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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.
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Vincent Nguyen

CEO Ubiqus
The switch went off suddenly mid-March, we need to turn it on as soon as possible. This crisis revealed a lot of facts, real and virtual. Some companies were ready to work remotely right away. Did it work? yes, because we have the whole infrastructure to do so in a normal situation. Is this the way we really need to work ? Not really. I read a post of someone picturing his 12-year old daughter wor...
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2020
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Shirley Li

CEO Glodom Language Solutions
Over the years, we have worked diligently to assist our clients in achieving their goals. Despite a dynamic language services market and ever-changing business environment, we remain true to our original aspiration and continue to step up our efforts to grow into a leading language services provider in the fields of ICT, intellectual property, finance, and medicine. To achieve this, we follow a b...
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2022
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Alexander Ulichnowski

CEO Argos Multilingual
In two words: exciting times. As an industry, we invested heavily over the past few decades to produce ever-increasing amounts of content in more languages. Faster. Cheaper. But the existing language technologies, processes, and to a large extent, our mindsets, have been reaching the limits of what’s possible. AI is changing the game. It’s a massive opportunity. It is a great technology that will...
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2026 2025 2024
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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...
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2021 2020
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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...
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2025
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David Parry-Jones

Chief Revenue Officer DeepL
I don't believe we're in a "Post-Localization Era." If anything, I think it's more important than ever to be cognizant of language and cultural differences when doing business around the world. Recent events have shown us the importance of clear communication. Take, for example, supply chain disruptions, with people in headquarters often speaking a different language from those in the manufacturin...
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2024
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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...
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2024
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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...
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2022
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Maarten Fleurke

CEO Ingenuiti
One of the benefits of living in areas that are used to natural disasters such as hurricanes, typhoons, and blizzards, is that you become flexible when it comes to changes in your work habits. Consequently, when COVID hit, we had our business interruption plans in place and did not skip a beat. After a few months of working remotely at our various global locations, we slowly resumed working out of...
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2021
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Pierrick Mathieu

Co-Founder, COO Powerling
GenAI suddenly appeared in the world in March 2023, as a universal solution for our customers but also as a new anxiety in their ecosystem. “How can we avoid being disrupted and face, potentially, much more agile competitors?” Of course, GenAI will play an increasingly crucial role in global content, accelerating, improving efficiency and reducing turnaround times. But don’t forget that automate...
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2026 2025 2024
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Scott W. Klein

President, CEO LanguageLine Solutions
They say, “the same heat that melts butter hardens steel.” We feel like we’ve been tested and emerged stronger than ever. The stakes of our work have never been higher than the past two months. We’ve had to rise to the occasion while working at a distance from one another. This could have brought us to our knees. In our case, we are communicating better than we ever have, our bonds are stronger, a...
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2024 2023 2022 2021 2020
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François Chartrand

President, CEO Versacom
Whether or not we are in a Post-Localization Era can be the subject of some debate, as a vast number of organizations are still trying to figure out how to trust AI, let alone harness and leverage it. This does not negate the fact that AI will inevitably drive the transition from language-centric tasks to global content creation: the possibility to quickly create multilingual content—albeit generi...
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2024
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Ian El-Mokadem

CEO RWS Holdings
The past 12 months have been one of the most exciting years in our long history. After acquiring SDL in November 2020, our priority over the past year has been to effectively integrate both companies. A tough task during a pandemic. Despite government lockdowns, and being forced to work from home, everyone has worked tirelessly to progress this complex project – whilst continuing to deliver a firs...
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2025 2024 2022
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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...
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2022 2021
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Nic McMahon

CEO United Language Group
As the expression goes “may you live in interesting times!” Business as usual has never seemed so far from “usual”. It feels as if the industry is at a constantly evolving point of flux during the first half of 2022. AI and NMT are radically altering the operational paradigm. Private equity is bringing in CEOs and investors from outside of the industry who in turn bring new ideas for products, ser...
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2022
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Karl Eastwood

CEO Global Lingo
2021 felt like a bounce-back year if solely based on economic performance. So, from a business perspective, we were very happy with what we achieved. However, the impact the pandemic is having on people and the disruption to working practices meant that a return to ‘normality’ never seemed to arrive. Being a global business made dealing with the pandemic even more of a challenge. The constantly a...
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2024 2023 2022
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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...
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2025 2024
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Micheal Kriz

CEO, Founder Acclaro
It’s an exciting moment in the evolution of our industry and Acclaro. Pre-pandemic, the localization industry was better positioned than most with hybrid distributed global teams. The last couple of years completed the transformation. There is no return to business-as-usual on the horizon. Only a shift to a future version of business with each company defining what that means for them. One of the...
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2022
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Christian Schwendy

Managing Director Gemino
The framework conditions were particularly challenging for us over the last two-and-a-half years (pandemic, supply crisis, etc.). We are grateful and proud to have achieved marked organic growth despite these circumstances. For example, we won two big tenders that we were invited to thanks to recommendations by longstanding clients. We also registered significant growth from existing clients. Gene...
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2022
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Cedric Sigoire

CEO DEMAN Übersetzungen
We have not returned to “business as usual” as we expected to at the beginning of 2022. Many people are still getting COVID and inflation is creating other more significant issues than we had during the pandemic! The economic situation in Europe remains split in two: while industrial clients, especially in Germany, are impacted by rising gas prices, other sectors (such as exhibitions and tourism)...
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2022

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