CSA Research

Market research and analysis help in ascertaining and understanding information about competitors such as their market network, customer focus, their identity and scale of operations. This assists in survival and certain issues, leaving behind the competition. Data-based market research and analysis permit discovery approaches that help in maximizing profits.

CSA Research Its focus is on assisting the client's benchmark, optimize and innovate industry best practices in translation, localization, interpreting, globalization and internationalization.

Unique Market Research Insights

Since 2002, CSA Research has provided independent, objective, and comprehensive primary market research focused exclusively on the global content and language services markets. Its unique insights help business and technology leaders to create value while profitably growing their global businesses across borders, languages, and cultures. The company has a dedicated and trusted team of expert analysts and data specialists who focus exclusively on globalization, localization, internationalization and global content.  The company earns the confidence of its clients because of how it gathers, manages, analyzes, and distributes aggregate data.

E-Commerce and Global Consultant

Started 20 years ago as Common Sense Advisory, CSA Research initially focused on e-commerce consulting, where there was a big opportunity to help companies that moving to the web. That original name focused onthe goal of bringing “common sense” to what was then a very chaotic, shoot-from-the-hip kind of market.

As the internet market grew and became more international, the company became more specialized and, over time, it shifted the focus to its true passion:language and global commerce. In the course of the transition, the company found that the guiding principles of e-commerce consulting – including rigor, reliability, and return on investment –had a particular resonance with companies reaching out from their home markets to global ones.

Science of Mainstream IT and Business Market Research

When CSA Research started, it believed that the language industry could benefit from the same kind of market research that is available in so many other markets. Dr. Donald A. DePalma, Founder and Chief Research Officer, essentially brought the science of mainstream IT and business market research to the language sector. This ties to the practice of companies and governments using market research to understand the landscape set strategies and invest smartly to flow over to the area of global content as organizations reach out to a growing number of countries and people who communicate in other languages.

Machine-Enabled but Human-Involved Translation

The company continually tracks market trends and looks ahead to reveal what they mean. For example, when there was an intersection of machine translation and new computer-aided translation tools a few years ago, the company predicted the emergence of “augmented translation,” a data-driven way to translate more words more quickly, while keeping humans in the processing loop for nuance and context. The company’s term for this new mode of machine translation (MT)-enabled but human-involved translation has been picked up by the industry and used by language services companies, global enterprises, academics, and other market research firms.

Views on Big Data, Cloud Computing, and AI

The impact of these three technologies –Big Data, the cloud, and AI – are largely visible in increasing the ability of the language industry to translate the enormous volumes of content that businesses and governments want to have in other languages. Developers began using Big Data about 15 years ago, first using it for statistical machine translation (SMT) and then to train software to perform repetitive tasks that machines could execute more quickly and efficiently – and at a lower cost – than humans could. The ubiquity of the cloud and the access to powerful computing services it offered sped up MT even more.

Together, these three technologies have enabled innovation and fostered widespread use of artificial intelligence for training MT, further automating operations, and enabling natural language processing (NLP) functions such as extracting relationships, summarizing content, and anonymizing personal data, all across many of the world’s 100+ economically significant languages. They offer greater business value by making it easier to understand the massive volumes of content in their original languages as well as making it easier and more cost-effective to translate this material into other languages.

Looking ahead, software developers and AI specialists continue their advances in neural machine translation (NMT). Even if press claims that the technology has become as good as human translators are premature, it is clear that the results are much more useful than they were even a few years ago. Whether integrated with human linguists in augmented translation workflows or providing unedited translation on-demand, MT is everywhere. Results that seemed like science fiction twenty years ago are now ubiquitous and, as our research shows, they deliver real benefit to people for whom the alternative to MT is not a human translation but zero translation.

Innovative Research and Data Products

The language services industry will continue to be influenced by three major elements: increased globalization, the growth of online commerce,and the boom of online and offline content volume. The company focuses on all these areas in its research and data products. It provides language service providers (LSPs) and global enterprises with innovative research and data products that prove localization ROI, improve global operations on- and offline, and increase business in new markets.

CSA Research recently launched a new data product, the Localization Effectiveness Analyzer, powered by LocHub. This product helps global organizations improve the global online customer experience. The Localization Intelligence Analyzer connects LocHub’s observed and crawled data to the firm’s historical repository of data and insights. It helps companies make strategic decisions based on data instead of anecdotal evidence and gut feel.

Remarkable Awards and Achievements

Over the past 18 months, CSA Research has conducted surveys with thousands of participants, run many virtual councils and open webinars, and had hundreds of one-on-one discussions and briefings. The company has been humbled by the language sector’s empathy and perseverance through a very tough year. Large and small organizations stepped up in support of one another; competitors became collaborators;colleagues became friends.

During a time of uncertainty, the company has been sharing feedback from multiple constituents to help organizations focus on what matters as well as find opportunities in the middle of a crisis to get ready for the re-entry phase and growth in the post-Covid-19 economy. It was recently recognized for its dedication to the industry and its pro bono research services with a 2021 Think Global award.

Future Goals and Vision

People worldwide prefer consuming information in their own language. Meeting this expectation – and sometimes legal requirements to do so – fuels an indispensable multi-billion-dollar global industry that continues to grow on the back of global digital transformation. Language service providers and technology developers support those global experiences in other languages, delivering outsourcing capabilities for essential translation, interpreting, and localization to businesses, governments, NGOs and individuals around the world. The language services industry will continue to evolve and grow to meet the burgeoning demands for content tailored to individuals in the format and language that is most useful to them when they need it.

To deliver on that promise of on-demand translation and interpreting, language service providers will use an assortment of content management and translation tools leveraging the ubiquity of the cloud, connectivity, ever-faster computers, and artificial intelligence. Big Data in the form of analytics for business optimizations, plus training data for AI machine learning, will be an essential enabler for helping them scale to meet the language needs of an entire planet.

Management: Dr. Donald A. DePalma, Founder and Chief Research Officer, CSA Research

URL: https://csa-research.com/