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Archive by tag: Machine translationReturn

Responsive Machine Translation: The Next Frontier for MT

CSA Research’s recent survey-based examinations of machine translation deployment at language service providers, enterprises, government agencies, and among freelancers revealed an ever-widening engagement with the technology. Although it didn’t surprise us, we also found widespread skepticism of claims that MT has reached human parity with numerous calls in open-ended survey comments for “truth in advertising.” Just as significantly, we saw widespread desire for MT to be more suitable for t...
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2020: A Year of Superlatives in the Language Industry

CSA Research recently released our list of the 100 largest LSPs and langtech providers, along with eight regional lists that add more than 80 firms. The rankings are based on our annual survey of more than 450 companies around the globe with revenue and business data supplied by the companies themselves and validated by their executives. Here’s a map of CSA Research’s 10 largest LSPs for 2021 – follow the lines to see the journeys of these companies over 17 years to their current positions. B...
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Building a Comprehensive View of Machine Translation’s Potential

It is no secret that machine translation (MT) has gone from a relatively niche solution to seeming ubiquity in just a few short years. A forthcoming report from CSA Research on MT use at language services providers shows a 51% increase in adoption since 2019, with over two-thirds of LSPs now using it openly. Similarly, cloud TMS developers reported that 2020 was the year when the majority of segments that they process involved MT. To help develop a comprehensive view of the technology’s role in...
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Making the Best of a Bad Year: Five Lessons for 2021

As we look back at the annus horribilis that was 2020, what are some things we can learn and take forward to improve 2021 and come back stronger than ever? In this post, I summarize some of the lessons CSA Research has learned from our conversations with professionals working in enterprise localization departments, at LSPs, or as freelance linguists.
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Where Is Your Translation Technology?

Long gone are the days when only the biggest enterprises or language service providers had their own translation management system (TMS) hidden away in a private datacenter. The cloud has made TMSes and machine translation (MT) accessible to all. Technology costs have gone from prohibitive for smaller LSPs to within reach for everyone, including newcomers to the industry. Some commercial solutions even have innovative pricing models that make the technology affordable – or even free – rather t...
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Microsoft Custom Translator: A Big Step Forward

In late 2015 most developers still treated Neural Machine Translation (NMT) as a future technology that would come someday, but by the middle of 2016 several developers had released functional neural systems that seemed to outperform even the best statistical MT (SMT) engines. Since that point, momentum has shifted decisively in favor of NMT because it delivered better fluency in its output and seemed to promise the end of incomprehensible MT output. Eventually, this rate of stellar progress slo...
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Augmented Translation: Are We There Yet?

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...
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The Linguist of the Future: Skills that Cannot Be Replaced by Automation

In recent conversations, many enterprises and language service providers have expressed concern about the long-term careers and livelihoods of linguists and of LSP intermediaries. A large high-tech enterprise relayed to us that machine translation (MT) is becoming the dominant source of its global content. Language service providers regularly mention their prices being driven ever lower by fierce competition. Long-time language industry workers worry about the Uberization of a profession that of...
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Writing for the World – Optimizing Your Global CX

For those who have worked within the localization industry for a while, the concept of “writing for translation” might feel old school, already-learned-and-forgotten-about: something that technical authors take for granted. Just like developers always think about internationalization of software code and processes, right? (We know how well that works!) That’s why a refresher course in how to write content in a way that optimizes the global customer experience is a really good idea – especial...
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Post-Sales Support Can Seriously Damage the Customer Experience

You buy a product or service once. What that means is that your journey from prospective buyer to customer can be a long and fraught passage. However, once you own it, the challenge changes to how to use it when you install it or something goes wrong. In our research on non-Anglophone markets, we stress-test post-sales support by putting ourselves in the shoes of people who don’t speak or read English very well but run into a problem. If a buyer in Bucharest is lucky, there may be documentation...
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