LocWorld 27 Event Speakers

Localization visionary and professional contrarian, Renato Beninatto has done it all – freelance translation, vendor management, sales and marketing, CEO, and everything in between. He has a passion for passing on his extensive industry knowledge to others and helping companies grow. Renato is a co-author of  The General Theory of the Translation Company, an adjunct professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in Monterey (MIIS), and a co-founder of Nimdzi Insights, a market research and advisory firm specializing in the language industry, and co-owner of MultiLingual Media, publisher of MultiLingual magazine.

Katie Botkin is the managing editor of MultiLingual magazine. Prior to joining MultiLingual, she studied journalism and applied linguistics, taught English on three continents and did freelance writing. She continues to write or edit for a variety of other publications in her spare time including the Translators without Borders newsletter.

Junt Kong Chan has over 20 years of experience in quality assurance and test engineering at companies such as Hewlett-Packard and Kodak, covering all-in-one printers, computers and more. He is currently the technical director at Beyondsoft where he handles teams that work on test automation, test methodologies and test strategies.

Helena Shih Chapman is the IBM globalization executive. She has extensive experiences in various areas at IBM. Helena spent a short stint managing the worldwide market intelligence operation and an internal open source bazaar for IBM’s software division. She also has a deep development background with hands-on development experience with the International Components for Unicode. Before joining IBM, Helena worked at Taligent, Dataware and Apple. In her spare time, she manages the information security compliance program for IBM Cloud Platform services and is an ISACA certified information security manager.

Bill Chen is founder and director of the Translation Service Center at Huawei, where he oversees the translation and localization of all of Huawei’s products for different world markets. He graduated from Nanjing Normal University with a degree in computer science, and he also has a degree in automatic control engineering from Southeast University in Nanjing. With a strong background in mathematical computing, software development and technical communications, Bill is renowned in his field for developing the structures and processes that have enabled Huawei to produce top-notch multilingual content at great scale.

Michele Coady has spent 18 years at Microsoft specializing in international engineering and global readiness. She is currently a director for the Microsoft Global Readiness group and drives company-wide geopolitical awareness, compliance and risk management.

Anne-Marie Colliander Lind is a recognized force in the global language industry landscape. She has spent almost 30 years helping multinational organizations solve their language issues, serving in executive sales and management positions at leading service, technology and market research companies. She is the CEO of Inkrease, a management consulting company based in Sweden that assists companies in their growth and development strategies. Anne-Marie is a sought-after speaker and is engaged part-time as marketing director for LocWorld. She is also the co-organizer of the Nordic Translation & Interpretation Forum (NTIF).

Alberto Ferreira has worked extensively in globalization services and product development with his key interests lying in user experience (UX) as well as content optimization technologies and processes. He specializes in aiding companies to redesign their digital presence and determine the user’s real needs with a global perspective. He has over seven years of experience in agile methodologies and corporate change, and is a cross-disciplinarian by nature. Alberto is also the author of Universal UX, to be published by Morgan Kaufmann in 2016, and often speaks and writes on design, localization and branding.

David Filip is chair (convener) of OASIS XLIFF OMOS TC; secretary, editor and liaison officer of OASIS XLIFF TC; a former cochair and editor for W3C ITS 2.0 Recommendation; advisory editorial board member for MultiLingual magazine; and co-moderator of the Interoperability and Standards WG at JIAMCATT. His specialties include open standards and process metadata, workflow and meta-workflow automation. David works as a research fellow at ADAPT Centre, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. Before 2011, he oversaw key research and change projects for Moravia’s worldwide operations. David held research scholarships at universities in Vienna, Hamburg and Geneva, and graduated in 2004 from Brno University with a PhD in analytic philosophy. David also holds master’s degrees in philosophy, art history, theory of art and German philology.

Tamara Fruehsorger is a PhD student at the University of Vienna, Austria, in the Department of Communications with a doctoral thesis called “Intercultural Communication Focused on the Color Adoption for the Advertising of the German Car Companies in China.” Her research interest includes intercultural differences between China and Europe and consideration of the ad development over time. Tamara completed two MA degrees from Friedrich-Alexander-University, Bavaria, Germany and the National University of Kiev, Ukraine. She has been living in Beijing for observational research since 2012.

Morgan Gallup Zhu, a Nimdzi consultant, speaks Mandarin and helps marketers and localization teams scale up global content that fuels revenue growth. She has spent 14 years in China, seven of which were with RWS Moravia where she rose to director. Her responsibilities included focusing on growing their business in China by engaging with the top seven largest Chinese technology companies and building programs for those that were in need of premium localization programs. Morgan regularly speaks at marketing conferences in China and is passionate about teaching marketers to leverage localization best practices to fuel global growth.

Daniel Goldschmidt is a speaker and educator with software internationalization and localization expertise. He also teaches computer science and physics to middle and high school students, driven by his belief that investing in the next generation is vital for humanity’s future.

Previously, Daniel was a senior internationalization project manager at Microsoft, leading the internationalization team in the Cloud and Enterprise Division. Before that, he co-founded RIGI Localization Solutions, a venture focused on visual localization, and served as a senior software engineer on Google’s internationalization team. He is Vice-Chair of the LocWorld Program Committee and has been a member of the Internationalization and Unicode Conference review committee. Daniel frequently presents at international events and leads workshops and roundtables. He holds a BS in computer science and mathematics (cum laude) and an MS in computes cience from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Ulrich Henes is the founder and president of The Localization Institute, a Madison, Wisconsin-based consulting and event organizing company. Already in his early years, Ulrich was fascinated by language, cultural differences, and global business. He spent the first decade of his career organizing international campaigns against the arms race and apartheid; and promoting global social justice. For the past 25 years Ulrich has channeled his passion for all things global into promoting awareness and respect for differences among people, countries, and languages in the international business community.

Changqi Huang is the assistant to the president of the Translators Association of China (TAC). She also serves as deputy director of TAC’s Translation Service Committee and Localization Service Committee, the two branches of TAC working for language services providers. Changqi organized two language industry conferences in China and a number of other events promoting the language industry. She has also attended and spoken at a number of international industry events. From 2011-2014, Changqi served as a council member of the International Federation of Translators (FIT).

Youyi Huang is a member of the Chinese Political Consultative Conference, vice president of Translators Association of China and serves on various other translation committees. As a senior translator/interpreter and editor, Huang has translated an extensive range of books about history, education, economy, politics, travel and literature, mostly from Chinese into English. He has helped to finalize a large amount of Chinese-English translation works, the most recent of which is Xi Jinping on Governance of China. Youyi was the first Chinese citizen serving as vice president of the Federation of International Translators. In recognition of his remarkable contribution to FIT and the translation and interpreting profession in general, he was awarded FIT Golden Pin in July 2011.

Jitendra Jaiswal is currently working as a senior localization project manager with Webdunia.com (India) Pvt. Ltd., one of the leading Southeast Asian language service providers. He started his association with localization in 2001 with Microsoft’s first localization venture for the Indian language market. Starting as a Hindi linguist, Jitendra has worked in various positions and seen various aspects of the emerging Southeast Asian language market. He has a rich experience of localization project and vendor management and has successfully executed thousands of projects for clients such as Microsoft, Google, Oracle, SAP and others. Jitendra holds degrees, diplomas and certificates in science, mass communication, economics, Hindi literature and project management. Jitendra is currently doing his PhD research in localization.

Shin Kayano is general manager of Asia-Pacific research and development at SAS, a leader in business analytics software and services and the largest independent vendor in the business intelligence market. He has several decades of experience in software development in internationalization and localization, and has been in charge of leading localization teams in the Asia-Pacific region. Shin’s current focus areas are agile development, distributed development process and remote project management.

Will Knight is an international business leader with over 20 years of experience in sales & marketing, Asia Geo expansion and operations, and change management initiatives. He is a former Microsoft executive and has recently joined CSOFT International as Executive Vice President of Global Growth and Operations responsible for the worldwide sales, business development, and client services of CSOFT. Knight received his MBA in Marketing and Operations from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and his undergraduate degree from Boston University in Architecture. He also attended an executive MBA program at London Business School in strategic management and leadership.

Kaiser Kuo is director of international communications at Baidu, China’s leading search engine. He also hosts the Sinica Podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China featuring prominent journalists, academics and subject-area experts. Born in upstate New York to Chinese parents, Kaiser took his first trip to China in 1981, lived in China in the late 1980s after graduating college, returned to Beijing after a long stint in graduate school and has lived there ever since. Kaiser was guitarist and cofounder of China’s first and most successful heavy metal band, Tang Dynasty, which was founded in 1989. He rejoined the band from 1996 to 1999, at which point he joined a fledgling internet start-up. Kaiser subsequently worked as China bureau chief of the technology and business magazine Red Herring and as director of digital strategy for Ogilvy China. He joined Baidu in 2010. From 2001 to 2011, Kaiser wrote the column Ich Bin Ein Beijinger, which ran in the magazine that’s Beijing and later in The Beijinger; the column has been described variously as “love letters to Beijing” and “musings of a Chinese-American smart-ass.” Kaiser remains active in the music scene as guitarist of Chunqiu (Spring & Autumn), which played at the Wacken Open Air festival in Germany — the world’s largest metal music festival. His mission in life is to help build bridges of understanding between China and the Anglophone West, and hopes he’s passed on that goal to his two children, Guenevere (11) and Johnny (9).

Bigrain Lin is the manager of international testing at Lenovo Mobile Group where he is responsible for field, carrier requirements and usability testing for all mobile products. Prior to Lenovo, Bigrain worked at HTC Corporation for ten years as a manager and engineer of global and China field testing. Today, he devotes his energy to test strategy and methodology development for emerging markets. He also spends time surveying and analyzing mobile phone user scenarios and preference models in different countries.

Alex Liu is a project manager in the IBM China Development Lab in Taipei, Taiwan. He is a member of the Globalization Shared Services Center, and has led the globalization tasks of IBM/Lotus Domino, IBM/Lotus Notes and IBM SmartCloud/LotusLive iNotes. Currently he is leading a team to perform globalization tasks on IBM ExperienceOne Omni Channel Marketing products.

Wen Liu attended Shanghai International Studies University where she received a master’s degree in translation. In 2014 she began working for Janssen Pharmaceuticals, Inc., a Johnson & Johnson company, as translation supervisor of the Medical Writing and Language Service Center.

Paul Mangell has a lot of experience at the cutting-edge of localization. His career has spanned all aspects of the localization industry, and he has been at the forefront of both the creation of agile processes and creative content management. Paul is passionate about localization, cultural adaptation and language transformation for product marketing, brand management, campaigns (TV, film and web) and advertising.

As vice president, globalization and localization, Teresa Marshall drives globalization and localization-related efforts across Salesforce, including internationalization, localization management and development of features designed to enable global Salesforce deployment. In 2009 she joined Salesforce as senior localization manager and led all product localization through a period of intensive growth. Since 2015 Teresa has led both globalization and localization for Salesforce. Teresa started her career as a German linguist and has been working in localization for over 15 years. She has held program and operational management positions at a number of Silicon Valley companies, including leading the Google localization team. From 2010 to 2014 Teresa was an adjunct member of the faculty at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey (MIIS) and taught in the translation and localization management program of the Graduate School of Translation, Interpretation and Language.

Jeni Mayorskaya is an entrepreneur and product expert with a special interest in the workforce marketplace and crowdsourcing. She built the first self-publishing e-book platform in Russia, Bookmate, which brought a new business model to the industry. Jeni also launched a crowdsourcing mobile platform in Southeast Asia. She has worked in tech product management and business development with tech companies and with mobile network operators, original equipment manufacturers and the media in the United States, Singapore, Philippines, Thailand, Russia and Europe. Currently, Jeni is leading product development for ABBYY Language Services, including the SmartCAT system for translation automation and automated professional translation services via application programming interface.

Brian McConnell is a software localization expert and startup veteran. He has led localization efforts at startups in the publishing, customer relationship management (CRM), and transportation industries, and is currently heading up localization efforts at Notion Labs. Prior to Notion, he led the localization teams at the rideshare company Lyft, at Medium, a popular web publishing platform, and at Insightly, a small business CRM provider. He is also a contributor to open source translation projects, and was an early contributor to crowd translation platforms.

Allison McDougall has been consulting and executing localization strategies with leading companies across multiple industry sectors for more than 25 years. She thrives on the supplier-side of the industry having worked with three of the top five LSPs, bringing leading-edge technology and an AI-first approach to complex enterprise engagements. Allison is currently with G3, a women-owned, women-led global content agency that provides language AI and specialized post-editing. In addition to her leadership at G3, Allison is focused on ‘paying it forward’ as an Investor, Advisor at University of Colorado Leeds School of Business, a Mentor at Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey (MIIS), serving on the Board of Women in Localization, and teaching yoga. She is passionate about the intersection of global business, technology, wellness, and intergenerational human connection.

Aoife McIlraith has been working in digital marketing for over 16 years and is a global expert on search, currently consulting with Lionbridge’s global clients on their global search on content strategies. Her expertise comes from a deep understanding of digital channels, user engagement aligned to global requirements. Aoife is also a qualified programmer and developer providing a rare combination of digital marketing and technology skills that provide a 360 degree view of the digital landscape. Aoife’s first job was in localization working for European Language Translations and over the past 20 plus years she has come full circle back with Lionbridge.

Dirk Meyer is a senior program manager and product owner, working out of Adobe System’s sales and marketing office in Beijing, China. It is his responsibility and passion to help advance the global market readiness of Adobe’s products and technologies, both from a business and internationalization perspective. In his current position (and geographic location), Dirk’s focus is on China and the Asia-Pacific region. Previously at Adobe, he held positions where he was mostly (but never exclusively) contributing to make both mature and innovative products “world-ready” and capable of supporting a global customer base. Dirk has studied in Germany and at Beijing University, China. He holds a master’s degree in Chinese studies and East European history.

Ilya Mishchenko holds a degree in linguistics from Novgorod State University. He has been with EGO Translating Company, a Russian language service provider, since 2006 where he progressed from a project manager to director of the Translation and Localization Centre. Ilya is also actively involved in the Union of Translators of Russia, chairing the St. Petersburg regional branch and currently proposed as Russia’s representative with the FIT Technology and Terminology Committee. As a member of various industry action groups, Ilya is primarily focused on standardization issues and STE.

Andrey Moiseev is an expert in translation, interpretation and internationalization business with more than 15 years of experience. He worked as the head of language services for the 2018 FIFA World Cup Russia Organizing Committee. He is also an independent language services consultant for various language service providers. Andrey was previously the director of language services for the 2014 Sochi Organizing Committee and subsidiary director of an international translation company in Kiev, Ukraine. He has organized linguistic support for a number of international events with Russian and international top-level authorities. He graduated from Moscow State University and Korean University.

Dmitry Molodyk joined Janus Worldwide in 1999 where he started his career as a translator and editor then was rapidly promoted to project manager. He successfully handled large-scale software localization projects for Hewlett-Packard, Invensys and SAP. Dmitry has a perfect command of English and German, is an expert at working with translation memory systems and computer-aided translation tools. He has worked at Janus from the company start-up day.

Sachiko Moriguchi is the group manager at Moravia in Tokyo, Japan. She has been living and working in both Japan and the United States, and has over 13 years of experience in the localization industry as a translator and project manager. Sachiko is now focused on managing and developing Moravia’s production team in Japan. She is a graduate from Monterey Institute of International Studies with an MA in translation.

Ron Myers is corporate vice president of digital marketing and operations at AMD, where he has had the opportunity to develop an organization that merged multiple functions into a singular unit delivering operational excellence and best-in-class capabilities. Ron’s leadership has developed the team into a true asset for AMD, delivering on projects as varied as the Marketing Effectiveness Index to a completely redesigned AMD.com. In his 20+ years of experience Myers has brought his entrepreneurial approach to companies ranging in size from retail chains to individual proprietorships to Fortune 500 companies.

David Orban has spent most of his career as an entrepreneur in the high-technology industry. His prior start-up endeavors include an infrastructure for the open Internet of Things and a social network enabling a technology startup ecosystem. Currently, David is on the faculty of and an advisor to the Singularity University. Born in Budapest, Hungary, his educational background includes studies in physics at both the University of Milan and the University of Padua. David’s personal motto is: “What is the question I should be asking?”

Jian-Hua Pan has more than 12 years’ working experience in the software localization industry, two years as translator, reviewer, desktop engineer and localization tester on the vendor side, and ten years as a localization project manager on the client side at HP Software. Jian-Hua is interested in project/program management, localization tools such as Passolo and Trados, localization workflow automation, machine translation and PowerShell, Python, VBScript (VBA) scripting programming and so on. Jian-Hua is a linguistic master from Shanghai FuDan University, PMP certified (expired) and ITIL Foundation certified.

Donna Parrish is co-organizer of the LocWorld conferences. She was publisher of the magazine MultiLingual for 18 years. Prior to her work at MultiLingual Computing, Inc., she was a computer programmer for 25 years. Donna holds a degree in mathematics from Peabody College of Vanderbilt University. She is presently the secretary of CLEAR Global (Translators without Borders) and CLEAR Tech.

Jean Senellart joined SYSTRAN in 1999 after defending a thesis on natural language processing and graduating from France’s École Polytechnique. He has been working on the modernization of SYSTRAN’s legacy code, by leading multiple challenges such as Unicode introduction, IntutiveCoding technology development, introduction of machine learning, development of Translation Stylesheet, design and first-ever release of “self-training” hybrid translation engines, and more recently, modularization of language assets into the world-unique “Linguistic Development Toolkit”. After the merger and acquisition of SYSTRAN by Korean company CSLi, Jean is now the global chief technology officer, leading development of teams located all around the world.

Lucy Shang has been the Beijing site manager for the globalization quality engineering (QE) team at VMware Information Technology (China) Co. Ltd. since 2007. Her responsibilities include people and vendor management; business operation; and internationalization consulting for the internal QE team and external development teams. Previously she was a senior software engineer at the Oracle China Research and Development Center and an on-site contracted software engineer at IBM.

Iouri Tchernoousko has worked in the localization space over the last 13 years. His current role at Adobe includes management of globalization and localization support for Photoshop and the Creative Cloud Ecosystem. He enjoys languages and technology. Iouri is a graduate of the Monterey Institute of International Studies, where he also taught localization-related courses. He originally comes from Russia.

Erji Wang is the senior localization program manager at VMware. His main focuses are on new product localization planning, customer feedback, and operation data analytics. Erji joined VMware in 2014, moved to the US in 2016, and loves hiking and cooking.

Peter Wang is a project manager at IBM China Development Lab. He has 15 years of experiences in project management and software globalization technologies. Peter currently focuses his studies on continuous delivery, cloud computing and mobile technology in globalization.

Kara Warburton holds numerous translation-related university degrees, including a PhD in terminology management, and she has over 25 years of experience managing terminology and other forms of microcontent for language service providers, nongovernmental organizations, and global enterprises. She has also been actively developing ISO language standards for 20 years. Her consultancy, Termologic, helps companies create effective multilingual microcontent databases to support their globalization strategy. Through her research, Kara has developed a methodology that optimizes microcontent databases by using corpus analysis techniques. She also teaches MA-level courses in terminology management, translation, and localization at the University of Illinois.

James Wei has been in the localization industry for more than 20 years. He started his career as an electronic engineer working at the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology. After five years of working with science and research, he decided to follow his passion in business management. In early 1997, after a few successful management positions in the IT sector, James founded EC Innovations to meet the increasing market requirement in localization services.

Li Xu joined the Translators Association of China (TAC) in 2013 after graduating from China Foreign Affairs University with a master of law degree in international relations. Li is the coordinator for TAC’s Translation Service Committee and Localization Committee, and has participated in the organization of a number of industry events including the Second China International Language Industry Conference in 2013 and two language service and globalization forums at the China Beijing International Fair for Trade in Services in 2013 and 2014.

Starting in April of 2008 Xing Xu worked for Baidu Network Technology (Beijing) Co., Ltd., and Alibaba.com as a product manager, product specialist and senior product specialist mainly responsible for mechanisms design and ranking design of advertising systems. In the beginning of 2014 he took charge of product design and operations of the Alibaba translation platform. At present Alibaba translation services include two parts: machine translation and human translation, which provide multilanguage solutions for Alibaba Group clients that do cross-border trading.

Carl Yao is responsible for the strategic development of CSOFT’s localization services, products and technologies. With the goal of leveraging and expanding CSOFT’s globalization solutions portfolio to optimize business outcomes and help customers extract greater value from CSOFT’s offerings, Carl plays a key role in the formulation and execution of new business strategies. He was a visionary behind TermWiki, a terminology network with nomenclature in 1,700 subjects and 100+ languages. Carl also pioneered Stepes, the world’s first mobile translation service with professional human translators. Prior to CSOFT, at YAOS Technologies, a company he founded, he was the principal architect for the development of the world’s first multilingual speech engine using natural human voice to synthesize speech. Carl also served as the CTO for Animation Technologies, based in Boston, Massachusetts. He graduated with a BA in mathematics and computer science from Whitman College and completed a master’s program in computer science from Brown University.

President and CEO of CSOFT International, Shunee Yee founded the company in 2003 with the goal of creating the world’s leading globalization firm. Under her direction, CSOFT has experienced continuous organic growth fiscally every year, with 14 offices worldwide. Featured in several publications, including Forbes, Investor’s Business Daily, and China Daily, Shunee was the 2009 recipient of the Stevie Award for Best Asian Entrepreneur for Women in Business. In 2011, Globalization Today named Yee a Top 25 Globalization Executive, and in 2012, Fortune identified her as one of technology’s most powerful disruptors and a Top 10 Most Powerful Women Entrepreneur.

Angelika Zerfaß studied Chinese/Japanese and computational linguistics at the University of Bonn, Germany. After her studies she worked for the Japanese Embassy in Bonn and then for Trados in Japan, Germany and the US. Since 2000 she has been providing independent consultancy, training and technical support for translation tools from her company based in Germany for clients all over the world. She is a frequent speaker at translation and localization industry events.

Xiaodan Zhang is the general manager assistant of the China Translation and Publishing Corporation, vice president of Global Tone Communication Technology Co., Ltd, and an associate senior translator. She supervises the work of the production center and is responsible for multilanguage translation management, translator resource management, translation flow management and translation quality management. Xiaodan has a rich experience in translation and ISO translation standard management.