Arle Lommel, PhD

Leads research strategy, methodology, and execution for an independent research organization with Global 1,000 and language-services clients, focused on globalization, localization, language technology, multilingual customer experience, and the business impact of language.

• Leads a geographically distributed research organization of 3–4 analysts and 4–5 research assistants, guiding professional development, setting priorities, assigning and scoping projects, approving approaches, conducting performance evaluations, contributing to hiring decisions, and maintaining final accountability for research quality and publication readiness.
• Sets and evolves the research agenda as technological and market conditions change, guiding the organization increasingly toward computational, AI-enabled, and just-in-time research methods rather than relying solely on conventional periodic analyst reports.
• Designs and prototypes analytical systems using fit-for-purpose computational methods – including deterministic algorithms, individual-level simulation, probabilistic modeling, conventional data processing, and GenAI/LLMs – selecting techniques according to the problem rather than treating AI as a universal solution.
• Developed a pre-deployment GenAI strategic-intelligence system that combines company-specific information with CSA Research’s proprietary research corpus to generate customized analysis and strategic guidance, moving research from generic publication toward decision support tailored to an individual organization’s circumstances.

Key research-based products

Global Revenue Forecaster

Integrates language, demographic, and economic data to quantify the incremental B2C opportunity associated with adding languages and identify high-value targets for localization investment.

Global CX Calculator

Simulates individual customer journeys using behavioral data from 9,908 B2C respondents across 33 markets and 2,800 B2B respondents across 28 markets to quantify how localization gaps affect purchase and repeat-purchase outcomes.

Probabilistic model of the global language-services market

Uses Bayesian reasoning and Monte Carlo simulation to estimate industry size, structure, and economic flows from sparse and systematically biased survey evidence. The model incorporates geography, company scale, service mix, and external constraints to produce defensible probability distributions and explicit uncertainty rather than unjustified point estimates.

Leads the independent nonprofit organization responsible for advancing MQM and rigorous approaches to translation-quality evaluation.

• Helped transition the MQM Council from an informal technical committee into a nonprofit, providing a durable institutional basis for governance, education, standards work, and continued development of MQM.
• Guides the continued development and stewardship of Multidimensional Quality Metrics (MQM), enabling organizations to define fit-for-purpose quality requirements, evaluate human and machine translation consistently, diagnose systematic failure modes, validate quality systems, and manage language-related risk more effectively.
• Served as a core contributor to an Association for Machine Translation in the Americas (AMTA) working group developing evaluation methods for Automated Quality Estimation (AQE), addressing the emerging problem of how organizations can determine whether automated predictions of translation quality are themselves valid and reliable.

Serves as technical contact for the effort to formalize an MQM-based translation-quality standard through ASTM International, currently approved as a standard and pending publication.

• Leads an international, geographically distributed, consensus-driven technical community of approximately 10–15 experts across North America, Europe, Africa, and South America, coordinating specialists from industry, academia, government, and standards organizations without hierarchical authority.
• Builds technical consensus across stakeholders with differing organizational, commercial, methodological, and implementation priorities, converting a widely used industry framework into a maintainable formal standard.

• Led applied research projects at the intersection of machine translation, translation quality, multilingual information, interoperability, and language-technology standards that involved participants from around the world.
• Conceived and co-developed early versions of MQM in the EU-funded QTLaunchpad project as a systematic framework for defining and evaluating translation quality across human and machine translation, giving researchers and organizations a common methodology for specifying requirements, identifying errors, and comparing output – moving translation-quality assessment away from undifferentiated notions of “good” and “bad” output toward explicit, task-dependent definitions of what constitutes acceptable performance.
• Contributed to European Union research programs addressing translation quality, multilingual linked data, interoperable language technologies, and the machine-readable representation of multilingual information.
• Co-edited the W3C Internationalization Tag Set (ITS) 2.0 Recommendation, creating standardized mechanisms for representing localization and language-processing information in web content and enabling interoperable multilingual workflows across tools and organizations.
• Helped organize and lead the Multilingual Web Workshop series, bringing together leading researchers, standards specialists, and developers to address technical barriers to a genuinely multilingual web and develop shared methods, technologies, and standards.

Held progressively responsible roles spanning research publication, industry standards, technical coordination, and localization-technology strategy.

• Chaired the OSCAR standards committee, coordinating technical stakeholders across competing companies and technology ecosystems to develop shared specifications and interoperable solutions.
• Led development of and contributed to core localization standards: Translation Memory eXchange (TMX), Segmentation Rules eXchange (SRX), TermBase eXchange (TBX), and Globalization Metrics eXchange – Volume (GMX-V).
• Led content selection and outreach for 15+ international LISA Forum conferences, averaging 200+ delegates from around the world. Served as the host for the events, led on-site proceedings and networking, and facilitated discussion of critical standards and business issues affecting globalization executives.
• Led international standards and publication activities addressing localization technology, terminology, multilingual content, workflow interoperability, and language resources.
• Shepherded transition of TBX to adoption as ISO 30042:2008, establishing the international standard for exchanging structured terminology data across tools and organizations and reducing dependence on proprietary terminology formats.
• Led LISA’s liaison for international language-technology standardization with the U.S. Technical Advisory Group (TAG) to ISO Technical Committee 37 and contributed to its work.
• Worked with localization technology vendors, enterprises, language-service providers, researchers, and standards organizations to identify common technical problems and turn them into shared specifications rather than organization-specific workarounds.
• Ran Executive Roundtable sessions that brought together leaders of enterprises and language-services companies to derive shared solutions to industry challenges.