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Leadership Reflections on

Successes, Challenges, And What’s Ahead

Twice a year, CSA Research asks its LSP CEO Council members a focused and timely question. Their responses provide strategic insight into how language industry leaders assess performance, navigate challenges, and adjust priorities in a changing market.

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Read CEO Perspectives by Year and Topic

CEO commentary appears in order of company revenue size.

Manuel Herranz

CEO Pangeanic

Change is not for the faint-hearted, and change to business models, to workflows, to markets, to clients’ expectations and deliveries is what has been happening in the language industry - and Pangeanic - at an exciting rate. I don't like to talk about "the localization industry" or how "better it was positioned than most" but about the Language Industry and an inherent, horizontal market need. Mo...

2022

Mary Kazamias

CEO TRSB

Historically, content has been created by humans, localized by humans, and then digested by humans. For several decades, various technologies have facilitated the localization process, such as Computer Assisted Translation Tools, Translation Management Systems, as well as Machine Translation. However, in the last few years, new technologies on the market have disrupted not only the process itself...

2025 2024

Henrique Verissimo

CEO Zaum Langs

It is an honor for us to be once more in this ranking! We think our growth over the years is deeply connected to our initial purposes. From day one, a little more than 10 years ago, we had “training” as a core concept. This would include not only our internal team but also our network of vendors. The reason for that is we kept listening and adapting to the client's needs. They want us to be specia...

2022

Silke Zschweigert

Group CEO JONCKERS

It’s a fascinating and fast-moving time in our industry as we all explore and apply the capabilities of AI. The pressure to offer solutions that help companies do more for less has always been there, but the speed of change has gone up exponentially. This means that leaders at LSPs need to define and apply new approaches faster than before. Generally, the opportunity could be huge for us to build...

2024

Craig Harrison

CEO Conversis

Over the past year, the conversation around AI has quickly moved from curiosity to necessity across the language services industry. Many clients are exploring new ways to gain efficiencies and manage costs, which has naturally brought price pressure along with higher expectations around speed and scalability. At Conversis, we work with clients whose content demands specialist expertise across a wi...

2025

Denis Khamin

Co-owner Allcorrect Group

Our continuous growth over the last two years is the result of many years of work striving to improve corporate management. We started planning our company growth not just in terms of money and clients but also our people. At the same time, it all comes down to our valued clients. Since 2008, we have been implementing the lean management principles, and in 2020, we were able to create and use val...

2022

Bob Willans

CEO XTM

The word ‘innovation’ is getting a little overused in our industry and risks being a victim of semantic satiation, as it seems everyone is innovating something. At XTM, we’ve placed a premium on getting innovation and it’s timing right. We made early bets on TMS technology as we foresaw a few critical things: it had to be a complete end-to-end solution (which would become a platform), it had to be...

2022

John Fennelly

President, CEO Lionbridge

Lionbridge is a crowd company, so it shouldn’t come as a complete surprise that we’ve performed very well while operating in a virtual state. Going through a crisis is like creating a real-time stress test for your leadership team. You learn a lot about your team and your company. We had a feeling that leaving our offices would be much easier than returning! And we were right. We were ahead of the...

2022 2021 2020

Richard Glasson

CEO Hogarth Worldwide

As the world continues to navigate the far-reaching consequences of COVID-19, the priority is clearly to keep everyone safe, but we also need to continue to work and keep our businesses moving forward. From a creative content production perspective, we have seen an absolute focus on the today, with clients exploring new media channels, breathing life into existing assets and harnessing new technol...

2022 2021 2020

Marina Ilari

CEO Terra Translations

The greatest challenge we have faced since starting this company is growing it without sacrificing its culture. Terra Translations started as a mother and daughter endeavor, and our first few hires were within our circle of friends and family. This created a very special atmosphere within our team that we were able to maintain throughout the years and many more hires. Our company culture is based...

2025 2024 2022

Lucie Séguin

CEO Translation Bureau of Canada

COVID-19 had wide-ranging impacts on all organizations and most of all on their employees. The Government of Canada’s Translation Bureau was no exception: employees were suddenly faced with an unprecedented work situation, requiring to go on-site to maintain critical services while applying stringent health and safety measures or isolated at home with an overloaded remote network – not to mention...

2022 2021

Chris Menier

CEO Transifex

Forces shaping 2024 are anchored in three pillars: human-quality content creation, localization hubs, and measured impact. Human-quality content creation is crucial for globalizing at scale. Generative AI will enable personalized marketing strategies in local languages so companies can meet their customers where they are. TMSs and other language technology will be leveraged to create content that...

2025 2024

Stephan Lins

CEO MediaLocate

The language services industry is experiencing an undeniable rebirth. AI has opened the floodgates to language automation, and Language Service Providers (LSPs) and tool developers alike are feverishly pushing new horizons of what’s possible. The relentless pace of AI innovation, marked by rapid development of AI tools, product announcements, and extraordinary performance claims, is dizzying. Keep...

2025 2024

Konstantin Iosseliani

President, CEO Janus Worldwide

The translation industry was better prepared for this crisis than many other industries since remote working has been a long-standing practice for most LSPs. Nevertheless, we had to rework our business continuity plan and pay special attention to issues like cash flow and cost optimization. And because work for some of our teams around the world decreased, remained the same for others, and even gr...

2026 2025 2024 2023 2022 2021 2020

Juan Julián León

Co-Founder, CEO SeproTec EX SeproTec Multilingual Solutions

Caution, Adaptability and Innovation: As a Spanish citizen formed by my country's own history with pandemics, I have been wired to move with great caution as we experience this current trial. As an advocate for safety and as the head of an international enterprise, I view it as our duty to keep our employees protected while also providing innovative and quality services. Our priority has always be...

2023 2022 2021 2020

Olivier Marcheteau

CEO Acolad

New realities, new strategies. 2022 is once again showing the need for flexibility and confidence in response to critical and changing global circumstances. Virtually every organization is dealing with some mix of economic or business-specific challenges: rising inflation, supply-chain strain, energy costs, globalization, talent retention, or even the future of traditional workplaces. Despite the...

2022

Maximilian Lachnit

CEO Transline

The first half of 2024 was definitely characterized by an increased demand for the usage of machine translation and AI-influenced workflows combined with consulting services on the topic of AI. In addition, macroeconomic circumstances mean that companies have to economize on many projects and are therefore looking for ways to reduce costs. The continuing demand for digital processes, improvements...

2025 2024

Katja Schabert

CEO Transline

We are not yet done changing. The need to work from home changed not only the way of communication within our company but also with our customers. Up to a few weeks ago local and global business operations relied heavily on personal meetings, trade fairs, and events. But where traveling seemed necessary before, in many situations online meetings are now sufficient in many situations. Completely ch...

2023 2022 2021 2020

Kåre Lindahl

CEO Venga

Albert Einstein stated, “In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.” These words are certainly true today as we start to venture back to the NEW normal. Venga is fortunate to have a culture of working remotely combined with a robust and secure online infrastructure. When Covid-19 hit, we could start looking at the future very quickly. Here is what we focused on: Community: staff, clients, partn...

2021 2020

Mark Evenepoel

President, Board member Acolad EX Amplexor

Looking back at 2020, we were happy to have had our technology and processes in place to deal with extreme security or safety issues and instantly enable fully remote operations. The accelerated digital transformation came with many business opportunities, which allowed us to stay on course or even exceed expectations within many of the industries we serve. We are also proud we managed to pull off...

2026 2024 2023 2022 2021

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Showing 1 to 20 of 67 results

Successes, Challenges, And What’s Ahead

Read CEO Perspectives by Year and Topic

Manuel Herranz

Mary Kazamias

Henrique Verissimo

Silke Zschweigert

Craig Harrison

Denis Khamin

Bob Willans

John Fennelly

Richard Glasson

Marina Ilari

Lucie Séguin

Chris Menier

Stephan Lins

Konstantin Iosseliani

Juan Julián León

Olivier Marcheteau

Maximilian Lachnit

Katja Schabert

Kåre Lindahl

Mark Evenepoel

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