Our Analysts' Insights

In January 2018, CSA Research reported on the business outlook on 2017 and early 2018 based on a survey of 85 CEOs of the language service providers in our list of top 100 providers. In August and September 2018, we surveyed respondents on their mid-year results and their predictions for the rest of the year.

Offering a website, mobile app, or enterprise application in another language can require a laborious and costly development project with specialized translation technology, workflows, and personnel. Some major brands have taken a simpler approach, instead relying on a translation proxy server that works alongside their websites or apps. In this model, the proxy intercepts requests to the application, determines the language, and then turns to a database of stored translations or to machine t...

What’s pushing even slower-moving companies to jump on the digital transformation bandwagon? There are several reasons, but one of the biggest is that their competition at the level of digital customer experience now includes competitors outside of their own industries in the form of Amazon, Facebook, their local equivalents, and similar companies. Prospects and customers perceive firms to be lagging behind if they don’t measure up in terms of one-click payment, voice-activation, chatbots, and...

Intelligent or smart content has been a dream since the late 1990s. The concept refers to text, data, and audio-visual materials that contains machine-interpretable information describing its structure, giving some guidance as to its meaning, and defining its relationship to other content. Various technologies have tried to deliver on the promise of content that machines can act upon. Today some approaches are beginning to bear fruit, but significant hurdles remain in the base technologies and t...

Language is the one of the most personal components of the customer journey. Ideally, you would be able to use a single variant of any language for any country where it's spoken, but the reality is that sociocultural and political facts require supporting the right dialect of a language in your target markets. The starting point for most planners is, "Which language do they use in a given country?"

Only months after rising up to squelch a product being developed by Google for the U.S. military, employees of the tech giant are protesting again, this time after reports surfaced about a Google Search product being readied for the China market. The new Android phone app would automatically filter out results from blocked websites, return blank results for blacklisted search terms, and meet government surveillance requirements. According to The Intercept’s reporting, CEO Sundar Pichai asked hi...

Apple recently made headlines as it became the first U.S. firm to achieve a market value of a trillion dollars. Why didn’t companies such as Microsoft – once Apple’s fiercest competitor – beat it to the punch? Apple’s resounding success is in part due to its long-standing commitment to excellent internationalization that has allowed it to meet local market expectations since the early 1980’s.

Last month the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) announced its new Internationalization Initiative as a way to boost its long-running activity in this area. CSA Research spoke with Richard Ishida, who leads these efforts, to learn more about its plans and what they mean for the language industry. He described an ambitious effort to identify – and resolve – technological barriers that keep the web from living up to the world wide part of its name. However, the success of this effort will rely on ...

In Ernest Hemingway's novel The Sun Also Rises, Bill asks, "How did you go bankrupt?" Mike answers, "Gradually and then suddenly." Both buyers and suppliers of language services and technology have had a similar experience with the evolution of artificial intelligence. After decades of science-fiction depictions of AI and fits and stops in the actual science, the last few years have seen a rapid move toward incorporating artificial intelligence in a broad range of process...

In 2017, CSA Research conducted the first large-scale, pro-bono, survey-based research on gender issues in language services. With over 2,000 respondents, the findings provided objective and reliable information about how women and men involved in the industry perceive these issues. On the eve of the #metoo movement, the report kicked off industry-wide discussion on the role gender plays. It provided detailed – and surprising – results for North America and Europe.