LocWorld29 Speakers

Known affectionately as The Content Wrangler, Scott Abel is an internationally recognized intelligent content strategist and cognitive computing evangelist who specializes in helping organizations deliver the right content to the right audience, anywhere, anytime, on any device. He is the coauthor of Intelligent Content: A Primer and The Language of Content Strategy (XML Press). Scott is the founder, CEO and chief strategist at The Content Wrangler, Inc. He coproduces Information Development World Conferences, produces a popular series of content strategy books and is the host of the San Francisco Content Strategy Content Marketing Professionals Meetup. Scott is also a highly sought-after keynote presenter, moderator and a frequent contributor to content industry publications. He manages one of the most widely-viewed webinar channels on the BrightTALK network, producing over 100 content-focused webinars a year. Scott’s alter ego, The Audio Wrangler, is a popular DJ and dance music mashup artist.

Igor Afanasyev is a director of localization at Evernote. During his nine years with Evernote, Igor built localization infrastructure from the ground up to meet the needs of this rapidly expanding startup. In his current role, he supervises internationalization and localization at Evernote, and continues to support and improve localization tools. Igor and his engineering team actively contributes to the open source localization community. He holds a bachelor’s degree in engineering from the Moscow State University of Printing (Moscow, Russia), and has over 20 years of experience in software engineering and user interface design.

Akulaa Agarwal is currently a senior program manager of internationalization at Adobe Systems. She has over 11 years of rich experience in the areas of globalization, program management, enterprise products evangelism and quality engineering.

Scott Amyx is the CEO of Amyx+McKinsey. He is a thought leader in wearables and the Internet of Things (IoT) and an industry member of AllSeen Alliance, a global open source IoT consortium. Scott is the coauthor of The Internet of Things and Cyber-Physical Systems Handbook, an academic publication by John Wiley and Sons, scheduled for late 2015, and he often speaks at global conferences. Scott writes for a number of publications, including Wired, InformationWeek, IEEE and Wearable Technologies. Previously, as vice president of product management, he helped the company be acquired by a Fortune 500 publicly traded company. Scott has a MPP from the University of Chicago and is a national Woodrow Wilson/Sloan Fellow.

Nancy Anderson is the senior director of globalization at EMC Corporation. Nancy is responsible for ensuring global business success for EMC through a comprehensive globalization strategy. Her organization provides internationalization and localization services to the enterprise, along with comprehensive quality management and globalization technology programs. Prior to joining EMC, Nancy was a business unit manager at Lionbridge, managing localization service delivery for key client accounts. She also had her own small translation firm for several years, operating out of the Washington, DC area.

Simon Andriesen is CEO of MediLingua, a 100% medical language service provider, specializing in the translation, localization and testing of many types of medical information in all European and many other major languages. He has been a member of the advisory board for the LocWorld Life Sciences preconference day since 2005. Simon also served on the board of Translators without Borders (TWB), with a focus on Africa. He set up the TWB Health Translation Center in Kenya and his Introduction to Health Translation course has trained hundreds of language-talented Africans to serve as health translators.

Jean Aurambault is a globalization engineer at Box, a leading enterprise cloud-based collaboration platform based in Los Altos, California. He has over five years of experience working on localization platforms, starting at Yahoo! and progressing to Box. As a full stack engineer, Jean has been working on building and integrating localization tools as well as driving internationalization efforts to deliver improved global products.

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.

Tim Brandall has over 15 years of experience in the globalization industry, both on the vendor side (Welocalize) and client side (Apple, Vivendi Universal and Netflix). For the past three years Tim has been leading the localization team at Netflix as localization manager as they built a program that would accommodate Netflix’s rapid international growth. A software engineer at heart, Tim has recently moved into a role as globalization technologies manager at Netflix, where he is responsible for internationalization of Netflix products, localization technologies and international quality control.

Kris Burlington has been with Hewlett-Packard (HP) for 15 years and is currently the Americas manager for HP ACG, HP’s language and content services organization. Prior to this role, he was the worldwide localization commodity manager for HP’s research and development. Kris later became the localization manager for HP’s printer software business where he managed localization consolidation for product development and worked in China to help grow HP’s ACG localization center of expertise. Kris has a master’s degree in eCommerce.

Scott Carothers, senior globalization executive at Kinetic theTechnologyAgency, is a 30-year veteran of corporate marketing with a specific focus on technical solutions, innovations and software. His career began on a genesis team that introduced one of the first MS-DOS based graphics software to the market, successfully placing the product into 200 Fortune 500 companies. Scott has since evolved into the realm of cutting-edge translation technology and digital asset management solutions.

Vincent Chen is a globalization project manager for IBM China Development Lab. He has 11 years of experience in software globalization testing and project management. In addition, Vincent is a globalization testing architect and owns the globalization testing process of IBM.

Hannah Choi is a localization program manager and a manager of the localization program management team at Localization Services, Autodesk. She has been working on a variety of components and products as a localization program manager, ranging from small components to a flagship product such as AutoCAD, and from desktop releases to web and mobile releases. Recently, Hannah’s responsibility has grown into overseeing a localization program management team, and she is on a steep learning curve in the new world of management.

Mitch Clark earned an MA in translation from Kent State University in 2006 and has worked as a technical translator in both Japan and the United States. Over the past three years, he has been working as an in-house translator at Nikon Precision Inc. His interests include machine translation and the utilization of post-editing in the technical translation workflow.

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).

Tito Colon is the senior director, head of multicultural marketing at Aetna Inc., one of the nation’s leading diversified health care benefits companies, serving an estimated 44 million people. With over 18 years in providing strategic leadership and transformative insights, Tito positions Aetna to target profitable multicultural growth opportunities in an evolving health care insurance marketplace. To support an authentic market presence, he is also responsible for enterprise language capabilities across print, digital and voice. Tito holds a BS in business management from Westfield State College and resides in Atlanta, Georgia.

Charles Cooper has over 20 years of experience in quality assurance and over 15 years of experience in eContent, user experience, taxonomy, workflow design, composition and digital publishing. He teaches, facilitates modeling sessions and develops taxonomy and workflow strategies. Charles has assisted companies by analyzing their content, current workflow and taxonomy systems, helped to create new ones and worked to ensure that they are maintained on a consistent basis. He not only understands process, he understands the production tasks and can design a process that works for everyone in an organization.

Lara Daly leads the revenue generating teams at Akorbi, the largest US-based, woman-owned, and diverse language services provider. She has been in the language industry 20+ years, working on global growth with clients in technology, life sciences, ecommerce, retail, manufacturing, and healthcare. Lara’s team and colleagues at Akotbi are dedicated to building innovative strategies and teams that broaden inclusion, accelerate growth, and promote truly global brands.

Eduardo D’Antonio has over 20 years of experience in the localization industry, including senior roles with major localization service providers and technology companies. He is currently the director of globalization operations for VMware. At VMware, Eduardo built a program management team from the ground up and implemented many innovations in process improvements including managed services, a TAUS language quality evaluation and preproduction outsourcing methodologies.

Sachiyo Demizu earned her master’s in translation and interpretation from the Monterey Institute of International Studies and has been working in the industry for more than 20 years. Currently, she works as a member of the documentation system support team at Nikon Precision Inc. Sachiyo also has a master of accountancy from the University of Denver, earning her CPA in Colorado. She is interested in machine translation, terminology management and international communication.

As the founder of CSA Research in 1999, Don DePalma has been instrumental in establishing the company as the preeminent market research firm in localization and globalization. He initiated CSA’s coverage of localization maturity, enterprise language processing, business-driven globalization, machine translation, return on investment for localization and multicultural domestic marketing. Don holds a doctorate in linguistics from Brown University, with specializations in generative grammar, computational linguistics and the historical phonology of Slavic languages. He also studied at Moscow State University and Moscow Linguistic University in Russia, Charles University (Univerzita Karlova) in the Czech Republic and ILISA in Costa Rica.

With a broad background in software development, marketing and globalization, Thomas Fenrich helps companies develop successful mobile and online products to enter and grow (primarily international) markets at scale. He built his global experience at a variety of notable digital product companies inside and outside of Silicon Valley, including eBay, Microsoft, Yahoo! and Salesforce. At The Weather Company, he now directs the product efforts and strategy to accelerate the company’s mobile-first international growth.

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.

Dimitris Glezos is the founder and CEO of Transifex. He built the first version of Transifex in 2007 while he was a graduate student and localization leader for the Fedora project, an open source operating system. Having seen how well Transifex worked and recognizing its usefulness beyond just Fedora, Dimitris decided to leave his PhD program and form a company around the product. Transifex has since grown into a localization automation platform for modern technology companies and open source communities alike.

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.

Attila Görög has been involved in various national and international projects on language technology over the past 15 years. He has a solid background in quality evaluation, post-editing, and terminology management. Attila specializes in quality management and machine translation, trying to solve globalization challenges through consulting.

Marie Hanabusa is a seasoned localization professional with over 13 years of experience in the industry. As the localization manager at Blackboard, she recently launched a movement called “reimagining localization,” inspiring internal and external stakeholders to participate in a new localization approach focusing on user experience. Marie has a bachelor’s degree from the University of Tokyo.

Jenna Harding is the Director of Localization Operations at Wordbank, a boutique marketing localization agency. Growing up in Hawaii, living abroad and traveling frequently has driven her to want to positively impact diverse groups globally. After completing a Master’s degree in the French language, Jenna joined the localization industry. She now has over 7 years’ experience in a variety of capacities, specializing in complex project management, localization delivery models, resource management, quality management systems, and agile localization. She’s passionate about helping clients craft effective globalization strategies – both for their own success and for the benefit of the local customer.

Michael Harris is an experienced localization technologist with a background in solution architecture, product management, full-stack development, machine translation, business process management, and linguistics, with great people skills and a passion for learning new things.

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.

Mimi Hills is a localization industry veteran. She teaches the Localization Teams Master Class for the Localization Institute. Mimi is the former director, global information experience at VMware, Inc., and has also led globalization teams at BlackBerry and Sun Microsystems. She comes from the software world with a background in project and engineering management. Mimi is active in the localization industry and in diversity and inclusion circles. In her spare time, she’s involved in the TechWomen program and plays guitar and bass, and runs a nonprofit music camp for adults.

Tuyen Ho leads corporate development and legal operations for Welocalize. She drives Welocalize’s mergers and acquisitions roadmap to align with the company’s overall growth strategy, from deal sourcing and target evaluation to transaction execution and integration planning. Prior to Welocalize, Tuyen held leadership roles in sales and operations at enterprise software companies.

A native of Japan, Aki Ito has been involved in the localization industry since 1996, working in various activities such as sales management, operations management, project management, Japanese language management and consulting, and translation memory tool management. He previously served on the Globalization and Localization Association (GALA) board of directors in 2005-2006 and as chairman of the board in 2006. He has also served on the editorial board for MultiLingual magazine. Prior to his involvement in the localization industry, Aki was an account executive at Dell Computer in the United States and Japan, selling personal computers and networking solutions to multinational companies for their worldwide implementations. Aki has an MBA in international marketing and a BA in international relations.

Andy Jacobson is a design operations leader for the Amazon business user experience team. He leads operations, research, content and localization across four global design studios. Prior to joining Amazon, Andy spent 17 years leading multiple user experience and software development programs at Blackboard Inc.

Katell Jentreau has 20+ years of experience in localization, both on the vendor and client sides. She led the globalization effort at Box from 2012 to late 2015, before joining Netflix’s Globalization team as the company was getting ready to launch globally. From 2013 to 2015, she was also on the board of Women in Localization.

Jennifer Johnson is the senior manager of localization services at Autodesk, based in San Francisco, California. She joined the localization organization in 1992 and was based in Neuchâtel, Switzerland for five years. After leaving Autodesk in 1998 she held senior manager positions at Sybase and SAP. Jennifer boomeranged back to Autodesk in 2012 in the localization services senior management team, heading up program management. In 2015 she moved into the senior management leadership role for localization in global engineering.

Andrew Jones has been active in the translation industry since 1983, when he began translating Chinese newspapers (on a typewriter) for the Joint US Publications Research Service. After a 14 year stay in Japan working as a translator for Mazda Motor Corp (going from pencil and paper to primitive memory systems), Andrew returned to the United States, where he now heads translation and documentation at Nikon Precision Inc. (using web-based, API-linked tools). His outside interest is classical Japanese maritime nomenclature.

Inger Jurajda is a senior business analyst with National Instruments. She has been working in software applications for over 15 years and for the past five years has been focused on software platforms to support web globalization. Inger has a strong understanding of the diverse needs of global markets, as well as the many intricacies of managing content and data in a way that balances global brand consistency with the unique needs of individual markets.

In her current role, Sveta Kelman is a program manager for Google Translate. She has previously spent several years on the Google localization team, managing localization processes for a number of Google consumer products. Having made a switch to the machine translation team, Sveta is currently focusing on expanding Google Translate to more languages, as well as growing Google Translate Community. She has been passionate about languages and translation for many years and holds an MA in Scandinavian philology from St. Petersburg State University (Russia).

Industry veteran having held a number of roles over the last 24 years. If you’d like to meet or have any questions for me, feel free to stop by the Acolad booth, # 205.

Michael Klinger has 25 years of experience in the globalization industry, starting as an interpreter and translation project manager. He is conversant in six languages. Michael established and grew the globalization staffing and localization outsourcing businesses at Winter Wyman Contracts which later became COMSYS. He helped find sellers for COMSYS in the language field. Michael then started Anzu Global and Language Transactions where he grew the language brokerage services business. His current wish is to leverage his business network to support his social venture and charitable work bringing computers and technology to Niger, Africa. Visit www.bokai.org for more information.

Gregor Kneitz is the senior international project engineering lead for Microsoft Xbox platform and applications, providing onsite localization and native speaking testing to the agile product development in XBOX. During his 18 years with Microsoft, he has worked on the localization and internationalization of many Microsoft products and services. Gregor is a competitive public speaker and a multiple-time division and district champion in Toastmasters International. He frequently coaches groups and individuals in presentation skills. Gregor holds an MBA from the University of Washington, Bothell.

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.

Andrew Lawless elevates senior executives and business owners to higher levels of managing change, creating growth, building trust and improving communication. Through his coaching and consulting, you will build top-performing teams for your success, sanity and happiness. A pioneer in process automation for translation and localization, he has devoted his entire career to helping people succeed through inevitable changes. Andrew brings a unique blend of experience in behavioral sciences, publishing, localization and education. He served as a trainer and consultant to the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit where he helped analyze the mindset of hostage takers. His accomplishments range from managing a corporate turn-around of Berlitz in Central and Eastern Europe to transforming the World Bank’s global approach to localizing its analytical work, from automating content processes in leading life science companies to helping small business owners making critical decisions and strategic pivots. Andrew presented his successes with transforming global teams to the Obama White House and testified before the US Senate on the importance of professional development in localization to the US economy. He is an adjunct professor at the University of Maryland.

Anthony Lee is the cofounder and CEO of Knowtions Research. Knowtions Research combines a crowd community of PhD scientists with advanced language and platform technology to deliver life science translations at scale. Prior to founding Knowtions, Anthony founded a translation service provider in the life science and medical vertical.

Alex Lik is a technical communicator, editor, trainer, localization manager, auditor and translator with over two decades of experience in the field, equally comfortable wearing vendor’s, client’s or conformity assessor’s hats. During these years, he has been making sure that the message gets through in a variety of positions. Alex is the founder and owner of A-CLID (Agency for Certification, Localization Management & Information Design) and lead auditor for ISO 17100, CGSB 131.10 and ISO 13611, representing the Language Industry Certification System (LICS®) in Israel and CIS countries.

A 25-year localization veteran, Stephan Lins has been in the industry since the early days of modern localization. He has held leadership positions in start-ups as well as established, larger localization companies. At the helm of MediaLocate since 2001, he has turned the company into one of the premier language service providers based on the US West Coast. Stephan grew up behind the Iron Curtain, in former East Germany, and holds US and German dual citizenship. He graduated from Brown University with a degree in business economics and currently resides near Monterey, California.

Clove Lynch is responsible for automation technologies that support the corporate globalization department at VMware. He has spent the past 15 years in product management and technology leadership roles, working on translation management systems such as WorldServer, ONTRAM and GlobalSight. Clove holds a master’s in translation from Kent State University and has been an ATA-certified translator since 1992.

Diane Manning is a senior marketing manager for localization at MobileIron, a leading mobile security software provider. She is responsible for localization of all marketing content including corporate website, demand generation campaigns, video, public relations and more. Diane has extensive experience in Silicon Valley’s high-tech industry, where she has held positions in international sales and marketing, localization, program management and executive communications. She has an MBA in international marketing from the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, speaks four languages and has lived and studied in the Netherlands, Italy and Guatemala.

Danielle Geraldine Marcos, known to many as a world traveler enthusiast, holds a master’s in translation and intercultural communication from the Universidad de Salamanca, Spain. She has lived and worked on four different continents as a translator, interpreter and cultural mediator. Danielle is very active with the Women in Localization in the Pacific Northwest and has been the running chapter manager for the past two years. Currently, she is enjoying the beauties of building world-ready training content for a data visualization software company. Danielle feels strongly about evangelizing and teaching others best practices of globalization, internationalization, localization and translation. Most recently she accepted a role as a co-instructor for the University of Washington localization certificate program of which she is an alumna.

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.

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.

Mary McHale has been the director of global services for the cloud and enterprise division since March 2013, owning the localization, site management and content engineering of Azure, SQL, Windows Server, System Center, Visual studio, MSDN and Azure.com sites. She has 23 years in the localization industry, and has vast experience working on workflow design and outsourcing strategies for content, software and localization testing. Mary’s current focus is designing a standardized workflow and outsourcing model optimized for the agile delivery of international products and services for the cloud targeting international developer and IT audiences. She has a BS in information systems and MBA from Dublin City University.

Patrick McLoughlin manages localization at Verily Life Sciences. Prior to Verily, Patrick spent ten years at Eventbrite where he founded and managed the localization function, and five years at Yahoo! as a localization project manager and terminology manager. Patrick has also held positions as a lexicographer, adjunct professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, translator, multilingual researcher, and writer. He holds a variety of certifications and degrees from universities in Italy, the UK, and California.

Over the past nine years Erica Mehallo has had a successful career specializing in dialog deliverables for a myriad of clients within the video game industry. She kick started her career at a post-production house in Los Angeles (formerly Soundelux Design Music Group), where she managed recording sessions for video games. Currently, Erica acts as dialog coordinator at Sony PlayStation Santa Monica Studio, where she continues her in-depth involvement in the fast-paced and dynamic world of voiceover for video games. She maintains a persistent dedication to building, developing and enhancing Sony dialog standards and practices as well as managing facets of dialog relating to casting, recording, editing, implementation and localization.

Fabio Minazzi is passionate about developing ideas and creating businesses for an inclusive society in a connected world. With a background in audio R&D, he has built a career in software and games localization, taking on roles as an entrepreneur, investor, and global business leader. Always learning, Fabio never stops reading technical papers and history books to understand how emerging technologies, like generative algorithms, impact society. He spent the past two years on speech synthesis projects, including “Voice for Purpose,” which he will present at PIC#17. Outside of work, he actively supports social causes and peace-building efforts.

Julien Mira is the operations manager of the globalization services team at Cisco Systems. He is responsible for leading the translation and localization services and strategy for Cisco worldwide. Scalable, flexible and cost-effective production as well as continuous innovation have been the foundations for driving change at Cisco, yielding tremendous cost savings and helping the company address constantly-changing business conditions and global business requirements. Julien has a PhD in electrical engineering and close to ten years of globalization industry experience. He joined Cisco in 2009, helping build the service before leading it in 2014.

As president of Akorbi, Azam Mirza oversees world-wide business initiatives, business development, innovation and strategic growth efforts. Under his leadership, the company has grown 75% since 2014, making Akorbi the fastest-growing language services provider in the world. Azam’s responsibilities also include strategy development and daily business operations, as well as technical initiatives for Akorbi’s localization and translation services. He also oversees the company’s multilingual staffing and business process outsourcing divisions. Azam’s leadership and vision have turned Akorbi into a multimillion dollar global business solutions company with over 600 full-time and part-time employees worldwide, and the company has experienced more than 200% growth in recent years.

Julian Muller leads the localization team at Meta, helping to connect people and build community in over 100 languages across the Meta family of products and services. After joining the company in 2009 with a background as a German translator and a music degree, he has since helped scale Meta’s localization operations and strategy across a broad range of products that reach billions of people around the world. Julian has also taught at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, focusing on how to use data in localization.

Dragos Munteanu is currently managing the end-to-end development life cycle of SDL’s statistical machine translation products, with a focus on continuous translation quality improvement via innovation in algorithms and advancement in scalability. He has extensive knowledge in statistical machine translation, machine learning and natural language processing. Dragos has over ten years of experience in the translation industry with significant contributions as both scientist and product manager. He has a PhD in computer science from the University of Southern California and an MBA from the University of California Los Angeles.

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.

Shaun Newcomer is an eclectic games industry veteran with eight years of experience working and living in mainland China and Taiwan. His language background is the basis of his competence in localization, internationalization, culturalization, translation, west-to-east/east-to-west business and cultural development, while his passion for games led him into project management, globalized product development, user experience design and multicultural team management in the context of the Chinese games development and publishing.

With a master’s in African languages and a doctorate in linguistics, Manuela Noske draws upon a deep understanding of language and social behavior to deliver fresh perspectives on the language needs and preferences of customers in emerging markets. She has taken a close look at the role that language plays in creating great user experiences worldwide and through her volunteer work with the Indigenous Language Institute she has gained first-hand experience working with Native American communities in preserving and strengthening their languages.

As the senior director of globalization at GoPro, Sonia Oliveira is responsible for all aspects of product and messaging adaptation aligned with an international strategy to maximize global growth. Her department focuses on key business functions including marketing, firmware, software, customer support and media localization. As an experienced professional in the industry, Sonia has spent most of her career in leadership positions at startups and well-established companies including Siebel (Oracle), Adobe and Zynga where she built and scaled highly productive teams to reach continuous and simultaneous delivery in multiple languages and platforms. She has led all aspects of the localization cycle including engineering, testing, program management and vendor management with distributed teams in the US, Europe and Asia. Sonia has been a frequent participant in localization conferences, round tables and forum discussions. She is fluent in Portuguese, English, Spanish and French and holds a BA in translation and interpretation and an MA in international relations.

Iris Orriss serves as a vice president of internationalization, product quality, and product experience analytics at Meta. She has been with Meta since January 2013 and is passionate about eliminating the internet language and cultural barriers, and improving the overall user experience. Her work focuses on growing Meta in international markets. From 2012-2019, Iris was a member of the board at Translators without Borders, a nonprofit organization that provides vital information in the right language at the right time. Prior to Meta, she was a director at Microsoft, working on product internationalization and development process in the enterprise and language technology divisions. Iris is a native of Germany, speaks four languages, and was educated at Freie Universität Berlin.

Lee Orr is the head of US and EMEA sales and marketing at Gengo, a global people-powered translation platform that is working toward enabling everyone to read and publish across languages. Before joining Gengo, he managed global sales and marketing teams at Cvent, CEB and Oracle. With 18 years of experience helping organizations establish a global footprint, Lee has extensive knowledge of go-to-market strategies, revenue generation and internationalization.

Silvia Oviedo-López is the localization manager at Pinterest, where she focuses on growing Pinterest’s international footprint in a fast-paced environment. Since the beginning of her career she has managed communities, content, localization and international at companies such as eBay, Yahoo! and Pinterest. Silvia has also run her own internationalization, blogging and search engine optimization consulting company. She studied translation and interpreting at Universidad Complutense of Madrid, and strategic decision and risk management at Stanford. She has a passion for experimenting, moving fast and making things happen.

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.

Sergio Pelino is a veteran of the localization industry with 25 years of experience spent on the enterprise-size buyer’s side, managing language quality assurance processes and technology; translation tools and workflow; and localization technology project managers and linguists. Before joining Google in 2008, Sergio held multiple roles with Microsoft’s and Oracle’s localization teams, focusing on enterprise scale translation technology, innovation and global process.

Hélène Pielmeier is a senior analyst at CSA Research. She focuses on LSP business management, strategic planning, sales and marketing strategy and execution, project and vendor management, quality process development, and interpreting technologies. Before joining CSA Research, Hélène was division president at Iverson Language Associates, a TransPerfect company.

Clint Poole is the vice president of global marketing at Lionbridge. He joined the company in 2012, leading the company’s global go-to-market strategy, demand generation, branding, positioning and communications, and improving marketing performance to drive revenue growth. Prior to joining Lionbridge, Clint served as director of marketing for Korn/Ferry International, where he was focused on growth strategies and demand generation in the human capital market. Clint has more than 17 years of experience in global brand development and demand generation for private and publically traded business services companies, including strategic planning, developing integrated, multichannel demand generation strategies and more.

Juan Pablo Puerta is director of engineering, growth and international at SoundCloud, a leading online audio distribution platform. His professional work has been focused on taking US and European companies beyond their national borders in a constructive, interactive and user-driven way. Juan Pablo is a frequent public speaker and is known for his visionary outlook on the potential for companies to reach hypergrowth by engaging with their customers and having them lead the internal innovation process.

Francesco Pugliano is a seasoned localization expert with over 15 years in the industry. As a senior language specialist at eBay, he is educating designers and product managers on how to design with international expansion in mind, and helping break down language barriers to maximize international growth and engagement. Francesco is also helping management define strategy for geographical expansion and new market entry. He has an MA in modern languages from the University of Florence, Italy. In his free time, he loves sailing and kite surfing.

Oleksandr Pysaryuk is a localization leader with experience in building and growing successful teams and disciplines focused on internationalization, software development, localization and internationalization technical program management, and global product management at the enterprise scale – in sports technology, telecommunications, human capital management, e-commerce and engineering organizations.

With more than 18 years of experience in the web development arena as senior manager of web development at Marketo, Rick Redondo leads the development and localization efforts of the APAC, EMEA and US marketing websites. Prior to working for Marketo, he managed the global marketing websites at Trion Worlds, Inc.

Fabrice Renaud is a development and localization program manager at ACL. With over ten years of experience in localization shared between EA and ACL, he has had first-hand experience in a variety of localization roles, including his work as a translator, quality assurance coordinator, engineer and project manager. Fabrice’s diverse experiences enable him to thoroughly understand and efficiently solve localization challenges. As a cloud tool evangelist, he is always looking for ways to improve localization processes. Fabrice holds a diploma in applied foreign languages.

Peter Reynolds is co-CEO at memoQ and has previously worked at Idiom, Berlitz GlobalNet, Bowne Global Solutions, and Lionbridge. Peter has been actively involved in the development and promotion of standards for over a decade – he is the convener of the ISO working group which deals with translation (ISO TC 37 SC 5 WG1), an Irish expert to ISO/CEN, the liaison representative of OASIS to TC 37, and Deputy Chair of the Irish ISO TC 37 Mirror Committee. He holds BSc and MBA degrees from Open University and is a localization and translation industry veteran.

Ann Rockley is CEO of The Rockley Group. She has an international reputation for developing multichannel content strategies and digital publishing solutions. Ann has been instrumental in establishing the field in content strategy, content reuse, intelligent content strategies for multichannel delivery and content management best practices. She is a frequent contributor to trade and industry publications and a keynote speaker at numerous conferences in North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific. Ann has a master’s of information science from the University of Toronto and is a Fellow of the Society for Technical Communication.

Jessica Roland serves as director of strategic accounts at SDL. She has over 15 years of globalization experience in the enterprise software world with Documentum/EMC and with web companies such as Yahoo! and Glassdoor, leading global teams in international product development and operations. At SDL, Jessica has the pleasure of working with some of the most sophisticated globalization leaders on the planet to help strengthen and expand their international efforts.

Jonas Ryberg is head of Digital Globalization Services. He and his team provide artificial intelligence-infused language services, global data curation for artificial intelligence/machine learning, and global marketing services. Jonas has twenty years of experience in the language services industry in various roles from solutioning and linguistics to sales and management. In those capacities, he has served as both company founder and executive.

Clio Schils has more than 25 years of experience in the translation industry on both the client and vendor sides. She has held several leadership positions in different organizations, with a focus on the life sciences vertical. The nearly 16 years she spent with Medtronic, Lionbridge Life Sciences and Sajan (now Amplexor) gave her the critical experience needed in this highly regulated niche. Since August 2018, Clio has served as the global director of life sciences at CQ fluency. From 2005 until 2018, she organized and moderated the Life Sciences Business Round Table at LocWorld in the different geographies. In September 2016, Clio was elected as an Elia board member and in October of 2018 she assumed the role of president of Elia.

Commonly referred to as “the guy in the pink shirt”, Scott Schwalbach has been in the localization and globalization business for 45+ years, working for and with some of the largest companies and governments in the world. He has worked with sales, solutions, and operations divisions of service companies ensuring that they delivered solutions that drove customers to success.

Scott worked on the original localization pilot team at Microsoft and stayed for 18 years. In addition, he has worked on Google localization for 7 years, Amazon for 4 years, and spent 10 years with the U.S. Government.

Scott teaches various courses in communications and customer expectations, group dynamics as well as advises start-ups and VC’s on globalization best practices. Scott’s free time involves taking care of his mini orchard, adventuring with his Sheltie, Cody, trying out new recipes and other adventures around the world.

Loy Searle has been a globalization and content industry leader for over 20 years. In the enterprise resource planning industry, her teams pioneered single-sourcing content strategies and built extraordinary integrated global content management systems and terminology solutions. At Google, Loy led global production and language services. Her focus was speed-at-scale — turning language quality around while shortening time-to-market. At Intuit, Loy’s team built a scalable globalization and innovative content foundation to support market expansion. At Deluxe, her team transformed their practice to support the entertainment industry’s digital transformation. As current president of Women in Localization, Loy is committed to the localization industry and the advancement of women within it.  At her side gig — the Global Guild — she builds curated industry peer networks, strengthening leaders and their globalization practices. Today at Workday, Loy’s team is building a localization and content center of excellence to scale and support the company’s expansion goals.

Marina Sedmak leads Rockwell Automation’s global team of technical writers, as well as overseeing the global translation team that supports all commercial, technical and web translation across the organization. She has over 20 years of experience in leading various technical writing teams at Rockwell. Most recently, Marina has focused on integrating the Rockwell’s technical content development and translation functions via formal content quality and terminology management programs.

Babs Sekel is the manager of marketing processes and localization at Agilent Technologies, Inc., bringing over 20 years of experience in strategic marketing planning and project management to this role. Babs leads a global team responsible for the localization of key strategic customer-focused communications for both the chemical analysis and life sciences divisions of Agilent. She is currently leading initiatives to improve worldwide localization operations, vendor management, terminology management, quality and automation of localization processes.

Richard Sikes has been immersed in technical translation and localization for over 30 years. He is passionate about linguistic technologies of all kinds and spends much of his time deploying technology solutions. Richard has managed localization teams at several industry-leading software companies. He contributes frequently to MultiLingual magazine, and is well-known as an organizer, speaker, and moderator at translation industry events.

Pete Smith is vice provost for digital teaching and learning at the University of Texas Arlington (UTA), where he oversees the new office of University Analytics, as well as the Learning Innovation and Networked Knowledge, a learning analytics research laboratory. His teaching and research focuses on big data in education, natural language processing and translation automation. Pete teaches and researches actively with students and faculty colleagues in Russia and globally via numerous virtual classroom and teaching exchanges. His teaching includes oversight of UTA’s localization and translation certificate, offered to students of seven languages as an introduction to localization and the localization industry.

Willem Stoeller  grew up in Amsterdam where he obtained his undergraduate and graduate degrees at the University of Amsterdam. After many years in software development, he made the move to localization. Willem has over 25 years of experience in translation, localization, and internationalization of marketing materials, software products, and web content. His focus is on project and quality management, and localization strategy/processes improvement. Willem became a PMP® in 2002 and was very involved with the Project Management Institute where he was a board member of the Portland and Silicon Valley chapters. Training for localization is a top priority for him with a focus on project, quality, and risk management. Willem is a former professor at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, the creator and presenter of the Localization Project Management Certification, and a round table leader for the Project Management Round Table and Technology Round Table.

Daniel Sullivan is a veteran in the localization industry, having led translation technology and international content teams at four companies and across a diverse set of business verticals. His most recent roles have focused on making localization more of a strategic part of business from a performance perspective, and bridging the gap between straight translation and more nuanced copywriting and transcreative endeavors. Daniel is currently a senior leader in the growth organization at Shopify and oversees a high-impact team that includes programs, enablement, R&D, and analytics, which supports a broad spectrum of teams spearheading international expansion across the entire company.

James Suprenant leads William Blair’s efforts as managing director in the outsourced, IT services and professional services sectors. Previously, Jim held outsourced, IT and professional services roles with CIBC/Oppenheimer; Lehman Brothers; and Friedman, Billings and Ramsey. His transaction experience includes the CareTech Solutions sale to HTC Global Services; the CLS Communication sale to Lionbridge Technologies; the Welocalize sale to Norwest Equity Partners; Paradigm Tax Group sale to The Riverside Company; Emergency Communications Network sale to Veritas Capital; and OneSource Virtual minority investment from Technology Crossover Ventures. Jim earned an MBA from the University of Maryland and a BS in finance from Georgetown University.

Bill Swallow is a technical consultant with Scriptorium Publishing Services where he helps clients with content strategy development, localization readiness and technology implementation. He has played many roles in his 18 years in technical communication, from writer to thought leader. Outside of work, Bill enjoys cooking, brewing his own beer and studying the art of taekwondo.

Val Swisher enjoys helping companies solve complex content problems. She is a well-known expert in content strategy, structured authoring, global content, content development, and terminology management. Val believes content should be easy to read, cost-effective to create and translate, and efficient to manage. Her fourth book, The Personalization Paradox, was published in 2021 by XML Press. She is on the advisory board for the Technical Communications Program at the University of North Texas. When not working with customers or students, Val can be found working on her latest quilt, and she also makes a mean hummus.

Tak Takahashi joined Teradata in 1989. He has been involved in the development of various applications — including the Teradata CRM tool as a globalization specialist — as well as internationalization and localization. He holds a degree in architectural engineering, and is an architect and a computer engineer certified by the Japanese government.

Gaetano Terranova joined Autodesk in 1993 and has since held several engineering and management positions, gradually increasing his responsibilities. In 2012 he took over the management of the localization engineering group, which provides internationalization consulting services to Autodesk’s engineering community and delivers all of Autodesk’s localized software. Gaetano holds a bachelor’s degree in electronics engineering and a master’s in business administration. He lives in Neuchâtel, Switzerland with his wife and three children.

John Tinsley is an entrepreneur, technologist, and machine translation expert. He holds a degree in applied computational linguistics, and received a PhD in machine translation from Dublin City University in 2009. Following that, John cofounded Iconic Translation Machines, an award-winning language technology software business which pioneered the commercial deployment of neural machine translation technology. He grew the business for almost a decade before selling it to RWS in 2020. Most recently, John was the vice president for artificial intelligence product and marketing at Language Weaver. He has consulted for the European Commission on technology research initiatives, and he is also a regular public speaker on topics related to language, translation, and business.

Marco Trombetti is a computer scientist, serial entrepreneur, and investor. He cofounded Translated in 1999 and currently serves as its CEO. He recently cofounded Pi Campus, a venture capital firm that invests in early-stage technology startups, mostly in the AI field.

Francis Tsang leads the international engineering effort at LinkedIn to enable economic opportunity for every member in the global workforce. His personal mission is to help remove language and cultural barriers in the world through technologies. Francis currently serves on the advisory boards of TAUS, the ADAPT Centre, and CLEAR Global.

Anne-Maj van der Meer is a marketing professional with over ten years of experience in event organization and management. She has a BA in English language and culture from the University of Amsterdam and a specialization in creative writing from Harvard University. Before her position at TAUS, Anne-Maj was a teacher at primary schools in regular as well as special needs education. She started her career at TAUS in 2009 as the first TAUS employee where she became a jack of all trades, taking care of bookkeeping and accounting as well as creating and managing the website and customer services. For the past five years, Anne-Maj has served as the events director, chief content editor and designer of publications. She has helped in the organization of more than 35 LocWorld conferences, where she took care of the program for the TAUS track and hosted and moderated these sessions.

Jaap van der Meer is the founder and CEO of TAUS, an organization started in 2004 that is on a mission to empower global enterprises and their service and technology providers with data-enhanced machine translation and language data solutions. He is a language industry pioneer and visionary, who started his first translation company, INK, in The Netherlands in 1980. Jaap is a regular speaker at conferences and author of many articles about technologies, translation, and globalization trends.

Yasmin Vanya joined Sony Interactive Entertainment (PlayStation) in 2011 and has been the senior localization manager since 2014. She is responsible for managing localization of user interfaces for PlayStation products — PS4, PS3, PS VITA and recently PS5. Prior to that, Yasmin worked at Megnicode (an app development startup) and had a long tenure at Xilinx as localization manger and senior software developer. She has an MSCS and MBA in technology management. Yasmin is a lifelong learner of languages and can speak Burmese, Japanese, Persian, Urdu and basic Arabic. When she is not localizing, she moonlights as a project manager for Burma with Moonlight Humanity Foundation . Yasmin has contributed to the Bay Area community volunteering for more than 15 years through social projects including feeding the homeless, interfaith activities and serving on community-based, nonprofit organizations.

Tiffany Vela is the worldwide rich media services lead for HP ACG, Hewlett-Packard’s language and content services organization. In this role, she helped to pioneer the process of content transformation, ultimately developing a rich media services delivery team. The team now delivers graphics, animation, video and eLearning. Tiffany is responsible for developing and promoting HP ACG’s rich media services, as well as managing the worldwide team’s tools and processes. She has over 20 years of experience in software development, localization and rich media, and has worked in the United States and France.

At the helm of his own venture since September 2023, Eric Vogt has dedicated himself to building solutions that align capabilities with real world business objectives. He helps clients responsibly redefine their globalization strategies around a practical objectives. As a systems thinker, his leadership focuses on fostering a solutions-oriented mindset, ensuring every initiative aligns with a core value proposition shaped by practical realities, and are both ambitious and responsibly aspirational. His localization journey has focused on operational, technical, and solutions management, particularly in mature program environments with complex technical and logistical requirements.

Christine Vukusic is manager of the SAP Language Services North America team and has over ten years of translation and localization experience. Her team in Vancouver is responsible for the translation of SAP business analytics products as well as internal corporate translation requests in over 25 languages. This diverse team of project managers, language quality specialists, terminologists and developers collaborate to provide industry-leading translation technologies and processes globally across SAP. Prior to joining SAP, Christine worked as a trainer, technical writer and immigration officer. Outside of work, Christine plays soccer and enjoys attending contemporary theatre and camping in this beautiful province.

Diane Wagner is a member of the Translators without Borders advisory board.

Henry Wang is the executive vice president of UTH International. He oversees the company’s language technological solution innovation and operations. Previously, Henry was president of WordTech International and CEO of GlocalExpert International, both of which were among the top five language and globalization service providers in China. Prior to that, he was vice president of Dextrys, Inc., a leading IT outsourcing service provider in China. Under his leadership, Dextrys topped the 2008 Brown-Wilson Group Black Book of Outsourcing’s list in the highly competitive localization and language service outsourcing industry. Prior to his position at Dextrys, Henry was a professor of linguistics at Shandong University of Technology in China.

Peng Wang has been teaching, researching and practicing localization on three continents. She is the convener for EDUinLOC, a part-time professor at the University of Ottawa, and a freelance conference interpreter with the Translation Bureau of the Canadian government. Peng began conducting corpus-based translation studies at the University of Liverpool and later she worked in the Corpus Research Lab at Northern Arizona University. She is an expert in approaching technology in the context of culture and humanities. Peng’s current research interests include human learning vs. machine learning, machine translation risk management, terminology and multilingual data analysis.

Christian Weih studied English literature and linguistics at the University of Mannheim, Germany. As chief sales officer at Across Systems, he provides customers with advice on language technology, translation workflows and integrated solutions such as for translation-oriented authoring.

Adam Wooten is an experienced localization industry executive and associate professor in the Translation & Localization Management graduate program at MIIS, the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey. He has previously headed up translation operations for various companies in California and Utah, including AccuLing, which he co-founded in 2013. Adam has been a columnist for MultiLingual magazine, a frequent speaker on localization topics, and a consultant for companies that want to “level up” in translation technology and AI.

Scott Yancey is the CEO and cofounder of Cloudwords, a cloud-based translation automation platform. Recognizing a need to speed up and simplify the process of content localization, Scott cofounded Cloudwords to help companies accelerate content globalization at scale, aiming to reduce the cost, complexity and turnaround time required for the localization of all marketing content. Prior to Cloudwords, he was a key architect on the Salesforce platform and applications.

Leslie Yewell has more than 15 years of progressive experience in direct sales, channel sales, business development, marketing and program management of innovative localization and translation services. His enterprise clients include preeminent global brands and Fortune 500 leaders in technology, manufacturing, learning and travel, as well as consumer products and services.

Smith Yewell cofounded Welocalize with his wife Julia in 1997, building it to one of the top ten localization firms in the industry. Both Smith and Welocalize have been recognized in many ways including the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year award, Deloitte & Touche’s “Technology Fast 500″ for 13 consecutive years and the Inc. 500/5000 award for ten consecutive years. Smith holds a BA in English from Tulane University. Prior to starting the company, he served in the US Army as a field artille