I’m sure everyone reading this is no stranger to the often completely unintelligible error messages that can be generated when software goes wrong! You can even find in the most voted for ideas in the RWS Community ideas platform that is related to just that, “Get those cryptic error messages more human“. As computers have become more and more complicated and software is relying heavily on inbuilt technologies provided with the operating system, 3rd party libraries, and add-ons that use the APIs, it’s really no surprise that things can go wrong. But do the messages really have to be so complicated and meaningless for the average user? Why don’t developers make them easier to understand?
Continue reading “When error messages attack: using ChatGPT to make peace with your users!”
Localization engineers are the miracle workers behind the scenes of localization workflows, and without them many of the projects we see couldn’t happen. The skillsets they possess go far beyond the sort of things that most translators know how to do, and often require the ability to code. I’ve already 
As I’m getting lost in my own thoughts around just what to talk about next with regard to AI technologies and in particular ChatGPT… and as I’m pondering about the effect this is going to have on our industry I recalled a couple of questions around the use of XPath in the community. One of these questions was yesterday and it related to how to use XPath to extract one of the languages in a TMX file using the XML filetype in Trados Studio. Not a particularly tricky thing to do, and I imagined the user was just editing the content or maybe changing the language pair by translating one of the languages into something else, or something like that. But what struck me was 
Continuing the theme of how to make use of AI technologies to help with the more technical nature of localization I thought I could revisit 
With all the excitement and interest around 
This is a topic that probably occurred a lot more in the old days of Trados and Translators Workbench where it was relatively easy to corrupt a translation memory. In those days the translation memory consisted of five file types with the extensions .tmw, .mwf, .mtf, .mdf and .iix and when problems did occur it was probably related to the files that supported indexing and lookup speeds for example. The .tmw file itself that contained the translation units was less likely to be the source of the problem. So fixing it could often be achieved by creating a new translation memory with the same settings, and then simply replacing the .tmw in the new translation memory with the old one… finally reorganising. This didn’t always help, but if often did!
Back in 2015 I wrote an article called “
The most viewed article I have ever written by far was “
Growing a product range, buying new companies, being bought yourself, adopting new technology, reorganising etc… all of this creates significant change across an organisation that often feels as though you’re on a merry-go-round where things change as you go around until you’re back to where you started and then it all changes again. I can only imagine that feeling applies to customers and employees alike as each revolution strives to be better than the last, easier to navigate, meaningful in its purpose and full of the promise of success once properly implemented… and yet slightly confusing at the same time!