Our Analysts' Insights

What do Barsoomian, Esperanto, Klingon, Ku, Na’vi, and Tenctonese have in common? They’re all languages created for sci-fi films, except for Esperanto, whose developer, Ludwig Zamenhof, sought to create a universal means of communication. They all represent a human desire to explore or undo the effects of Babel. Although they seem to be a thoroughly modern project, they are actually part of a scholarly project that has been underway since at least the Middle Ages. This research spawned a whole...

Pundits predict that AI and its neural machine translation (NMT) spawn will obsolete an entire industry and put hundreds of thousands of people out of work. That could happen – but only if we postulate a future where the language sector stands by and does nothing. Inaction will result in the wholesale annihilation of many providers, but CSA Research has observed enough tech-enabled LSPs where it’s not business as usual to be more optimistic.

Did you know that companies have access to subtitling in real-time or that riders can access in-app translation to enable their ride-hailing-service drivers to find them on the left corner of the intersection, rather than on the right? If not, check out what Amazon Web Services presented at the most recent LocWorld in Lisbon, Portugal. Platform providers such as Alibaba, Amazon, Baidu, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft continue pouring money and people-hours into harnessing artificial intelligence...

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...

CSA Research’s 15th annual survey of the language services and technology market demonstrates that new capabilities to analyze and manipulate big data in local markets will continue to push advances and new applications within AI and the machine learning that it drives. Content will continue to morph as it becomes more conversation-centric to support more and more speech-enabled products and services.

CEOs in every kind of company often observe that they have the loneliest job. Shared experiences with people who work for them are limited because of internal politics and because they must deal with issues that no one else in their organizations face. CEOs periodically meet with their boards of directors or management, but those sessions often reinforce the singular position that the CEO occupies. In esoteric sectors like language services, CEOs must manage an array of process, technology, and ...

Artificial intelligence has become the new buzzword in the language services industry, with countless technology vendors and LSPs proclaiming that their AI efforts will revolutionize the field. Providers are scrambling to keep up with the fast pace of development to understand how it will affect their business and how to remain relevant in a world full of automation. Buyers are trying to figure out what it means for both their own processes and when they purchase services from vendors. Humans at...

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...

I have an interest in 19th-century sporting newspapers and would like to have them in digital form. Unfortunately, these newspapers used almost microscopic fonts, the type was often heavily worn, and their paper has degraded over time. Despite these problems, humans usually don’t have any trouble reading them, but optical character recognition (OCR) is another matter.

In addition to weighty issues related to privacy, data security, and transparency, global content is what brought Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg face-to-face with 44 members of the U.S. Senate this week. At the heart of the discussion was how the company plans to police harmful material while at the same time avoiding censorship.