In this week’s SlatorPod, we are joined by Mark Lawyer, General Manager of Trados, the key technology product line of UK-based Super Agency RWS.

Trados is a translation technology adopted by hundreds of thousands of freelance translators, LSPs, and enterprise customers — the three main market segments of the localization supply chain.

Mark begins with his journey to joining the localization industry straight out of university, with roles spanning business development, solution architecture, and global customer experience management. He shares some of Trados’ milestones starting with its creation in 1984.

Mark talks about the flexibility of the Trados platform and why they offer cloud capabilities with the desktop app to provide a hybrid working environment for translators. He discusses how user feedback allows them to release hundreds of best-in-class features each year.

Mark highlights how user experience and accessibility are critical to Trados, where there are multiple configurations available to users based on their role. For example, a post-editor will have the Track Changes feature and fuzzy-match repair available to them. With more than 270,000 linguists using the platform, Mark shares how they strike the right balance between functionality and features without overwhelming those users.

Mark shares his views on Google’s Translation Hub and how it can bring awareness to the industry, which he sees as still being very fragmented. The pod rounds off with Trados’ roadmap for 2023, plans to invest money in security, AI-driven features, the modern user experience, continuous localization, and building out that ecosystem.