Our Analysts' Insights

For the last 10 years, I have written hundreds of pages of research on interpreting in its various forms. I personally tested countless interpreting technologies, but I had never been lucky enough to have to rely on interpreting as a true user would in a situation when they don’t know the language at all. Recently, I had the unique opportunity to attend a conference where I relied entirely on interpreting to navigate presentations, discussions, and interactions. Despite some quick language-lear...

Do you work for a brand that addresses Spanish-speaking prospects and customers formally during some phases of their experience with your company, while informally during others? You’re not alone in mixing these styles of address – this is a common challenge for which CSA Research has verified data. But how do you decide which tone to adopt?

After we published our recent Q3 2024 update on market sizing for the language sector, which was also covered in a public webinar, this blog addresses some of the questions we have received from clients, prospects, and investors. This quarterly update for Q3 2024 is noteworthy because it includes our final annual market sizing numbers for 2023, which are based on a representative sample of LSPs and produced only after careful examination of vetted revenue data following the close of the year. Th...

In today’s interconnected world, a global enterprise’s success hinges on its ability to produce, refine, and deliver content across multiple languages and cultures. Imagine your content creation process as a sophisticated manufacturing production line, where various components from different departments – legal, logistics, marketing, product development, support, and training – come together to create a polished, market-ready product. In this Post-Localization Era, there's a new tool in ...

Partnering with localization teams to achieve internationalization compliance on time every time means working closely together – especially as your processes and theirs integrate (Gen)AI. Open an ongoing dialog with localization, testing, and design colleagues. They are sure to have other suggestions for how to close the gap between you and the multilingual products that grow out of original coding. And, if you let them, the localization team may even offer to generate your developer notes aut...

CSA Research has been running a survey about the procurement of language access, services, and technology. We are looking for input from supply chain managers across various vertical markets and global organizations. They can tell us something significant about language enablement processes at major consumers of these products and services. 

It Depends As your organization pivots toward integrating generative AI (GenAI) into more of its business processes, you may be wondering if it’s time to engage GenAI talent to join your staff. The answer depends on several factors.

In October 2023, we argued that the future of AI would be in “focused large language models” (FLLMs). These are purpose-built language models that target a specific industry, set of languages, or task and that are correspondingly smaller than the large language models (LLMs) being created by OpenAI, Google, Meta, and others. Those massive models – GPT-4o has over 175 billion parameters – are like Swiss Army knives: They are prepared to handle almost any task, from creating a haiku to drawing...

The topic of automation has taken the interpreting industry by storm. On the one hand, enthusiasts believe in artificial intelligence as a way to broaden language access at an affordable cost. On the other hand, skeptics worry about all the things that could go wrong in the implementation. But where does it all settle when it comes to organization-level implementations?

Back in the day when I first began working in localization, we didn’t have a translation management system (TMS) – they didn’t exist – and our LSP was refusing to use translation memory because it created “too much overhead” for the first venture into producing a customer care website in more than one language. Knowing that the advent of the internet was likely to produce masses of new content in – hopefully – all the languages in which the company operated, we took a huge risk. We found...