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.

Carolina Arias has 15 years of experience in the translation industry and heads the European life sciences sales team at RR Donnelley. She provides specialized language solutions to pharmaceuticals, contract research organizations and medical devices and biotechnology companies.

Carmen Avilés Suarez is the manager of localization at Agilent Technologies, Inc. Her desire to explore new areas moved her from a BS in molecular biology to the localization industry. Carmen brings over seven years of experience in localization project management. She and her global team are currently focused on marketing content of key strategic customer-focused communications for both the chemical analysis and life sciences divisions of Agilent. Carmen is currently leading initiatives for customers across all the different regions Agilent covers, working on terminology management, branding, asset management and operational efficiencies.

Rahel Ann Bailie is a results-driven strategic consultant. She is an ISTC Fellow, an STC Fellow, an industry author, and has tremendous depth and breadth of experience in operationalizing content. Rahel has a strong track record of developing successful digital content projects, tackling the complexities of managing content to be able to scale content across products and multiple languages when faced with complex content ecosystems.

Michaela Bartelt-Krantz is senior localization director at EA, heading up all worldwide localization functions including translation, recordings, vendor management, testing and engineering for the video game developer and publisher. Originally a translator by education, she looks back at 15 years of experience in the game localization industry. Her current focus is shaping the strategic direction of localization in the company’s shift to online service models.

Diego Bartolome is the founder of sintetic.ai, a start-up that helps companies achieve more with Generative AI.

Herbert Bauer, a native German with degrees in German and English from the Universities of Regensburg, Germany, and Boulder, Colorado, started a successful professional translation business in 1989. He came to SDL in 1995 and has shaped its localization business as a project manager and testing manager. Herb developed the Colorado Test Lab as an internal quality assurance organization and independent service for companies seeking outsourced localization testing. Back in Germany since 2014, he is using his talents as business consultant, to help SDL’s clients find solutions for their international business challenges.

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.

Olga Beregovaya has over twenty years of experience in language technology, natural language processing (NLP), machine learning (ML), global content transformation, and AI data development and is passionate about growing businesses through driving change and innovation. She started her career in language technology building lexicons and rules for rule-based machine translation, gradually expanding her expertise into other broader applications of NLP and ML to enterprise translation workflows. Olga has served as president of AMTA, currently serves as a vice president and technology program sponsor for Women in Localization, and as an advisor for Engineering Leadership at California State University, Chico. She received her MA in linguistics/Germanic studies at UC- Berkeley and MA/BA in linguistics from St. Petersburg State University.

Miguel Bernal-Merino believes passionately in great quality game localization and has been working nonstop to raise awareness of issues within the game and localization industries as well as academia and translation studies. He is convinced that research into these topics will improve quality, player satisfaction, turnover and return on investment. Miguel holds a doctorate in the localization of video games and is currently lecturing at the University of Roehampton in London. He is a sought-after speaker and prolific author on audiovisual translation and game localization. Miguel was instrumental in the creation of the Localization Summit within the Game Developers Conference and is one of the advisors. He is also a member of the International Game Developers Association and cofounder of the Game Localization Special Interest Group.

Almudena Bernardos has spent over four years building the localization department at Airbnb. She is currently focused on creating the localization strategy and operations for emerging markets worldwide.

George Bina has more than 15 years of experience in working with XML and XML-related technologies, and contributes to a number of XML related open-source projects. He is one of the founders of Syncro Soft, the company that develops oXygen XML Editor.

With 25 years at Microsoft, Sue Bishop has shipped more than two dozen consumer software titles, working primarily in the design, user experience and localization spaces. Five years ago, following her love of v1 projects and desire to turn traditional processes on their ear, she joined the GlobalART team to help develop their next generation of tools. As a result, GlobalART has entered into a unique supplier relationship which has resulted in a more time and cost efficient end-to-end localization and print production process.

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.

Konstantine Boukhvalov is the operations manager of software engineering services with over 25 years of industry experience and 20 years at Experis, ManpowerGroup (formerly COMSYS/ASET). Over the years, he has developed a passion for developing and executing solutions for integrating technology and language for diverse global requirements. For over a quarter of a century Konstantine has been successfully supporting implementation and delivery of high-quality products and solutions for federal and commercial clients including Qualcomm, Discovery Channel, Microsoft, DELL, Ford Motors, SAIC, Department of Defense, Department of State, DTRA, Department of Health and other US Government agencies.

Daniel Brockmann is director of product management at SDL, having joined the company in February 1994. Early on he worked as a training and support specialist, sales engineer and documentation specialist, among other roles at the fast-growing company. Daniel also played a vital role in etablishing the worldwide TRADOS operations by training the various emerging TRADOS offices on TRADOS’ software solutions. Today, his team product-manages a wide range of applications for translators, project managers and terminologists: the translation productivity environment SDL Trados Studio, the terminology management suite SDL MultiTerm, the collaboration solution SDL Studio GroupShare and the app store platform SDL Open Exchange. He also contributes to translation productivity capabilities in SDL’s cloud-based platform Language Cloud.

Richard Brooks is the owner and CEO of UK-based language service provider, K International. He holds an MBA from Cranfield University and is a director of the Association of Language Companies. Richard has completed and contributed to numerous educational programs in Europe, the United States and Asia, and cowritten several publications on topics of interest. His academic interests lie around entrepreneurism and international leadership development. Richard’s dream, and that of his company, is to create a world without language barriers. He is an experienced professional in the translation industry, much respected for his business insight and acumen, and as such has become a renowned and popular international conference and event speaker — his open, passionate and honest style, combined with his dry and entertaining sense of humor keeps his audiences thoroughly engaged in his chosen topic.

Katherine (Kit) Brown-Hoekstra is an STC fellow and former STC society president, a certified trainer for the STC Certified Professional Technical Communicator (CPTC) program and a member of the Colorado State University Media Hall of Fame for the Department of Journalism. She is an experienced consultant with over 25 years of experience in technical communication, much of it working with life sciences companies and localization teams. As principal of Comgenesis, LLC, Kit provides consulting and training to her clients on a variety of topics, including localization, content strategy and content management. She speaks at conferences worldwide and publishes regularly in industry magazines. She recently edited The Language of Localization for the Content Wrangler and XML Press.

Johnny Campbell is the founder and CEO of Social Talent, the world’s largest online recruitment training company with over 800 clients in more than 70 countries. He worked as a financial recruiter from 1998 until he set up Social Talent five years ago, and to this day loves trying to find impossible-to-find people. Today he says that he “recruits vicariously” through the nearly 10,000 sourcing ninjas that his company has trained. Johnny is married with three sons and says the secret to maintaining his high energy levels is plenty of sugar and several overseas speaking engagements where he can get a good night’s sleep in a hotel.

David Čaněk is the founder and CEO of Memsource, a software company providing cloud translation technology based in Prague, Czech Republic. He is a graduate in translation and comparative studies, received his education at Charles University, Prague, Humboldt University in Berlin, and the University of Vienna. David’s professional experience includes product management and business development roles in software and translation industries. He has delivered a number of presentations on innovation and trends in the translation industry including the growing use of machine translation post-editing and cloud translation software.

Alessandro Cattelan is chief operating officer at Translated.net, one of the first and largest internet-based translation companies. He is an experienced top manager in the translation industry with a strong focus on technology, automation and process optimization. Having worked in translation since 2004, Alessandro has hands-on experience in all aspects of the industry, from freelance translation to executive roles. He is also responsible for product management and strategy for MateCat, the open source online computer-assisted translation tool developed by Translated.net.

Konrad Chmielewski has been in the translation industry since 2006. He is a social selling evangelist and XTRF’s head of sales. Before that, Konrad worked at Argos Multilingual, one of Poland’s largest language service Providers. His focus is and has always been on innovation and execution.

Alan Clark heads up the European Office Product Marketing team, based near London, UK.  The team manages the product life-cycle of the Office portfolio, approx 250,000 annual installs across Europe to businesses large and small.  As part of his role, Alan is also managing the translation of product collateral to support the portfolio in Europe, and the creation of sales training and tools that support the various direct and indirect routes to market that Xerox sell through. Alan has worked for Xerox for 25 years and holds an BEng (Hons) from University West of England, Bristol, UK.

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).

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.

Laura Cramb heads the global engineering organization for Microsoft Bing, delivering globalization, marketization and localization, as well as product development specifically for international markets. With 15 years at Microsoft in a variety of roles in the US and UK, Laura came to this role last year after heading the engineering fundamentals team for the Microsoft Information Platform and Experiences team. Other roles include technical integration manager for an acquisition, and international quality for Bing, Maps, Speech and Augmented Reality. Her belief is there is always a better way to do things through partnerships, passion and technology.

Orla Creaven has eight years of localization experience in program management and sales on the both client and language service provider sides. She is passionate about the promotion of technology for process efficiencies to create space for focus on quality and improving access to language services for everyone.

Romulus Crisan is a passionate and trustworthy software developer who guides other developers to be successful in working with frameworks and application programming interfaces. He’s a problem solver with expertise spanning a significant number of different subject areas such as translation, finance and digital media. Romulus’ constant curiosity keeps him abreast of new technologies and gadgets, which he loves to read about, learn about and of course experiment on.

Simone Crosignani is the CEO of Jinglebell, an audio production and video game localization company based in Italy. Simone started his career in the game industry working as a journalist for 15 years before moving to the PR department of Sony Computer Entertainment. At Sony he handled enthusiast and online media, working on the launch campaigns of PlayStation Portable, PlayStation 3 and over 100 games. In 2006 Simone moved to Binari Sonori, a localization company now part of Keywords Studios. In 2016 he joined Jinglebell. From 2013 to 2020 Simone has been the vice-chair of the International Game Developers Association localization group.

Muntsa Cuchí is the global sales director and member of the marketing committee with CPSL. She has over 20 years of experience in the localization industry, having started as a translator and interpreter and later moving into management roles in operations and technology. For the past ten years she has managed sales and marketing. Muntsa holds a degree in translation and interpreting, a master’s in sales and marketing and an MBA. She is passionate about facilitating good communication to establish and reach common goals between team members, between departments, and between clients and their international target markets.

Tabea De Wille is a lecturer in the Department of Computer Science and Information Systems at the University of Limerick, where she teaches localization, internationalization, and translation technology. She previously worked in games localization.

Anne-Cécile Dousson-Lhéritier is a manager of content management at Amazon. Her strengths and focus areas are process optimization, business efficiency, and lately data forecasting. Prior to joining Amazon in 2019, she gained professional credentials by building and running the content department of GetYourGuide GmbH, a Berlin-based travel unicorn. Anne-Cécile started her career at translation agencies and tech companies in Silicon Valley. Her content and business strategies, localization expertise, and technical innovations are the basis of her thought leadership. Anne-Cécile is an occasional contributor to MultiLingual magazine and industry conferences, and also participated in the localization community expansion by managing the Women in Localization, Germany chapter.

Catherine Dove is the senior director of localization at Z-Axis Tech Solutions, a global provider of consulting, localization and IT services. She is responsible for designing and implementing localization quality strategies for clients looking for the best possible localization quality in alignment with their in-country stakeholders, and with optimal process and cost efficiency. Prior to joining the vendor side, she managed quality operations on the client side for over ten years, at PayPal and i2 technologies.

Formerly of Memsource, where he collaborated on a big data program, Konstantin Dranch runs translationrating.ru, a ranking and research blog for language service providers (LSPs) in Russia and Ukraine. He currently collaborates with the ATC association to survey LSPs in the United Kingdom, and with CNET in France. Konstantin is one of the creators of national translation conferences: Translation Forum Russia and Ukrainian Translation Industry Conference.

Katrin Drescher is a senior manager at the globalization department at Symantec and is responsible for global content and its efficient delivery to market. She has worked in the localization industry for the past 16 years and has been a regular presenter of Symantec’s innovative localization strategies at LocWorld and TAUS.

Loïc Dufresne de Virel, a 20-year industry veteran, is currently the localization strategist with Intel’s in-house localization team. On top of managing advanced localization projects involving language models and multilingual speech recognition engines, Loïc also has direct ownership for functional areas such as innovation and business operations. In particular, he is the sponsor of a recent initiative to deploy a localization-focused enterprise service bus, making it easy and efficient for customers across Intel Corporation to access localization capabilities provided by his team, today and in the future.

Jeannette Eichholz leads the global ultrasound documentation team for GE Healthcare-Ultrasound, a collaborative team located in nine different countries. She manages the component content management system, plans its reuse strategy, collaborates with the other writers to create content, single sources content and oversees translating this content into 33 languages. Jeannette has been a technical communicator since 1986, working as a technical communicator with GE Healthcare, Thomson Reuters Beta Systems and Compuware.

Christophe Eyraud is part of the translation technology solutions team at Semantix. He is currently working on the implementation of Memsource and machine translation within the company. Christophe started in the industry in 2000. Curious about tools and processes, and eager to find better methods for working, he quickly moved from being a translator to becoming a solution finder. Today he is advising all parties involved in the supply chain with emphasis on terminology, localization and quality. Christophe holds a degree in translation from the Stendhal University, Grenoble, France.

Now based in Zurich, Florian Faes previously spent over eight years working in Asia, stationed in Singapore, Hong Kong and Shanghai. Before launching Slator in 2015, he was with CLS Communication as head of Asia where he was part of group management during the trade sale to Lionbridge. Slator is the most up-to-date source of industry news covering language services and technology. Headquartered in Zurich, Slator runs an editorial desk in Manila and has a presence in Singapore

André Faure has over 18 years dedicated to the digital entertainment industry. He is a main executives in the LatAm games’ landscape. André has localized and launched over 100 products including software, hardware, media and services. He has been an executive for companies such as Microsoft, Tectoy, Qualcomm, AeriaGames and GameHouse and had gone full circle in the industry on leadership roles with complete responsibility over key metrics, marketing, DCM, EBITDA and profitability. André currently acts as the CEO of GamePlan, a 360 consultancy for companies willing to do business in Latin America, and is also Games’ Localization mentor and certified instructor for ABRATES (Brazilian Association of Translators and Interpreters).

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.

Tomi Fitzsimmons is the senior business program manager accountable for localization and digital production services under the global marketing operations’ marketing service centers at Microsoft. Tomi is currently building enterprise-scale localization services for Microsoft’s bold new OneLoc initiative, which is designed to support the company’s push toward modern marketing. This endeavor involves standardizing tools, processes and methods across Microsoft’s vast and varied marketing teams in a centralized model, thus creating massive operational and cost efficiencies, all while allowing her customers to maximize their marketing results and localization return on investment. After assuming her current role in 2012, Tomi architected and operationalized the first centrally-managed localization and digital operations services at Microsoft, growing the customer portfolio from a single stakeholder to a portfolio of 22 unique, global marketing programs throughout the company. The program’s infrastructure is designed to provide virtually limitless production scale, and includes a services model to support the unique needs and nuances of her customers.

Klaus is a terminology aficionado who helps global companies harmonize and control their multilingual data and content. His company Kaleidoscope provides the collaborative workflow platform Quickterm, which manages, distributes and enforces corporate terminology. Quickterm is integrated into all major translation management systems, MT engines and more recently GenAI platforms, making it the central enterprise terminology hub.

Monica Foresi is the director of localization quality at Expedia Inc., a leading company in the online travel industry. She is responsible for the quality strategy of the localization department and manages a team of over 70 people worldwide, all of whom are committed to provide the best localization services from translation to authoring.

Suzanne Frank is the vice president of global enablement at Vistatec. She works across the Vistatec global sales team to make sure that the sales team is trained on the chosen sales methodologies and has the tools necessary for success. Suzanne also works with the larger account programs within the Vistatec account portfolio.

Federico Garcea and his team are responsible for all machine translation services and applications offered by Microsoft for text and speech translation, such as Bing Translator, Skype Translator and Microsoft Translator apps for all smartphones. He has over 15 years of experience building large-scale online services, and collaborates daily with scientists and engineers across the company to bring the latest research results to business partners and consumers.

Patrick Gellé runs the Microsoft Dynamics International Engineering organization where he oversees globalization and localization for Dynamics enterprise resource planning and customer relationship management products. He is a 24-year Microsoft localization veteran. Prior to Dynamics, Patrick held the same responsibilities in the Server and Tools division (now Cloud and Enterprise) and in the Developer division. He has a strong track record of spearheading continued engineering and business innovations. Back in 2003, Patrick pioneered and developed the use of machine translation, translation wikis, localization engineering system automation and community localization, and since 1999 has adopted an innovative centralized single multilingual localization and test vendor model. He has been a senior member of the Microsoft International Leadership team since 2002. Patrick holds a BS in electrical engineering and a BA in business, both from the University of Orleans, France.

Shulamit Gilan was born in Israel, graduated from Tel Aviv University in French language and culture and musicology. She joined ManpowerGroup in 1985 where she assumed different roles and responsibilities, mainly as vice president of sales and marketing. During the past four years, Shulamit has developed the company’s service portfolio, streamlined processes, improved service levels, opened new business units and promoted integration of technological tools and platforms.

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.

Orly González Kahn is a language specialist at Google, ensuring all products speak directly to users across Spanish-speaking Americas. She holds an MA in translation from El Colegio de México and a BA in modern languages and literatures from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Orly has published work on on literary self-translation as well as the history of translation in the Hispanic world.

Ed Griffiths has over 20 years of experience in programming, workflow and digital media. In his current role he liaises with Microsoft GlobalART to optimize its localization workflows, working with Spark’s Software Development team to deliver best-in-class solutions to Microsoft enterprise scale. After starting programming a ZX Spectrum, then migrating to internet systems in the early 1990s, Ed has delivered localization and workflow solutions for Disney, Universal and 20th Century Fox, publishing workflow and subscription systems for EMAP, Haymarket and Thomson Reuters, and payment processing and domain name systems for global clients. He is passionate about using technology to solve business problems.

Gavin Grimes has spent almost 20 years in the localization industry across a number of senior leadership roles. Before joining Welocalize, he worked as part of the engineering and product teams for both IBM and AOL. Gavin was based for a number of years in China heading up the Welocalize offices in both Beijing and Jinan. Recently he has returned back to Ireland to head up Welocalize Ireland. He is looking forward to welcoming his many friends from the industry to his home town of Dublin.

Siobhán Harding is the founder of her own consulting company, Skeyne Global. She has worked in the localization industry since 1998 in Irish and US offices at Microsoft, in several localization disciplines across four major company divisions. Siobhán moved to Silicon Valley in 2014 to work as a group program manager for PayPal’s globalization team, helping them split from eBay in 2015 and release their mobile consumer app into 203 markets in early 2016. Her skills include managing large-scale localization supply chains; global compliance expertise; global strategy, especially in emerging and frontier markets; and agile localization methodologies.

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.

Bruno Herrmann has more than 25 years of experience in international product, content, and customer experience leadership within large organizations and startups, and in various industries such as technology, market research, business intelligence, and life sciences. Until early June 2022, he was the director of localization operations at IQVIA, creating and leading an international team of more than 150 hub-based project managers, content design experts, vendor managers, and internal linguists in the US, LATAM, EMEA, Greater China and APAC. From 2003 to 2019 Bruno had roles of increasing responsibility in marketing, business operations, and product leadership at The Nielsen Company, including digital globalization leader between 2008-2019 where he was responsible for global content creation, localization, testing, certification, and delivery, product management, and international customer experiences. Before joining Nielsen, he managed online globalization programs at HP and content operations including localization at Compaq and Digital Equipment Corporation. Prior to joining Digital Equipment Corporation, Bruno worked in marketing communication and localization startups, taking part in major international projects for high-profile technology clients. He has been a practitioner, change agent, thought leader, and strategist in data-driven and client-first information, transformation, and product management, both in the offline and online world. Bruno is a regular speaker, panelist, moderator, and workshop leader during conferences and events around the world.

Ron Hewitt is the portfolio manager for Canada localization at Z-Axis Tech Solutions, a global provider of consulting, localization and IT services. Prior to joining Z-Axis, Ron managed the localization engineering department with SDL Canada for over 15 years. He worked with Fortune 500 companies as well as regional clients to provide localization expertise, applying industry technologies to solve their translation challenges for software products, human resource tools and website/application needs.

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.

Nadira Hofmann is a language technology expert and certified French to English translator. Working with STAR since 2000, she has over 16 years of experience in language technology support, training and consulting for Transit/TermStar NXT. Nadira’s primary responsibility is for STAR CLM (corporate language management) and statistical machine translation.

Birgit Hoppe is a certified process manager and technical translator graduate with intercultural sociology endorsements. She started in language technology more than 20 years ago as a translation manager. Birgit’s interest in optimizing processes led her through computer-assisted translation support and training toward translation process design and consulting including lecturing and participating in standardization projects. One outstanding project spanned the implementation of an integrated corporate language management landscape from authoring quality assurance via terminology up to automated translation management for the BMW Service. Her current position of business development manager at STAR Group covers the entire area of corporate language management in order to achieve efficient and customer-oriented processes.

Marina leads a talented team responsible for designing and maintaining efficient localization delivery pipelines. Her work provides strategic support to our incredible team and partners as we continue to push the boundaries of localization in the gaming industry.

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.

Sabina Jasinska is an international marketing leader with experience in managing global marketing and operations teams and activities for top language service providers Donnelley Language Solutions, SDL and Welocalize. Her specialization is driving growth in the rapidly evolving translation industry by capitalizing on regulatory changes and marketing trends. Sabina is currently leading global sales and marketing teams for a digital agency specialized in marketing automation for financial services companies. One of her passions is building communities — that’s why she dedicated her time as a member of the board of directors of GALA, Translation Commons and the advisory board of  The Localization Institute. Sabina is also an active member of the largest grassroots movement in Poland, campaigning for the preservation of parks and historical monuments.

Nandan Jha has found himself among great software testing teams mostly because of good luck and sheer coincidence, at times contributing toward superstar products such as Adobe Photoshop. During his 17-year journey, Nandan has learned to test various types of software and has worked with small startups to big multinational corporations such as EMC. Currently he helps ship international versions of Adobe software products while still learning the finer nuances of globalization, internationalization and localization. Nandan is based in Noida, India, and when he is not testing, he loves driving long distances, mostly to the Himalayas with his family.

Łukasz Kaleta if the XTRF superhero who has the power to choose which features go in or get out of the system development pipeline. He began in 2009 as a support specialist and is now the product owner. Łukasz works with all departments on the system road map and sets priorities for current developments.

Maria Kania has worked in the localization industry for over 20 years, holding various roles including sales director, account manager, quality ISO manager, and business development manager. Maria is very active in the localization community as a presenter and localization activist. She currently holds the role of board member for strategic global sponsorship. Since 2017, Maria has been leading a team of ten account managers at Translations.com who serve large enterprise clients mostly from fashion retail, travel and hospitality, and other verticals. She is a Polish-Canadian native and has been living in Barcelona, Spain for 15 years.

Terukazu Konishi serves as director of sales, Europe, at TOIN Corporation. He has worked in localization and translation for nearly two decades, building sales and marketing teams and facilitating business growth and customer relationships for some of the largest language service providers. Terukazu also has a strong background in information technology and business consulting, and he has extensive business experience around world. Prior to working in the localization industry, Terukazu served at IBM Japan for more than a decade as a software engineer and account manager helping large clients in various industries.

Vassilis Korkas is the COO and a cofounder of lexiQA. Following a 15-year academic career in the UK, in 2015 he decided to channel his expertise in translation technologies, technical translation and reviewing into a new tech company. At lexiQA he is involved with content development, product management and business operations.

As service owner for cloud translation at SAP, one of the world’s leading business software enterprises, Anke Kortenbruck is responsible for organizing the translation of the full portfolio of SAP cloud products. She heads a team of account and delivery managers, project managers and quality engineers. Prior to her current role, Anke worked in product translation and coordination for enterprise resource planning at SAP. Before joining SAP eight years ago, Anke worked at a single-language vendor specializing in IT translation. In addition to this, she is a university lecturer who has been teaching courses on translation tools and technical writing for more than ten years. Anke holds a degree in applied language studies and translation from the University of Mainz (Germersheim) in Germany. Sessions

Lilian Lai is a globalization project manager of IBM Tivoli products. She has more than ten years of experience in globalization testing, including globalization verification test and the translation verification test. Lilian has also worked in globalization project management and translation management.

Natalia Lankina started her career at Palex in 2008 as a project manager and is now an account manager for the company’s key customers. With nine years of experience in the industry, she focuses mostly on complex multilingual localization projects. Natalia studied math and cybernetics at Tomsk State University, and translation and intercultural communication at Tomsk Polytechnic University. Apart from being a localization professional, Natalia is an athlete in the World Dance Sport Federation and a happy mother of two little sons.

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.

Annette Lawlor is the CEO of Lion People Global, driving growth in the language industry through executive search/strategic staffing/corporate development and mergers and acquisitions. She is passionate about “people first”, honesty, personal and employee well-being.

Wouter Leeuwis has worked in localization for over 20 years in various positions on both the buyer and the supplier sides. For the past ten years he has been senior localization project manager at Waters Corporation, where, among other things, he is responsible for the implementation and administration of localization tools and technologies.

Gary Lefman is a chartered engineer, internationalization evangelist and educator, passionate about software globalization. He is a Fellow and chair of the British Computer Society, the Chartered Institute for IT, with nearly two decades of authority and leadership in software localization. Gary gained his master of science in multilingual computing and localization from the Localisation Research Centre (University of Limerick), where he is now a visiting lecturer. He is a STEM ambassador and Code Club leader, enthusing children across England in the subjects of science, engineering and computational thinking. Talk to Gary about internationalization and continuous localization.

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.

Originally from London but now living in the Netherlands, Karen Loughrey has been working in localization since 2008. With a background in content creation and management, she’s passionate about global content strategy and giving Spil Games’ huge international user base the best possible experience.

Ilaria Marforio holds a master’s degree in international communication. She joined Google in 2008 as a sales representative and moved into a program management role across diverse verticals and product offerings. Ilaria has recently taken on people management within the language services organization, where she currently leads the MED and Americas regions.

Anca Marica is a localization professional with seven years of experience in the video games industry. She has held various positions within the Ubisoft localization department, from quality control localization team lead to project manager. Currently, Anca is handling localization quality topics, process improvement and vendor management, working closely with localization project managers to ensure localized games meet Ubisoft standards. She holds a BA in English and Spanish philology, a Master degree in international studies and an MS degree in project management.

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.

Luciana Martins Franco is a senior international engineering lead in the Microsoft Dynamics International Engineering organization. Luciana and her team are responsible for the Dynamics AX (Enterprise Resource Planning) product internationalization, partnering with the Microsoft engineering teams on enabling product world-readiness, driving international scenarios implementation and delivering the translated versions of the products. Her team also creates solutions to support the Dynamics ISVs and partner translation scenario. Luciana has four years of experience with Dynamics product internationalization and 19 years of experience on the localization space across different Microsoft product lines and roles. She specializes in world readiness, international scenarios, custom localization processes, agile localization and enabling solutions for partner/community localization. Luciana holds a BA in computer science.

Gráinne Maycock is the chief revenue officer of Acolad, a renowned sales leader, and revenue enabler in the language and content services industry. Working with Acolad since 2013, the Irish-born leader has 25+ years of experience driving revenue and go-to-market strategies, focusing on removing language and technology barriers for successful international growth for Acolad’s customers worldwide. With a remit that covers revenue, marketing, solutions, pre-sales, sales ops, sales academy, and sales enablement her focus is on AI transformation strategies for group and client success.

Lisa McCabe has been in the high-tech industry since the mid-1980s and has held a variety of positions supporting all aspects of the software development process. She is currently program director of the IBM Global Foundations Technology team responsible for IBM’s contributions to the Common Locale Data Repository (CLDR) and International Components for Unicode (ICU) as well as the internationalization of strategic emerging technologies. Lisa is also the product manager for IBM Globalization Pipeline, a service on Bluemix, IBM’s cloud platform-as-a-service. Globalization Pipeline enables application developers to integrate translation into their development and continuous delivery infrastructure. Formerly, Lisa managed localization for IBM’s Analytics division. She lives in the UNESCO town of Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, a historic sea-bound town with a tremendous cultural pedigree. Lisa maintains a “secret” life in literature and owns and rides her cheval canadien in her spare time.

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.

Daniel McGowan is a localization professional with over 20 years of experience in all aspects of localization and internationalization. He manages FireEye’s Endpoint Globalization effort, enabling FireEye to bring global-ready products to market. Daniel has led localization tools development efforts and provided internationalization and localizability support for development of new products and features. He has been involved in all aspects of the localization industry from testing to translation, desktop publishing to engineering, vendor and project management. Having worked extensively on both the client and vendor sides of the industry, Daniel has a broad appreciation of stakeholder needs.

Ksenia Mezhenina is a senior editor at All Correct Games. She has been working in game localization for three years and edits translations for such companies as EA, Ubisoft, Gaijin Entertainment and others.

Josep Maria Moré is a partner in AMG Assessors, Corporate Advisors, which is based in Barcelona. He has helped directors and business owners of SMEs to improve their performance and achieve strategic goals focused on growth. Josep Marie’s professional experience includes defining and implementing strategic growth plans as well as leading subsequent merger and acquisition processes in several industries. He is also professor of corporate finance and strategic growth at different institutions and business schools worldwide. Josep Maria is an economist and holds an MBA from IESE Business School.

Sheila Morris manages the Keywords Dublin localization group. The group is 50 strong, made up of linguists and project managers with a focus on social and mobile games for leading publishers. Sheila has been with Keywords for four years and previously worked at Oracle where she led the translation project management function in their translation group.

Jon Mulder is a dynamic marketing leader with over 15 years of experience successfully delivering go-to-market plans that align with corporate revenue and margin objectives. He has demonstrated expertise in the mobile industry, including product definition, product marketing and customer engagement strategies. Jon is currently responsible for creating winning content strategies to engage Lenovo’s global customer and developer communities.

Andrea Nessi is partner at Vaccani, Zweig & Associates (VZ&A), an advisory firm supporting small and medium-sized enterprises and divisions of large corporates in their international growth strategies and merger and acquisition (M&A) activities. Before joining VZ&A, he worked for a major Swiss bank, then opened the Chinese business of an international consulting firm specialized in strategic partnering (licensing, distribution) and M&A. Andrea was also board member of the Swiss Chinese Chamber of Commerce. He holds a bachelor and a master of law from the Universities of Zurich and Hong Kong. Andrea is fluent in Italian, German, English, French and has good knowledge of Mandarin.

Ultan Ó Broin, director of applications user experience in EMEA, has worked in Oracle applications development in the US and EMEA since 1996. A passionate evangelist for the Oracle Applications Cloud user experience (UX), his charter covers strategic Oracle PartnerNetwork and customer-facing Oracle sales enablement. Ultan provides Oracle UX PaaS and SaaS competitive win differentiation, scaling a powerful Oracle Cloud message for a worldwide audience. He also maintains an up-to-the minute conversation with local markets on innovation and digital trends in technology.

Paul O’Dea has cofounded and help build several international companies, particularly in the technology sector. Since making the switch from entrepreneur to business advisor in 2000, he has worked with hundreds of CEOs in investor-backed companies. His passion is to help ambitious CEOs grow their early stage companies to over €25 million revenue internationally. Paul was the founder/director at Credo Group, a banking software company where he helped lead a great team to become a global market leader with over 60 major banking clients on five continents. Paul is the owner of Select Strategies, a business advisory practice that helps leadership teams make growth happen. He listens to and challenges management thinking to get to the heart of issues and delivers pragmatic experience-based advice.

Kevin O’Donnell is the fractional leader and advisor for international expansion and revenue growth at Global10x. He help B2B SaaS companies expand internationally, grow their international revenue and modernize their localization processes. He has 20+ years in product and international leadership roles at Microsoft, Dropbox, and Nitro.

Tony O’Dowd is the founder and chief architect of KantanMT.com, a cloud-based custom machine translation solutions provider. He is a serial entrepreneur and localization veteran with more than 25 years’ experience working in the localization industry. He has previously held senior positions at Lotus Development Corporation, Symantec Corporation, Corel Corporation and Alchemy Software Development, which he founded in 2000. Tony holds a BS in computer science from Trinity College Dublin, and a fellowship from the Localization Research Institute at the University of Limerick. He is currently a member of the governance board of the ADAPT Research Centre at Dublin City University.

Selçuk Özcan who has over five years of experience in the language industry, is one of the founders of Transistent Language Automation Services. He holds two degrees in mechanical engineering and translation studies. Selçuk has a keen interest in linguistics, natural language processing, language automation procedures, agile management and technology integration. He is mainly responsible for building high-quality production models including quality evaluation and deploying “train the trainers” model. Selçuk teaches computer-aided translation and total quality management at Yeni Yuzyil Universitesi, Translation and Interpreting Department in Instanbul.

Véronique Özkya has established herself as a prominent figure in the localization industry, demonstrating expertise and leadership across various professional roles. At Lionbridge and Moravia, she helped scale the businesses to become among the largest content services players in the industry. Post-Moravia, Véronique became CEO at Xplanation, and then at Argos Multilingual, where she played a pivotal role in shaping organizational strategies and fostering growth across sectors such as technology, life sciences, finance, and retail. She is a frequent public speaker on leadership, growth hacking, diversity, and inclusion. Véronique is a former GALA board chair.

Chiara Pacella is a language manager at Facebook where she covers a series of roles that span from linguistic support, translation quality assurance (QA), vendor management, training and crowd management. After an initial career as an in-house, vendor-side marketing and technical translator, linguistic tester and freelancer, she became involved in the broader localization industry then joined the Facebook team in early 2010 moving to the client-side. Chiara is now focusing on translation QA and language management and is still actively involved in crowd management at Facebook. In the past, Chiara was involved as a partner in the EU-funded MultilingualWeb Thematic Network, where she also acted as a speaker during their workshops. She holds a BA in translation and interpreting (Italian with English, Spanish and Portuguese) from the University of Trieste and an MA in applied translation studies from the University of Leeds (Italian with English and French).

Sergey Parievsky has been involved in globalization since 1989, after joining Autodesk in Moscow, Russia. Since then, he has worked for a number of companies in Silicon Valley, California, both on the vendor and client sides. Sergey has held globalization leadership positions at Zynga, Cisco Systems, BMC, Siebel and SimulTrans. Currently, he manages product globalization technology and operations at VMware. Sergey’s skills and interests in localization include innovations in localization technology, process and operations management, as well as international product and vendor management.

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.

Stefan Petrica joined the Ubisoft localization project management team four years ago and has managed various projects across several gaming platforms from mobile games to AAA titles. For the past two years, he worked on shipping Tom Clancy’s The Division into 20 languages, ensuring that the quality standards for localization, internationalization and culturalization were met. Stefan has a BS degree in quantitative economics and programming and a MS in project management.

Gerard Plante is the agile office lead for the European product delivery organization at Sage. His mission is to drive the agile agenda across Europe and manage the European product portfolio for Sage. Gerard is a PMI PMP certified project manager, and has over 19 years of project and program management experience with development and localization teams across the globe.

Dario Quondamstefano has been in the video game localization industry for quite some time. He started in 2008 as an Italian localization tester for Electronic Arts. Dario joined Wooga in 2012 and laid the groundwork for Wooga’s localization testing team. He recently moved to new adventures and is now one of the localization managers at Wooga. Dario is currently in charge of the preparation, execution and evaluation of the localization of Wooga games.

Gema Ramírez Sánchez made sure that she could mix her two passions: languages and computers. She holds a bachelor’s degree in translation and interpreting and a master’s degree in computer applications from the University of Alicante where she started her professional career as a computational linguist. Gema is the CEO of Prompsit, a language technology provider with a strong focus on tailored machine translation (MT) services. You will find her frequently running workshops and linguistic Olympiads. Gems is co-author of various research papers, an active developer of the Apertium MT platform and the vice president of ARTES Cultura y Ocio, an association for inclusive leisure for disabled and non-disabled people.

Rebecca Ray has focused on designing, testing, adapting and marketing software outside of the United States since 1980. She has managed worldwide product design, localization and marketing for successful products sold internationally by IBM, Netscape Communications, Remedy Systems, Symantec Corporation and Sun Microsystems. She is fluent in English, French and Spanish and proficient in Portuguese and Turkish. In her work at Common Sense Advisory, Rebecca’s primary focus is enterprise globalization, social media, multilingual SEO and global product development. Her other coverage areas include outsourcing, testing, multimedia localization and internationalization. A former Rotarian scholar and Silicon Valley veteran, Rebecca was most recently managing editor for the Localization Industry Standards Association. During her tenure, she oversaw all of the association’s research and publications. She also coauthored a book for global high-tech companies on doing business in the United States. Based in Turkey, she has lived and worked in Asia, Europe, the Middle East and Latin America for many years.

Antoine Rey, senior vice president, customer development at Argos Multilingual, started his career in localization in 1997 and has held various technical, sales, and management roles in the industry. His main area of focus is to consult, develop, and implement mature operational and business globalization models with clients across various industries. Antoine is a French native and holds a MS in information technology and a BA in international business and communications. He lives in Dublin, Ireland.

Peter Reynolds is CEO at memoQ and was previously Co-CEO. He has worked at Idiom, Berlitz GlobalNet, Bowne Global Solution and Lionbridge. Peter has worked with memoQ since 2008 and is one of the main architects of memoQ’s growth from startup to being leadership in the translation technology sector.

Peter has been actively involved in the development and promotion of standards for over a decade – he is an Irish expert to ISO TC 37 Committee. He holds and BSc and an MBA degree 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.

Dave Ruane started his 25-year localization industry journey in technology and solutions roles, followed by operations management, consultancy, and then designed globalization business solutions for enterprises. He is a regular moderator and speaker at industry events, and runs the Process Innovation Challenge at LocWorld. He is a self-confessed techie, based in coastal Spain and more often than not can be found near fly fishing water.

Achim Ruopp has been involved in enabling computers to process different languages and the translation business since the mid-1990s. After pursuing a master’s in computational linguistics with a thesis focusing on mining parallel corpora from the web he participated in a wide range of projects improving machine translation from a research perspective, but also practically integrating machine translation in the human translation process. Achim is aiming to share his knowledge, experience and latest developments in the field of machine translation to break down barriers in cross-language communication.

Soroush Saadatfar is a PhD candidate whose research focus is interoperability in localization workflows through contributing to the OASIS XLIFF standard’s enhancement. His standardized validation solution is to become an official part of the next version of the standard which is XLIFF 2.1.

Libor Safar is the vice president of growth at Argos Multilingual. He has localization and translation industry experience spanning over 20 years. Libor joined Moravia in 1995 and held various translation, production, sales, marketing and other management responsibilities in Europe and Japan during the company’s growth. Libor holds a master’s degree in electrical engineering from the Brno University of Technology, and an MBA from the Open University in the United Kingdom.

Ben Sargent has worked in the language services industry since 1989, serving in operations, consulting, and marketing roles at companies such as CSA Research, Lionbridge, iXL, Bowne Global Solutions and International Communications. He also helped to found and manage several venture-funded, high-tech startups. He also consults for Global 1000 brands and global technology vendors. He has lived in France and has traveled to China, Canada and Western Europe. Ben has formally studied French and earned a degree in music theory and composition in 1983.

Felix Sasaki joined the W3C in 2005 to work in the Internationalization Activity where he remained until March 2009. In 2012 Felix rejoined the W3C team as a fellow on behalf of DFKI (German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence). He was cochair of the MultilingualWeb-LT Working Group and coeditor of the Internationalization Tag Set (ITS) 2.0 specification. Felix is currently engaged in the LIDER project. His main field of interest is the application of Web technologies for representation and processing of multilingual information.

With over thirty years of experience in the localization industry, Roberto Sastre has played key roles in major language service providers, including EMEA vice president of sales and managing director. Hailing from the picturesque island of Jersey and raised in the vibrant culture of Mallorca, Roberto is now based in Dublin. He joined Translated in 2021; as part of the enterprise account management team, he focuses on creating world-class localization programs that combine the sensitivity of translators with the speed and capacity of machine translation. Trained in computer science, Roberto’s expertise lies in connecting global brands with diverse audiences around the world, bridging language and cultural divides.

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.

Martin Schneekloth has more than 20 years of experience in the localization industry and is a firm believer in internationalization best practices to achieve high-quality localized products. As globalization manager at RippleWorx, Martin is responsible for product strategy and direction as it pertains to internationalization, localization and quality. Along with his globalization management role, he manages localization into 35+ languages. Martin has obtained PMP certification along with a select number of localization professional certificates. He also holds a bachelor of business administration degree and a master of science degree in management.

Fleur Schut started working for TRADOS in 1997 and currently holds the position of business consultant for SDL’s Translation Productivity Division. She has a university background in translation, from the University of Groningen, Netherlands, and Institut Supérieur des Traducteurs et Interprètes in Brussels, Belgium. Over the years, Fleur has developed multiple skills and has built a large amount of knowledge in the sphere of language technologies. Her pragmatic approach to language complexities has proven valuable to many different companies around the world.

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.

Christian Stanke has been dedicated to localization technology and translation workflow automation for the past several years. He entered into this field from the product/developer/buyer side and therefore brings fresh and unique perspectives into this field. As the CEO and founder of Applanga, Christian oversees the strategical development of the organization, team building/recruiting and product vision. He is a frequent speaker on mobile app localization and globalization strategy.

Lisanne Steinle holds a degree in translation studies (Diplom-Übersetzerin) for English, French and German. She joined Brainlab in 2003 and has been working as an in-house translator and project manager. Lisanne is responsible for the localization of the Brainlab user documentation, software and corporate website for up to 26 languages. She is also involved in all strategic process changes for the technical writing and localization teams, such as the introduction of structured FrameMaker or currently a Content Management System.

At Translated, Michael Stevens is responsible for growth: finding interesting companies to work with and building a team that values the humans in the ever-growing world of automation. As cohost of The Global Podcast, he explores areas of the localization industry that spark his own curiosity and he then shares it with the industry at large. Over the years, Michael has studied languages, marketing, and searched deeply to understand the mind of God. He has worked successfully with two major language service providers and also consulted in software development. Michael lives in Seattle, Washington with his family.

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.

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.

Antonio Tejada joined the localization industry in 1992 after studying translation and interpreting at the University of Granada in Spain. His early involvement within the industry was as a language specialist, and he later managed one of the largest Spanish single language vendors (now SDL Spain), defining the language service provider in-country production model. In the late 1990s, Antonio helped international translation and publishing developing solutions for software localization, computer-assisted translation implementation and machine translation. He has combined a wealth of experience to the industry with his management and leadership capabilities, and is now language solutions director at Capita, where he is leading product development and solutions architecture.

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.

Elena Tischenko is a linguist and works as a localization engineer at Kaspersky Lab, one of the world’s largest cybersecurity companies. She previously worked as a quality assurance manager at a localization company, which has given her experience on both sides of the localization process.

Dmitry Ulanov has been involved in localization since 1998 and has risen through the ranks from a project manager to CTO. Now he is focused on automation of operations and also supervising the research and development department. Dmitry holds an MS degree and is an accredited internal auditor for ISO 9001 QMS.

Paola Valli is the product manager for the TAUS Quality Dashboard, an industry platform for statistics on translation, analysis of translation performance and benchmarking translation activity as well as quality. Paola coordinates the development of the broader TAUS DQF resources, such as the DQF API, DQF plugins and the reporting on the Quality Dashboard. She defines product requirements and is particularly interested in user experience and product design. Paola has been involved in the translation industry for almost ten years. She holds a European PhD and an MA in translation from the University of Trieste and further pursued her education with study visits and research stays at the University of Iowa, Copenhagen Business School and Saarland University where she focused on translation technologies and the translation process from a cognitive perspective. Paola also completed traineeships at Lionbridge, the European Parliament in Luxembourg and Translated in Rome. Prior to joining TAUS, she worked as a project manager at Lionbridge (formerly CLS 4-Text) in Berlin.

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.

Heidi Van Hiel studied Japanese at the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium, and at the Kansai University in Osaka, Japan. After graduating in 1995, she started working at a speech technology company where she was involved in the development of Japanese text-to-speech systems. After seven years of experience in speech technology, Heidi started working for the translation team of Yamagata Europe in 2002, where she was originally involved in general technical support and in the development of tools such as QA Distiller. Since 2010, she has been leading the Tools Development and Machine Translation team of Yamagata Europe.

Pablo Vazquez is a senior manager of localization at NetApp. He joined NetApp in 2014 to help the globalization organization strategically plan the next-generation enterprise localization process. Pablo has a strong focus in technology and has been an advocate for translation automation and streamlining the end-to-end content life cycle in the enterprise. Prior to NetApp, Pablo led machine translation strategy and development for EMC and Cisco.

Georgia Vidler is the coordinator of internationalization at Canva, Australia’s fastest-growing tech startup. With the help of her incredible team, Georgia is working to put the power of creation into the hands of billions of people this year by localizing Canva into at least 20 languages.

Anton Voronov has a PhD in economics and has held the position of innovations director at ABBYY Language Services since 2012. He is responsible for business development and the launch and growth of new products and services. Among them are SmartCAT, the first translation-automation platform with direct access to thousands of professionals worldwide, and a project on crowdsourcing the translation of Coursera courses, covering over 2.5 million words translated by 14,000 volunteers.

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

Karina Ward-Topp is EMEA marketing lead for Nitro Inc., and has over 11 years of experience in marketing across a variety of disciplines. She currently leads the EMEA marketing team and is responsible for all activities across the region, including Nitro’s localization activity and strategy. Karina’s primary goal with regard to localization is enhancing the customer journey and experience with Nitro.

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.

Anna Woodward Kennedy has dedicated the past 25 years of blood, sweat and tears to the localization industry and enjoyed every minute of it. She is currently operations director and cofounder at Chillistore Technologies, an innovative, lean and agile localization services company. Anna is also a cofounder of Scrum Ireland and is a certified safe agilist. Her passion for quality excellence and agile led her to implement a homegrown methodology for the management of localization services at Chillistore.

Ace Yamaguchi is the head of globalization at Dropbox. He leads the globalization team and is responsible on all dropbox.com platform offerings. Ace has gained his localization and internationalization experience from a number of companies including LinkedIn. During his tenure at LinkedIn, he led localization efforts for the first 21 languages, established a fully automated localization process and developed technology solutions to ensure that translated content is always shown to users.

Yan Yu established Spartan Software in 2008 with a vision to create a customer-centric technology company. Prior to Spartan, he was with Idiom Technologies, building and implementing WorldServer for customers. Yan is passionate about helping customers to achieve their goals.

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.

Andrzej Zydroń is CTO at XTM International and technical architect of XTM Cloud. He is one of the leading IT experts on localization and related open standards. Andrzej sits and has sat on many open standard technical committees. He has been responsible for the architecture of the word and character count GMX-V standard, as well as the revolutionary xml:tm. Andrzej is also head of the OASIS OAXAL technical committee.

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.

Carolina Arias has 15 years of experience in the translation industry and heads the European life sciences sales team at RR Donnelley. She provides specialized language solutions to pharmaceuticals, contract research organizations and medical devices and biotechnology companies.

Carmen Avilés Suarez is the manager of localization at Agilent Technologies, Inc. Her desire to explore new areas moved her from a BS in molecular biology to the localization industry. Carmen brings over seven years of experience in localization project management. She and her global team are currently focused on marketing content of key strategic customer-focused communications for both the chemical analysis and life sciences divisions of Agilent. Carmen is currently leading initiatives for customers across all the different regions Agilent covers, working on terminology management, branding, asset management and operational efficiencies.

Rahel Ann Bailie is a results-driven strategic consultant. She is an ISTC Fellow, an STC Fellow, an industry author, and has tremendous depth and breadth of experience in operationalizing content. Rahel has a strong track record of developing successful digital content projects, tackling the complexities of managing content to be able to scale content across products and multiple languages when faced with complex content ecosystems.

Michaela Bartelt-Krantz is senior localization director at EA, heading up all worldwide localization functions including translation, recordings, vendor management, testing and engineering for the video game developer and publisher. Originally a translator by education, she looks back at 15 years of experience in the game localization industry. Her current focus is shaping the strategic direction of localization in the company’s shift to online service models.

Diego Bartolome is the founder of sintetic.ai, a start-up that helps companies achieve more with Generative AI.

Herbert Bauer, a native German with degrees in German and English from the Universities of Regensburg, Germany, and Boulder, Colorado, started a successful professional translation business in 1989. He came to SDL in 1995 and has shaped its localization business as a project manager and testing manager. Herb developed the Colorado Test Lab as an internal quality assurance organization and independent service for companies seeking outsourced localization testing. Back in Germany since 2014, he is using his talents as business consultant, to help SDL’s clients find solutions for their international business challenges.

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.

Olga Beregovaya has over twenty years of experience in language technology, natural language processing (NLP), machine learning (ML), global content transformation, and AI data development and is passionate about growing businesses through driving change and innovation. She started her career in language technology building lexicons and rules for rule-based machine translation, gradually expanding her expertise into other broader applications of NLP and ML to enterprise translation workflows. Olga has served as president of AMTA, currently serves as a vice president and technology program sponsor for Women in Localization, and as an advisor for Engineering Leadership at California State University, Chico. She received her MA in linguistics/Germanic studies at UC- Berkeley and MA/BA in linguistics from St. Petersburg State University.

Miguel Bernal-Merino believes passionately in great quality game localization and has been working nonstop to raise awareness of issues within the game and localization industries as well as academia and translation studies. He is convinced that research into these topics will improve quality, player satisfaction, turnover and return on investment. Miguel holds a doctorate in the localization of video games and is currently lecturing at the University of Roehampton in London. He is a sought-after speaker and prolific author on audiovisual translation and game localization. Miguel was instrumental in the creation of the Localization Summit within the Game Developers Conference and is one of the advisors. He is also a member of the International Game Developers Association and cofounder of the Game Localization Special Interest Group.

Almudena Bernardos has spent over four years building the localization department at Airbnb. She is currently focused on creating the localization strategy and operations for emerging markets worldwide.

George Bina has more than 15 years of experience in working with XML and XML-related technologies, and contributes to a number of XML related open-source projects. He is one of the founders of Syncro Soft, the company that develops oXygen XML Editor.

With 25 years at Microsoft, Sue Bishop has shipped more than two dozen consumer software titles, working primarily in the design, user experience and localization spaces. Five years ago, following her love of v1 projects and desire to turn traditional processes on their ear, she joined the GlobalART team to help develop their next generation of tools. As a result, GlobalART has entered into a unique supplier relationship which has resulted in a more time and cost efficient end-to-end localization and print production process.

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.

Konstantine Boukhvalov is the operations manager of software engineering services with over 25 years of industry experience and 20 years at Experis, ManpowerGroup (formerly COMSYS/ASET). Over the years, he has developed a passion for developing and executing solutions for integrating technology and language for diverse global requirements. For over a quarter of a century Konstantine has been successfully supporting implementation and delivery of high-quality products and solutions for federal and commercial clients including Qualcomm, Discovery Channel, Microsoft, DELL, Ford Motors, SAIC, Department of Defense, Department of State, DTRA, Department of Health and other US Government agencies.