Our Analysts' Insights

When friends and family hear what I’m working on these days, they typically ask: 1) won’t AI eliminate the need for translators and interpreters? and 2) won’t that eradication of the language sector do away with your job, too? The first question has taken the air out of the room in a lot of discussions over the last couple of years, especially given media coverage of humans in the loop that amounts to job descriptions that are little more than janitors cleaning up after bad MT outcomes.

While the goal for project management has long been full automation (“lights-out”), few organizations achieve it – not for translation nor interpreting services, neither at LSPs nor enterprises. Many teams have tools and processes in place to enable touch-free workflows, yet our research demonstrates a huge gap between “we have the system” and “we are using it.” While some organizations use lights-out processes for a vast amount of translation work – even most of their projects – genera...

Are you an expert project manager or interpreting scheduler? We need to talk! Project management – the shepherding of work from request to delivery, ensuring all the correct criteria are met, and in a timely manner – is not specific to the localization industry. In every area of work, from construction to international shipping, a project manager (PM) plays a leading role in satisfying customers, whether in daily personal contact or acting behind the scenes. These individuals – and the projec...

Companies all over the world are experimenting with breaking away from the traditional five-day work week to move to a more condensed or shortened one. My husband, an HR manager, has implemented 4x10 (4 days of 10 hours each) at his company for over two years now and I have had countless discussions with him on whether language service providers could switch to such a model. I originally had some reservations because LSPs need to be there for their clients at a minimum of five days a week – if ...

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.

In the first episode of an iconic sci-fi television series, a NASA test pilot was seriously injured in the crash of an experimental aircraft. The emergency medical team replaced three of his four limbs and one eye with nuclear-powered bionic implants, while a voiceover intoned, “We can rebuild him. We have the technology. We can make him better than he was. Better...stronger...faster." The resulting six-million-dollar-man worked as a secret agent, using his now superhuman powers to battle ...

In 2017, CSA Research introduced the concept of “augmented translation,” a technology-centric approach to amplifying the capabilities of human translators. Although companies such as Lilt, SDL, and Unbabel had already implemented portions of this model – namely the tight integration of human and machine capabilities, we predicted that more technologies would be folded in over time to create an AI-driven platform for linguists that would make them far more efficient and capable by offloading r...

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...

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...

It’s almost impossible to open one’s email or social media feed without skimming one or more messages entreating the reader to “follow the path to digital transformation” or to “recognize how artificial intelligence (AI) is changing digital transformation.” But how much attention should LSPs pay to what’s going on in this area? CSA Research recently launched an initiative to find out. In the meantime, here’s what our preliminary results show.