Each issue of The 'Roost brings a curated mix of what matters: practical insights from the field, fresh thinking on where content and language operations are headed, product updates you can actually use, and a bit of fun along the way.
The Blackbird Roost | September 2026 | Issue #8
The Blackbird Roost | Issue #8 | September 2026👋 Hi, this is Bruno and Team Blackbird with a subscriber-only issue of The Blackbird Roost Newsletter. Apparently, no one read our August issue. Or, more accurately, our usual 75% open rate dipped slightly while most of Europe conducted its annual experiment in pretending email did not exist. If you were one of the vacationers, welcome back. You can catch up on everything you missed here: Read the August issue. Blacklake enters the future of translation memoryNimdzi Insights has published its annual Language Technology Radar, including a particularly interesting new section on "The Future of Translation Memory." We were delighted to see Blacklake featured as a tangible example of where that future is heading. Nimdzi's Yulia Akhulkova writes: Traditional segment-based TMs are now evolving into dynamic, context-aware linguistic and content memories that can be queried semantically, enriched with metadata, and used directly by AI systems. ​She goes on to describe Blacklake as a system deliberately moving beyond the traditional TM concept. It is a living linguistic data layer that keeps content connected to its source systems, preserves context and metadata, tracks change, and applies governance rules to determine not just what we know, but what should actually be reused. The future of content memory is not simply about finding the closest fuzzy match. It is about understanding what content is, where it came from, how it changed, whether it was approved, and under what circumstances it should be used again. Increasingly, that same governed context will support much more than translation, including summarization, repurposing, personalization, AI generation, and other content transformations. Product UpdatesThe Blackbird product team has been busy. Here are four recent additions worth knowing about. 1. Sneak peek: the Blackbird MCP serverBlackbird's coming MCP server will give AI assistants and agents governed, headless access to your Birds, Flights, and Blacklake context. They will be able to discover and trigger Birds, query multilingual content knowledge, and monitor what happens next, all through a standard protocol. Early access is coming later this month, with general availability planned just ahead of LocWorld. Sneak peek: If you're interested in early access, just let us know! 2. Salsify has landedSalsify has joined the Blackbird Marketplace. The new app expands our PIM and ecommerce coverage alongside Akeneo, Shopify, and Magento (a.k.a. Adobe Commerce). ​Explore the Salsify app → 3. OpenAI Web SearchMost AI workflows are still a little too static. They rely on what the model already knows, even when the task calls for current information. We have changed that by adding web search to the chat actions in our OpenAI app. Birds can now retrieve up-to-date information from the web and use it inside larger, governed workflows. ​Learn more → 4. North Small Translate lands in Blackbird Cohere has launched North Small Translate, a high-performance, open-weight machine translation model designed for multilingual reach, high throughput, and data sovereignty. It is now available to all Blackbird users through our Cohere app. North Small Translate supports more than 50 languages and performs particularly strongly across European, Southeast Asian, and East Asian languages. In Cohere's WMT26 evaluation, it achieved an average score of 83.6 across all languages, ahead of DeepL, Google Translate, and Mistral Large 3. North Small Translate is also part of a broader Canadian AI and language technology story that Blackbird is increasingly connected to. ELL joins the flockWe are delighted to welcome Tim Renders and the Entre Les Lignes team to the Blackbird partner ecosystem. Great localization workflows need both strong technology and great people. We are looking forward to working together and creating value for our mutual customers. Blackbird migrates in two directions at onceBlackbird has become so global that, on 10 September, we attended two events simultaneously on two continents. Bruno and Mathijs joined TAUS in Amsterdam for our first fall workshop on quality evaluation, AI orchestration and content governance. Meanwhile, six time zones to the west, Dan and Michael represented Blackbird at ServiceNow’s World Forum in New York City. Apparently, even our event schedule is now distributed. Next stop: Vancouver 🇨🇦The Roost keeps moving west. Our next workshop with TAUS lands in Vancouver on 14 October, where we’ll continue the conversation around quality evaluation, AI orchestration and content governance. If you’ll be in town, come join us and explore what modern, governed multilingual content operations look like in practice. Register here → Then, LocWorldAfter the TAUS workshop, we're sticking around in Vancouver for a jam-packed LocWorld. Blackbird was a semi-finalist this year in The Process Innovation Challenge, Dan will take the stage with Erik Vogt and Ari Karampour for a session on A/B testing, and, of course, we'll be exhibiting. Come find us on stage, at our booth, or wherever we manage to squeeze in a coffee in between. Blackbird’s Vancouver ResidencyThe Red Hot Chili Peppers made Blood Sugar Sex Magik while living together in a mansion. The Rolling Stones made Exile on Main St. in a rented villa. Our leadership team will be sharing an entire house in the Arbutus Ridge neighbourhood in Vancouver's West Side throughout TAUS, LocWorld and the long weekend in between. What masterpiece will emerge? An album seems unlikely. A new category for multilingual content operations, however… Come, and visit us! Video of the Month: Figma Variables in BlackbirdFigma Variables provide a powerful foundation for managing multilingual design systems. In this month's video, Mathijs explores how Variables and Modes work in Figma, how Modes can represent multiple languages, how to organize multilingual content, and how to prepare designs for localization automation. OverheardPeter Tatischev of Disney, after SlatorCon San Francisco: "I think platforms like Blackbird or n8n do more for enterprise loc team efficiency right now than another TMS or another LLM pipeline." Peter is onto something. Thanks for being part of the Blackbird community. Let’s keep flying faster together. |
The Blackbird Roost
Each issue of The 'Roost brings a curated mix of what matters: practical insights from the field, fresh thinking on where content and language operations are headed, product updates you can actually use, and a bit of fun along the way.
The Blackbird Roost | Issue #9 | October 2026 👋 Hi Reader, this is Bruno and Team Blackbird with a subscriber-only issue of The Blackbird Roost Newsletter. Last month, we announced our Vancouver residency. This month, the calendar has caught up with us. Two workshops, two conferences, panels, demos and a three-minute pitch. Apparently, sharing a house was the easy part. Before we pack, though, there's a release I've been waiting a long time to tell you about. Blacklake can finally edit Native...
The Blackbird Roost | Issue #7 | August 2026 👋 Hi, this is Brunó and Team Blackbird with a subscriber-only issue of The Blackbird Roost Newsletter. Six issues in and we're still here, which in newsletter years makes us practically an institution. If you're reading this from Europe, congratulations on being one of the twelve people still checking email in August. Everyone else will presumably discover this newsletter sometime in September, tanned and confused about why their inbox has four...
The Blackbird Roost | Issue #6 | July 2026 👋 Hi, this is Brunó and Team Blackbird with a subscriber-only issue of The Blackbird Roost Newsletter. Four issues in and we're still here, which in newsletter years makes us practically an institution. Catch up on Issue #1, Issue #2, Issue #3, Issue #4 (a 75% open rate, which either means you love us or means four of you have very generous email habits), and our special post-LocWorld edition . Let's get into it. One year, zero regrets (mostly) "No...