AI and the machine learning that it drives. Content will continue to morph as it becomes more conversation-centric to support more and more speech-enabled products and services.

A major translation event few language professionals heard of occurred in Xi’an, China on April 27. Sponsored by Xi’an International Studies University (XISU)’s Collaborative Innovation Center for Silk Road Language Services, the 2019 Annual Meeting of Postgraduate Degrees in Translation conference for educators in masters of translation and interpreting (MTI) programs in China brought together approximately 600 professors and localization professionals for a day of discussion about education...