LSP: An new industry standard term

It feels good to see that an acronym that you coined has caught on. In the early days of Common Sense Advisory, when Don and I were writing Beggars at the Globalization Banquet, we didn't want to use the common practice of separating the world in buyers and vendors, especially because very often vendors act as buyers, too (in the case of MLV buying from SLVs).

We didn't like the other acronym (GILT) that was coming up at that time and which we avoid to use. We believed that GILT (pronounced "guilt", for globalization, internationalization, localization, translation) had a negative connotation, especially when associated with other words like GILT Provider, GILT Vendor (weird, isn't it?)

So we looked at what all companies had in common and came up with Language Service Providers (LSP), which is the term that we use in our research. And now we are proud to see that the industry has adopted our terminology and incorporated it into products, like SDL, with its LSP Solutions, and Idiom, with its WorldServer LSP Advantage Program™.