Breaking news: circular wheels reinvented

Preserving file formats is not a novelty feature in 2026. It’s something you only notice when it breaks.

Yet Lara Translate (Yet Another AI Translator) by Translated, an Italian LSP, proudly announces that it can translate DOCX and PPTX files while preserving formatting. This is presented with a tinny trumpet fanfare as a key feature, even though it has been standard in most competent CAT tools for decades.

Back in the 1990s, DejaVu was the first Windows CAT tool many translators like me actually used in production. Somewhere, I must still have a DejaVu installation disk whose entire serial number is simply “11”, and it was on DV that I first worked in a segmented environment on Windows and got my formatted files back at the end. By the time Trados for Windows and other tools followed, the expectation was already set: you feed in a formatted source file, translate in a CAT tool, and get back a clean, formatted target file.

Fast-forward to today, and we see marketing copy that treats “we preserve formatting” as if it were a bold, AI‑powered breakthrough. 

It isn’t. For anyone who has used mainstream CAT tools over the last 15–30 years, it sounds more like reinventing the wheel by loudly claiming your wheels are circular.

If there is something genuinely new under the hood, that would be the part worth explaining. Do they handle edge‑case layouts better? Integrate AI sensibly with TM and terminology? Solve real workflow problems? The email campaign doesn’t say.

Better to entrust your translations to an experienced, tech‑savvy human linguist, someone who knows which tools to use (including AI, when warranted) and when to rely on their own expertise.

Frozen mandates, real consequences: the effects of the Italian Corte di Cassazione silence on citizenship applications

In his article “As the Court of Cassation has yet to rule on Venice ordinanze, crisis grows between Italian citizenship firms and clients” (Insieme, 27 May 2026), Desiderio Peron describes a problem that is technical on paper but very concrete for applicants worldwide. The Court of Venice has sent two cases (RG 5343/2025 and RG 5358/2025) to the Corte di Cassazione, asking it to clarify when a lawyer’s power of attorney in citizenship cases should be considered non‑existent from the outset, not just flawed or incomplete.

The issue revolves around article 182 of the Italian Code of Civil Procedure, which allows certain representation defects to be corrected later. Here, however, the Venetian judge draws a distinction: one thing is a mandate that exists but is filed incorrectly; quite another is a situation where, at the time the action is brought, the lawyer simply has no valid authority to act. In the orders, this is described as “ab origine” lack of the ius postulandi – and that’s a more serious issue than a missing document.

While the Corte di Cassazione thinks it over, proceedings are suspended and uncertainty permeates the entire citizenship industry. Clients worry about cases filed in recent years; companies and intermediaries face frozen pipelines, financial pressure, and, in some regions, drastic downsizing or outright closure. And this is not just about structures in Brazil: anyone who has relied on standardized, outsourced court filings, whether from Lisbon, Toronto, or Melbourne, should at least be asking who actually held the pen in their name.

Everything takes place in a climate already made more difficult by Law 74/2025 (the so‑called “Decreto Tajani”), where formal and procedural objections carry increasing weight. The right to Italian citizenship iure sanguinis may remain in principle, but the real battleground is shifting to how that right is brought before a judge – and whether the person who brought your case to court was ever truly entitled to speak for you.