Firehead

Microsoft’s Seven Pillars of AI Readiness – but where’s the wisdom?

CJ — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 11:07:49 +0000

Jerry Bartlett of Content Pro Tech Ltd delivers another guest post for the Firehead blog. This time, he’s looking into the role wisdom plays for AI readiness. There’s a well-trodden quote from the systems analysis world that offers: “Information is not knowledge, knowledge is not wisdom…” I thought of this after reading Content Wrangler Scott Abel’s Substack post about Microsoft’s…

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Unlocking New Career Paths: How Content Reuse and Single-Sourcing Skills Empower Technical Communicators

CJ — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Post 13 in our series on localization skills for modern technical communicators Somewhere in your documentation set, the same safety warning appears in forty-seven places. It was written once, then copied for the next product variant, then copied again when a new market opened up. Nobody remembers who wrote the original. Nobody is entirely sure the forty-seven copies still say the same thing.

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Terminology Management in the Real World: A Conversation with Jerry Bartlett

CJ — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 16:10:39 +0000

Termbases and style guides can be designed with total rigor and still fail to change a single habit in the field. To understand why, and what separates the rollouts that take hold from the ones that quietly stall, we sat down with Jerry Bartlett of Content Pro Tech Ltd, Firehead’s partner for The Content Forge consulting offer. Jerry has spent years in the trenches of terminology programs…

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Introducing The Content Forge 🔥

CJ — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 15:45:32 +0000

AI doesn’t fix broken content. It amplifies it. That’s the hard lesson organizations are learning right now. They invest in AI tools, integrate them into their workflows, and then watch them produce output that’s inconsistent, unreliable, or just plain wrong. The problem isn’t the AI. It’s the content going in. Unstructured. Poorly governed. Siloed across teams, systems, and languages.

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Unlocking New Career Paths: How Terminology Governance Skills Empower Technical Communicators

CJ — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 10:09:55 +0000

Post 4 in our series on terminology skills for modern technical communicators Every terminology initiative starts with the same problem and ends with one of two outcomes. In the first, the termbase is built, integrated into the workflow, and used. Translation costs fall. Consistency improves. The technical communicator who led the work can point to measurable results and a seat at a table…

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Unlocking New Career Paths: How Termbase Skills Empower Technical Communicators

CJ — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 13:33:22 +0000

Post 9 in our series on localization skills for modern technical communicators Your translation vendor sends you a quality report. The same product feature appears under six different labels across your documentation. The translators resolved the inconsistency independently, producing six different translations. The cost is more than the retranslation bill: it’s the next release…

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Unlocking New Career Paths: How Terminology Management Skills Empower Technical Communicators

CJ — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 15:37:35 +0000

Post 8 in our series on localization skills for modern technical communicators Does your organization have terminology management, or does it have a glossary? The answer matters more than it might seem. A glossary is a document. It lives somewhere: a shared drive, a wiki page, a PDF attached to the style guide. It lists words with definitions. People consult it when they remember it…

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What’s Next in Our Localization Strand: A Deep Dive into Terminology Management

CJ — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 11:23:28 +0000

A note from the series editors If you’ve been following the localization strand from the beginning, you’ve now covered a significant stretch of territory. You understand the difference between translation and localization, why your writing habits shape translation costs, how controlled language disciplines your source, how files move through engineering pipelines…

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Unlocking New Career Paths: How Translation Memory Skills Empower Technical Communicators

CJ — Thu, 28 May 2026 13:42:14 +0000

Post 7 in our series on localization skills for modern technical communicators Every time a translator in Tokyo, Sao Paulo, or Warsaw opens a file you wrote, something happens before they read a single word. The translation memory system checks whether it has seen that sentence before. If it has, the system offers the previous translation as a suggestion. If it has seen something similar…

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Unlocking New Career Paths: How File Formats and Localization Engineering Skills Empower Technical Communicators

CJ — Wed, 20 May 2026 09:26:00 +0000

You’ve written the content. You’ve applied controlled language, maintained your terminology, and structured your sentences for translation efficiency. Now comes the moment that many technical communicators never see: the content leaves your authoring environment and enters the localization pipeline. What happens next depends almost entirely on file formats and localization engineering.

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