This year’s CSA Research Verified 100™ widened its scope to include global content solutions. The market is no longer sorting vendors by who translate fastest. It is sorting them by who can create the content, ship it in every language, and keep all of it current as products change. That is the work Hansem Global has been doing for 36 years.
What changed this year
Hansem Global placed 37th, up twelve positions from 49th last year.
The more interesting change is in the list itself. CSA Research expanded its survey from language service providers to language and global content solutions providers. Companies that only translate and companies that build the source content and take it to market in dozens of languages are now measured in the same market.
A shift the industry has felt for years now has a name.
What a GCSP actually is
CSA Research describes two kinds of suppliers. An LSP, or language service provider, takes finished source content and moves it into other languages. A GCSP, or global content solutions provider, goes further. It owns the enterprise’s global content and customer experience beyond transactional translation, and it typically brings its own development capacity and technology infrastructure.
The distinction becomes concrete the moment you look at what a manufacturer actually needs. Turning unstructured engineering input into technical documentation. Bringing that documentation into compliance with international standards. Localizing it into dozens of languages. Redoing all of it every time the product changes. Split that chain across separate vendors and quality and schedule start slipping together.
Why few companies are built this way
Globally, this space has long been divided into two camps.
- Translation-led companies. Many stand up a writing team when a client asks for one. Fewer manage to keep it alive after the project ends. Technical documentation is a different discipline from translation. Reading engineering intent, applying safety and information standards, and rebuilding it all around the user takes years to develop, and it cannot be assembled on a project deadline.
- Documentation-led companies. Most never build translation in house, because the two businesses need different people. Documentation is led by writers working in their own language. Translation is led by people who recruit, train, and manage linguists across every market, which calls for a globally fluent team. Very few organizations have grown both to full strength under one roof. When a client asks for multiple languages, the work goes back out to a vendor, and the team that wrote the source is no longer the team that carries it.
Either way, the client ends up doing the coordinating. And when something goes wrong, working out whose problem it is becomes part of the job.
Where Hansem Global is different
Hansem Global built both capabilities separately over decades and now runs them as one operation. It was not an easy path. The company started in manual development, and translation began cautiously, in response to client demand. Years of manual localization taught us what the translation business actually requires, and today marketing, web, eLearning, and AI training data are each handled by dedicated teams. Bringing the two sides to equal strength took a long time, which is also why the structure is hard to copy.
- We create documentation from nothing. Engineering data, drawings, specifications, and unstructured reference material become manuals, SOPs, training and eLearning content, and marketing collateral. No legacy manual to work from is not an obstacle.
- Global products are authored in English from the start. Writing in Korean first and then translating into dozens of languages widens the margin for error. Korean and Western languages differ sharply in sentence structure, and in a manual that difference reaches user safety. We work with client engineering teams in Korean and deliver in English.
- We localize what we write. Our translation services cover more than 100 languages, with more than 50 in continuous manual localization, including long-tail languages where qualified linguists are hard to source. Two decades of multilingual manual programs for global manufacturers have produced thousands of language manuals a year. The team that understands the source owns the translation.
- Translation and multilingual DTP happen in the same organization. With multilingual manuals, finishing the translation gets you halfway. Text expansion breaks page layouts, and right-to-left languages such as Arabic and Hebrew require the entire page direction and graphic placement to be mirrored. Providers working in a narrow language set hand this stage to an outside DTP shop, and that handoff is where quality slips. Our language teams carry out the work through print-ready files.
- Standards are applied during authoring, not after. IEC/IEEE 82079-1, ANSI Z535, ISO 3864 and ISO 7010 are applied in live projects. IEC/IEEE 82079-1 in particular serves as the basis for meeting instructions-for-use requirements in the European market. None of this can be retrofitted at the translation stage.
- We build our own technology. Hansem QA Suite is a set of more than 60 comparison and verification tools we developed for manual production and localization, each targeting error types specific to its stage of the process, and each adjustable to a client’s document types and production environment. Hansem CALM handles AI translation and language quality evaluation, and Hansem Media automates media production.
- Our quality system is certified where it counts. Hansem Global has held ISO 9001 certification scoped to the manual development process itself since 2011, which is rare anywhere in the world. ISO 17100, ISO 18587, and ISO 27001 are also in place.
More than 170 full-time specialists run this process across offices in Korea, the United States, and Vietnam. It is not a structure a freelancer network can reproduce.
What this means for your program
When the chain is connected, the way the work runs changes. Documentation and localization sit in the same organization, so the time spent briefing one vendor on what another vendor did disappears, and nothing falls through the handoff.
The difference compounds across a product line. Documents, content, data, records, and change history all live in one place. A new model inherits the history of the model before it. When a product is revised, only the delta is tracked and pushed into every language. The same holds when retail content or product UI is added to the scope, because the team already knows the product and does not need the background explained again.
Less elapsed time, less coordination overhead, and quality that holds steady rather than degrading at each handoff. That is what content-through-localization under one roof actually means.
Frequently asked questions
- Does a ranking like this help when selecting a documentation or translation partner? Treat it as one reference point. Only companies that participated in the survey and consented to publication are listed, so it is not a comprehensive ranking of the market. What it does tell you is that the submitted data went through a verification process, and that you can see whether a company appears year after year. Weigh it alongside industry-specific experience, language coverage, and a documented record of standards compliance.
- How is a GCSP different from an LSP? An LSP moves finished source content into other languages. A GCSP starts one step earlier, at content creation, and carries through multilingual deployment and revision management. The practical difference is how many vendors you manage and how much coordination lands on your team.
- Can a translation company handle technical writing as well? Sometimes. Technical documentation is a separate discipline that requires interpreting engineering information and applying international standards, so it is worth confirming how long the organization has been building that capability.
- Can we translate only and handle layout in house? For Latin-script languages, often yes. Once right-to-left languages or languages with difficult font support enter the mix, in-house layout tends to introduce errors. Keeping translation and layout in one organization reduces the rework loop.
What does 37th mean for clients
This started as a ranking story, so let us close there. CSA Research widening its scope to global content solutions reflects a change in what the market wants from a partner. Buyers used to compare rate cards and turnaround. They are now looking at the whole capability, from creating content to shipping it globally to keeping it current.
Hansem Global’s 37th place was measured on that basis. It reflects data submitted by participating companies and verified before publication, and it is twelve positions up from 49th last year.
Read the number this way. Hansem Global has worked in this manner for years, and an outside party has now confirmed the scale of it. Can we stay with the same partner as our products and markets multiply? When you are evaluating partners, this is one answer to that question.
Hansem Global will continue to expand its GCSP capabilities across IT and mobile, automotive and automotive electronics, medical devices, next-generation robotics and smart logistics, and industrial infrastructure and heavy equipment.
Our thanks to the clients and partners who made this possible. Manual development and multilingual localization project examples are available in the Hansem Global resource library.
The CSA Research Verified 100™ covers companies that participated in the survey and consented to publication, and it does not label individual companies as LSPs or GCSPs.
Hansem Global is a global content solutions provider headquartered in Korea, delivering manual and technical documentation development, training and eLearning content, and translation and localization in more than 100 languages.