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.

Henri Broekmate is general manager of Lionbridge Technologies’ Asia business. He joined Lionbridge in April 2001 after serving as COO and SVP, eBusiness at TRADOS for almost five years. Henri has worked in the localization services and language technology business for 30 years. He holds a BA and MA (Cum Laude) from the Free University of Amsterdam and an MBA (With Distinction) from the Bradford University School of Management. Henri has lived, studied and worked in the Netherlands, United Kingdom, Republic of Ireland and United States.

As head of global platform development, James Carroll drives the architecture and development for all of GoDaddy’s global business and product platforms, including the systems that power our global marketing and eCommerce systems worldwide. Before joining GoDaddy in 2013, he was a senior vice president at Yahoo!, where he directed the company’s global research and development centers in China, India and the Middle East. James also oversaw Yahoo!’s content, social and membership platforms as well as the international delivery of all Yahoo! products and services worldwide. Prior to Yahoo!, he spent 13 years as general manager at Microsoft. While there, James managed the MSN international team and later, the Windows and Windows Live international teams.

Ann Chen is passionate about language and culture. After graduating in translation studies from Aston University, she became involved in the localization industry and for the past five years has worked with many global companies, providing innovative solutions with her insight into the Asian market.  Ann began as a project manager, then started and led the business development team in a Taiwanese localization company. She is now at Welocalize as a business development manager. Using a very customer-centric approach, her goal is to bring in new client brands for Welocalize in Asia.

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).

Claudia Di Lorenzo is passionate about languages, with more than ten years of experience in the translation industry. She has been a member of Translated since 2011, acting first as a project manager, then as a productive senior account manager with a very customer-centric approach. Claudia is responsible for account development and has been involved in the efficient development of end-to-end translation processes. She is now responsible for business development and has been involved in the efficient development of end-to-end translation processes for the main enterprise customers at Translated.com.

Dace Dzeguze is the Dynamic Quality Framework (DQF) product manager at TAUS, a resource center for global language and translation industries. She oversees the DQF product development, works with third party integrators and acts as product spokesperson at international events and conferences. Dace has eight years of experience in the industry, working as a project manager for language service providers in Riga and Amsterdam.

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.

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

Chip Gettinger is vice president global solutions consulting, SDL, managing a team that works with SDL customers in maximizing global content using SDL solutions. He has over 20 years’ experience in global publishing, content strategies, customer experience, business consulting, coaching and content management solutions. Chip works closely with industry organizations, partners and customers in technology solutions and deployment.

Alex Han (韩林涛) is a lecturer of the School of Translation and Interpreting, Beijing Language and Culture University (BLCU) and director of the International Center for Language Services, BLCU. Before joining BLCU, he received his master’s degree in computer-aided translation (CAT) from Peking University and worked as a project manager at LingoSail Technology, a Chinese provider of CAT tools. With rich experience on translation technology development and training, Alex is now teaching a CAT course and translation project management course at BLCU and is also one of two lecturers of Coursera course principles and practice of CAT. He is also the TAUS representative in China.

Guanqing Hao is the product manager of Beijing Lingosail Tech Co., Ltd. He received his master of translation and interpreting degree from Beijing Language and Culture University in 2016.  Guanqing is a coeditor of A Practical Guide to Translation Technology, which is a volume of the Language Service Competence Assessment and Testing series. He is also the second author of the published paper Terminology Management Technology in Modern Translation Collaboration.

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.

Gunnar Hojem has lived and worked in London since finishing his master’s degree in media and communication studies at Stockholm University in 2007. He joined Sony Interactive Entertainment in 2008, first working for the international software development team as an asset management coordinator then joining the localization services team as senior project manager in 2011. Over the years Gunnar has managed the localization of some of Sony’s biggest first party franchises such as Uncharted, The Last of Us, Infamous, Resistance and God of War.

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.

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.

Fulin Liao graduated from the University of Shanghai in science and technology, and is a leader in outsourcing management. He has proven track records in localization and globalization with over 10 years of experiences and a focus on consultation services to clients including globalization, internationalization, localization and translation, software development and testing, content management systems development, search engine optimization/search engine marketing, user experience design, crowdsourcing and business process outsourcing.

David Li is a cofounder and COO at Yicool International Cultural Development Co., Ltd. He graduated from the Central University for Nationalities and worked in the Russian Affairs department for China Metallurgical Group Corporation and China Translation & Publishing Corporation. Later, David worked as a journalist at the China Internet Information Center and engaged in the development of new media products. Since 2014, he has been working for Yicool and is responsible for the design of Yicool product lines, as well as translation services.

Huidan Liu is a chief engineer in the globalization department of Huawei. He is an expert at natural language processing. Huidan has experience with many languages such as Chinese, Mongolian, Tibetan, Uyghur and Korean. Currently he focuses on the processing of Myanmar to promote the localization of smartphones.

Emil Lu started working for the game localization industry in 2007 as a game text translator. Before joining Blizzard, he was responsible for the localization work of several games developed in China and shipped in North America and Europe. Thanks to the knowledge of localization and game publishing accumulated in those years, Emil was qualified to join one of the most talented and professional in-house localization teams in the world: Blizzard China. His job at Blizzard covered game text translation, localized audio recording, publishing and marketing text support, website construction support and so on. Emil participated in the localization work of many successful Blizzard projects such as World of Warcraft, Starcraft II and Hearthstone. Now he is working as the supervisor of the localization team, focusing more effort on resource management and team coaching.

Costanza Marinelli has a translation diploma, a political science degree, diplomatic studies and an MBA. Currently based in Tokyo, Costanza has 20 years of experience in localization project management for Medtronic, international human resources for Mallinckrodt Medical, market research for Sémaphore Conseil and recruitment in the localization industry for Larsen Globalization, first in Europe and in the Asia-Pacific region since the end of 2013.

Maxim Morkovkin is an experienced translator, blogger and public speaker. He has been deeply involved with Chinese-Russian and Chinese-English translation since 2010 and has lived and worked in China for seven years. Maxim previously worked at Wuhan Optics Valley BeiDou Holding Group Co., Ltd., and Shanghai Kingnet Technologies Co., Ltd. He has published articles, taught classes and spoken at conferences on a wide variety of Chinese-language related topics. He also acts as the Chinese language expert at different Russian radio stations. Maxim has a BS degree in Chinese language and an MS degree in business administration from Central China Normal University. He is also active in the field of translation automation tools and is focused on building relationships between SmartCAT and Chinese language service providers. In his free time, Maxim travels and practices martial arts. His life motto is: “Don’t be afraid to fail, be afraid not to try.”

Passionate about technology and people, Alex Muntyan is the Jedi of business processes automation. He has been in this field for more than seven years assisting a variety of organizations — from banks to media and scientific institutions — to deploy the technology and break new ground. At SmartCAT, Alex’s mission is to move customers to the light side of the force, help them hit their goals using the platform in the most impactful way and grow their business. When he has time, he lectures at European universities and spreads the word about cutting-edge translation automation technologies or plays ice hockey.

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.

Liu Qaing received a master’s degree in natural language processing from Peking University in 2013, a bachelor’s degree in computer science and technology from Wuhan University of Technology and a dual bachelor’s degree in English from Huazhong University of Technology. He now works as the technical director at Beijing WeTrans Technology Co., Ltd., maintaining the technical achitecture of the company’s products, managing the technical team, controlling technology trends and helping to make decisions.

Aeh Ratanavibhas is a language manager for Thai at Google, based in Singapore. Born and raised in Bangkok, she obtained her master’s degree in translation and interpretation from Chulalongkorn University. Before joining Google, Aeh worked in marketing for one of the biggest fast moving consumer goods companies. Having always been in a multicultural environment and having a strong knowledge of Southeast Asian consumers, Aeh understands how significant of a role localization is playing. In her own time, she enjoys cooking, traveling and photography.

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.

Fei Shen is a software engineer at IBM China Development Lab. For over seven years he has been working on the globalization tools development to support the software globalization process on almost all IBM products. Now Fei’s focus is on developing continuous delivery translation services (Globalization Pipeline) for both IBM and external products on the IBM Bluemix platform.

Ibon Sotil is an export advisor for Google China’s Large Client Services team in Shanghai. Born in the Basque region of Spain, he obtained a master’s degree in telecommunications engineering. As an engineer Ibon worked for the Mondragon Group in Spain, India and France until he decided to go for a career switch and pursue an MBA in Shanghai. After his graduation, Ibon joined Google as export advisor and has been helping Chinese companies with their geo expansion opportunities and strategies. He’s passionate about skiing, surfing and food.

Li Tang is the general manager of China for Keywords Studios Group. She has been in the game industry for more than a decade, starting her early days as the global localization producer for EVE Online, an MMORPG developed by Icelandic game developer CCP Games. Prior to joining Keywords Studios Group, Li served as a software engineer, development director and producer of various AAA titles such as EVE Online and Ryse: Son of Rome. She has accumulated in-depth knowledge of game localization from both technical and business perspectives through her years of experience in the field.

Yueting (Claire) Tan is an experienced, results-oriented, PMP certified localization professional skilled in building and improving processes and managing high performing teams in a fast-paced environment. Since 2015 she has been leading a team of localization professionals, providing efficient internationalization and localization solutions to game products that have successfully entered global markets. Claire built her global experience at a variety of notable technology and video game companies in the US and China including Apple, Welocalize and YY Inc. after obtaining a master’s degree in translation localization management at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey.

Kah Hui Teo is the assistant general manager of Keywords Studios. She currently heads the localization teams in Singapore and Shanghai. Prior to Keywords, Kah Hui was the senior manager, asset localization and testing with Electronic Arts. Since 2008, she has worked on the localization and testing of AAA console titles as well as mobile games. Kah Hui holds a degree in chemical engineering with a minor in law and an MBA. She is a certified professional interpreter and project management professional. Kah Hui has just completed her master’s in translation and interpretation.

Jeffrey Towson is a professor at Peking University, a best-selling author and an expert on how Chinese consumers and competitors are disrupting global markets. He travels from Beijing and New York, and some of his recent talks include:

• How China’s increasingly emotional consumers are shaking the world
• How the internet and e-commerce became Chinese: Lessons from Baidu, Tencent, Alibaba and others
• How China became the global epicenter for mobile innovation: Lessons from Apple, Xiaomi, WeChat and others

Yukako Ueda is the lead of the global content management team at NetApp. She is responsible for assuring tight alignment with local stakeholders on their requirements for high-quality localized content for marketing and products for 15 countries in the APAC, EMEA and America regions. In addition, Yukako leads internal and external discussions on improving the localization processes and oversees the machine translation implementation from the linguistic point of view. In March 2015 she launched the Japan Chapter of Women in Localization, a nonprofit organization for women working in the localization industry.

Alfredo Eduardo Valdés Matta is a computer science engineer with an MBA from National Sun Yat-sen University who is interested in the usage of technology to simplify business processes.  Before moving to Asia, he worked as a system administrator in the electrical power industry. When Alfredo moved to Beijing in 2010, he started working in the localization testing field.  He uses his knowledge to communicate between developers and linguists to improve software globalization. Alfredo evangelizes the best localization practices at LeEco and supervises the product globalization efforts across many business units in the company. He enjoys SCUBA diving and his most recent hobby is photography.

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.

Andrew Wang has over 16 years of experience on digital content creation and globalization services management. He is Alibaba’s internationalization solution director and globalization business architect.

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.

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

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

Emily Wei has worked in the language service industry for ten years as a project manager, account manager and marketing manager. Now she is in charge of the sales and marketing department at Linguitronics where she is fully devoted to new business development, market strategy, client services and consultancy. Emily has worked with many Top 500 global companies, helping them solve language problems with her insight into language service and the Chinese market.

Yongpeng Wei is the CTO and cofounder of Lingosail, a language technology provider in Beijing. He received his BE and ME degrees in computer science from Tsinghua University. Yongpeng has devoted himself to machine translation and natural language processing for more than 14 years. He is also one of the founders and organizers of Translation Technology Salon in China.

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

Camille Xu is the director of translation technology of Linguitronics Co., Ltd., where she has been fully devoted to language services, translation management and translation technology for the past five years. She received a BA degree in translation and interpreting and an MS degree in European studies. Camille has been a translator in the IT and life science domains for more than nine years. She also has extensive experience in project management as well as training and consulting in translation environment tools and other translation technologies. Camille is a frequent speaker and trainer at Linguitronics in Taiwan and China.

Guoqing Yan built the international business team at Global Tone Communication Technology, leading them to reach strategic cooperation with reputable companies and organizations, such as Alibaba Cloud, Baidu, Wikipedia, iReader, American Translation Association and Conférence Internationale Permanente d’Instituts Universitaires de Traducteurs et Interprètes. In addition, he has successfully planned the business layout in the global market and introduced YeeCloud and YeeSight into North America, Europe and South America. YeeCloud is a language service ecosystem based on language big data and artificial intelligence technology and YeeSight is a cross-language big data analysis platform offering language and big data analysis service for users in more than 40 countries around the world.

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

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

Before joining Blizzard in 2010, Elvis Zhang worked for five years at HP on software development and testing, with certificates in PMP, Scrum Master and 6 Sigma Green Belt. He then worked several years for the localization and quality assurance team of Blizzard China, becoming the supervisor of the Blizzard China quality assurance team, responsible for localization testing, process and quality improvement. Elvis’ responsibility is to make sure all Blizzard products localized in Chinese are delivered with quality that matches Blizzard standards.

Jing Zhang is the founder and CEO of Tmxmall, and deputy director of the Association of Language Service Providers. He graduated from Northwestern Polytechnical University and received a master’s degree from Tianjin University. Previously, Jing worked for Baidu.

Kirk Zhang graduated from Dublin City University in information technology. He has worked in the university research center for many years. Kirk’s research area covers multimedia information retrieval, content management, language processing and wireless sensor network technology. In recent years, he has been engaged in the system development and operation management for the localization industry. In 2015, Kirk founded Wiitrans – a technology-driven localization company.

Michael Zhang is a vice president of a global investment bank’s research department. Prior to this role, he was a research associate with Morgan Stanley Huaxin Securities Company Limited for more than five years. In 2008, Michael developed a computer-assisted translation-based translation workflow for investment bank research reports when he worked as an on-site translator for UBS’s Shanghai branch. He holds a BA in Chinese literature from Shanghai University. Michael has more than ten years of translation/editorial experience in the financial services industry; is a proactive innovator and coach in translation workflow of global investment banks with a strong track record; and has hands-on expertise with machine translation, computer-aided translation and speech-to-text.

Professor WeiHe Zhong is president of Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, China. He is a leading scholar in interpreting and translation studies in China. WeiHe is a committee member for discipline development and academic programs under the Ministry of Education. He is chairman of the advisory board of ELT and chairman of the National Supervisory Committee for the interpreting and translation program under the Ministry of Education of China. WeiHe is also vice chairman of the National Committee for Translation and Interpreting Education in China, and executive vice president of the Translators’ Association of China. He is an award winner of the New Century Outstanding Talents Program of the Ministry of Education, Leading Scholar of the “New Century One Hundred, One Thousand, and Ten Thousand Talent Project”, and an expert enjoying special subsidy from the State Council. WeiHe has published extensively in interpreting and translation studies, and foreign language education.

Joe Zhou is an associate professor and director of the MTI Education Center, Ludong University in Yantai, China. He has rich knowledge and experience in translation technologies, teaching courses such as computer-aided translation, project management, localization, post-editing and more. Joe is also a freelance translator, good at software user interface (UI) localization and technical document translation. He is a memoQ certified trainer, Memsource certified trainer and has SDL Trados Studio and SDL MultiTerm 2014 and 2015 six certificates respectively. Ludong University is a TAUS academic member, KantanMT.com university partner, Memsource UI localization partner and a member of the Localization Service Committee at the Translators Association of China.

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.

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.

Henri Broekmate is general manager of Lionbridge Technologies’ Asia business. He joined Lionbridge in April 2001 after serving as COO and SVP, eBusiness at TRADOS for almost five years. Henri has worked in the localization services and language technology business for 30 years. He holds a BA and MA (Cum Laude) from the Free University of Amsterdam and an MBA (With Distinction) from the Bradford University School of Management. Henri has lived, studied and worked in the Netherlands, United Kingdom, Republic of Ireland and United States.

As head of global platform development, James Carroll drives the architecture and development for all of GoDaddy’s global business and product platforms, including the systems that power our global marketing and eCommerce systems worldwide. Before joining GoDaddy in 2013, he was a senior vice president at Yahoo!, where he directed the company’s global research and development centers in China, India and the Middle East. James also oversaw Yahoo!’s content, social and membership platforms as well as the international delivery of all Yahoo! products and services worldwide. Prior to Yahoo!, he spent 13 years as general manager at Microsoft. While there, James managed the MSN international team and later, the Windows and Windows Live international teams.

Ann Chen is passionate about language and culture. After graduating in translation studies from Aston University, she became involved in the localization industry and for the past five years has worked with many global companies, providing innovative solutions with her insight into the Asian market.  Ann began as a project manager, then started and led the business development team in a Taiwanese localization company. She is now at Welocalize as a business development manager. Using a very customer-centric approach, her goal is to bring in new client brands for Welocalize in Asia.

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).

Claudia Di Lorenzo is passionate about languages, with more than ten years of experience in the translation industry. She has been a member of Translated since 2011, acting first as a project manager, then as a productive senior account manager with a very customer-centric approach. Claudia is responsible for account development and has been involved in the efficient development of end-to-end translation processes. She is now responsible for business development and has been involved in the efficient development of end-to-end translation processes for the main enterprise customers at Translated.com.

Dace Dzeguze is the Dynamic Quality Framework (DQF) product manager at TAUS, a resource center for global language and translation industries. She oversees the DQF product development, works with third party integrators and acts as product spokesperson at international events and conferences. Dace has eight years of experience in the industry, working as a project manager for language service providers in Riga and Amsterdam.

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.

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

Chip Gettinger is vice president global solutions consulting, SDL, managing a team that works with SDL customers in maximizing global content using SDL solutions. He has over 20 years’ experience in global publishing, content strategies, customer experience, business consulting, coaching and content management solutions. Chip works closely with industry organizations, partners and customers in technology solutions and deployment.

Alex Han (韩林涛) is a lecturer of the School of Translation and Interpreting, Beijing Language and Culture University (BLCU) and director of the International Center for Language Services, BLCU. Before joining BLCU, he received his master’s degree in computer-aided translation (CAT) from Peking University and worked as a project manager at LingoSail Technology, a Chinese provider of CAT tools. With rich experience on translation technology development and training, Alex is now teaching a CAT course and translation project management course at BLCU and is also one of two lecturers of Coursera course principles and practice of CAT. He is also the TAUS representative in China.

Guanqing Hao is the product manager of Beijing Lingosail Tech Co., Ltd. He received his master of translation and interpreting degree from Beijing Language and Culture University in 2016.  Guanqing is a coeditor of A Practical Guide to Translation Technology, which is a volume of the Language Service Competence Assessment and Testing series. He is also the second author of the published paper Terminology Management Technology in Modern Translation Collaboration.

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.

Gunnar Hojem has lived and worked in London since finishing his master’s degree in media and communication studies at Stockholm University in 2007. He joined Sony Interactive Entertainment in 2008, first working for the international software development team as an asset management coordinator then joining the localization services team as senior project manager in 2011. Over the years Gunnar has managed the localization of some of Sony’s biggest first party franchises such as Uncharted, The Last of Us, Infamous, Resistance and God of War.

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.

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.

Fulin Liao graduated from the University of Shanghai in science and technology, and is a leader in outsourcing management. He has proven track records in localization and globalization with over 10 years of experiences and a focus on consultation services to clients including globalization, internationalization, localization and translation, software development and testing, content management systems development, search engine optimization/search engine marketing, user experience design, crowdsourcing and business process outsourcing.

David Li is a cofounder and COO at Yicool International Cultural Development Co., Ltd. He graduated from the Central University for Nationalities and worked in the Russian Affairs department for China Metallurgical Group Corporation and China Translation & Publishing Corporation. Later, David worked as a journalist at the China Internet Information Center and engaged in the development of new media products. Since 2014, he has been working for Yicool and is responsible for the design of Yicool product lines, as well as translation services.

Huidan Liu is a chief engineer in the globalization department of Huawei. He is an expert at natural language processing. Huidan has experience with many languages such as Chinese, Mongolian, Tibetan, Uyghur and Korean. Currently he focuses on the processing of Myanmar to promote the localization of smartphones.

Emil Lu started working for the game localization industry in 2007 as a game text translator. Before joining Blizzard, he was responsible for the localization work of several games developed in China and shipped in North America and Europe. Thanks to the knowledge of localization and game publishing accumulated in those years, Emil was qualified to join one of the most talented and professional in-house localization teams in the world: Blizzard China. His job at Blizzard covered game text translation, localized audio recording, publishing and marketing text support, website construction support and so on. Emil participated in the localization work of many successful Blizzard projects such as World of Warcraft, Starcraft II and Hearthstone. Now he is working as the supervisor of the localization team, focusing more effort on resource management and team coaching.

Costanza Marinelli has a translation diploma, a political science degree, diplomatic studies and an MBA. Currently based in Tokyo, Costanza has 20 years of experience in localization project management for Medtronic, international human resources for Mallinckrodt Medical, market research for Sémaphore Conseil and recruitment in the localization industry for Larsen Globalization, first in Europe and in the Asia-Pacific region since the end of 2013.

Maxim Morkovkin is an experienced translator, blogger and public speaker. He has been deeply involved with Chinese-Russian and Chinese-English translation since 2010 and has lived and worked in China for seven years. Maxim previously worked at Wuhan Optics Valley BeiDou Holding Group Co., Ltd., and Shanghai Kingnet Technologies Co., Ltd. He has published articles, taught classes and spoken at conferences on a wide variety of Chinese-language related topics. He also acts as the Chinese language expert at different Russian radio stations. Maxim has a BS degree in Chinese language and an MS degree in business administration from Central China Normal University. He is also active in the field of translation automation tools and is focused on building relationships between SmartCAT and Chinese language service providers. In his free time, Maxim travels and practices martial arts. His life motto is: “Don’t be afraid to fail, be afraid not to try.”

Passionate about technology and people, Alex Muntyan is the Jedi of business processes automation. He has been in this field for more than seven years assisting a variety of organizations — from banks to media and scientific institutions — to deploy the technology and break new ground. At SmartCAT, Alex’s mission is to move customers to the light side of the force, help them hit their goals using the platform in the most impactful way and grow their business. When he has time, he lectures at European universities and spreads the word about cutting-edge translation automation technologies or plays ice hockey.

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.

Liu Qaing received a master’s degree in natural language processing from Peking University in 2013, a bachelor’s degree in computer science and technology from Wuhan University of Technology and a dual bachelor’s degree in English from Huazhong University of Technology. He now works as the technical director at Beijing WeTrans Technology Co., Ltd., maintaining the technical achitecture of the company’s products, managing the technical team, controlling technology trends and helping to make decisions.

Aeh Ratanavibhas is a language manager for Thai at Google, based in Singapore. Born and raised in Bangkok, she obtained her master’s degree in translation and interpretation from Chulalongkorn University. Before joining Google, Aeh worked in marketing for one of the biggest fast moving consumer goods companies. Having always been in a multicultural environment and having a strong knowledge of Southeast Asian consumers, Aeh understands how significant of a role localization is playing. In her own time, she enjoys cooking, traveling and photography.

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.

Fei Shen is a software engineer at IBM China Development Lab. For over seven years he has been working on the globalization tools development to support the software globalization process on almost all IBM products. Now Fei’s focus is on developing continuous delivery translation services (Globalization Pipeline) for both IBM and external products on the IBM Bluemix platform.

Ibon Sotil is an export advisor for Google China’s Large Client Services team in Shanghai. Born in the Basque region of Spain, he obtained a master’s degree in telecommunications engineering. As an engineer Ibon worked for the Mondragon Group in Spain, India and France until he decided to go for a career switch and pursue an MBA in Shanghai. After his graduation, Ibon joined Google as export advisor and has been helping Chinese companies with their geo expansion opportunities and strategies. He’s passionate about skiing, surfing and food.

Li Tang is the general manager of China for Keywords Studios Group. She has been in the game industry for more than a decade, starting her early days as the global localization producer for EVE Online, an MMORPG developed by Icelandic game developer CCP Games. Prior to joining Keywords Studios Group, Li served as a software engineer, development director and producer of various AAA titles such as EVE Online and Ryse: Son of Rome. She has accumulated in-depth knowledge of game localization from both technical and business perspectives through her years of experience in the field.

Yueting (Claire) Tan is an experienced, results-oriented, PMP certified localization professional skilled in building and improving processes and managing high performing teams in a fast-paced environment. Since 2015 she has been leading a team of localization professionals, providing efficient internationalization and localization solutions to game products that have successfully entered global markets. Claire built her global experience at a variety of notable technology and video game companies in the US and China including Apple, Welocalize and YY Inc. after obtaining a master’s degree in translation localization management at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey.

Kah Hui Teo is the assistant general manager of Keywords Studios. She currently heads the localization teams in Singapore and Shanghai. Prior to Keywords, Kah Hui was the senior manager, asset localization and testing with Electronic Arts. Since 2008, she has worked on the localization and testing of AAA console titles as well as mobile games. Kah Hui holds a degree in chemical engineering with a minor in law and an MBA. She is a certified professional interpreter and project management professional. Kah Hui has just completed her master’s in translation and interpretation.

Jeffrey Towson is a professor at Peking University, a best-selling author and an expert on how Chinese consumers and competitors are disrupting global markets. He travels from Beijing and New York, and some of his recent talks include:

• How China’s increasingly emotional consumers are shaking the world
• How the internet and e-commerce became Chinese: Lessons from Baidu, Tencent, Alibaba and others
• How China became the global epicenter for mobile innovation: Lessons from Apple, Xiaomi, WeChat and others

Yukako Ueda is the lead of the global content management team at NetApp. She is responsible for assuring tight alignment with local stakeholders on their requirements for high-quality localized content for marketing and products for 15 countries in the APAC, EMEA and America regions. In addition, Yukako leads internal and external discussions on improving the localization processes and oversees the machine translation implementation from the linguistic point of view. In March 2015 she launched the Japan Chapter of Women in Localization, a nonprofit organization for women working in the localization industry.

Alfredo Eduardo Valdés Matta is a computer science engineer with an MBA from National Sun Yat-sen University who is interested in the usage of technology to simplify business processes.  Before moving to Asia, he worked as a system administrator in the electrical power industry. When Alfredo moved to Beijing in 2010, he started working in the localization testing field.  He uses his knowledge to communicate between developers and linguists to improve software globalization. Alfredo evangelizes the best localization practices at LeEco and supervises the product globalization efforts across many business units in the company. He enjoys SCUBA diving and his most recent hobby is photography.

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.

Andrew Wang has over 16 years of experience on digital content creation and globalization services management. He is Alibaba’s internationalization solution director and globalization business architect.

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.

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

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

Emily Wei has worked in the language service industry for ten years as a project manager, account manager and marketing manager. Now she is in charge of the sales and marketing department at Linguitronics where she is fully devoted to new business development, market strategy, client services and consultancy. Emily has worked with many Top 500 global companies, helping them solve language problems with her insight into language service and the Chinese market.

Yongpeng Wei is the CTO and cofounder of Lingosail, a language technology provider in Beijing. He received his BE and ME degrees in computer science from Tsinghua University. Yongpeng has devoted himself to machine translation and natural language processing for more than 14 years. He is also one of the founders and organizers of Translation Technology Salon in China.

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

Camille Xu is the director of translation technology of Linguitronics Co., Ltd., where she has been fully devoted to language services, translation management and translation technology for the past five years. She received a BA degree in translation and interpreting and an MS degree in European studies. Camille has been a translator in the IT and life science domains for more than nine years. She also has extensive experience in project management as well as training and consulting in translation environment tools and other translation technologies. Camille is a frequent speaker and trainer at Linguitronics in Taiwan and China.

Guoqing Yan built the international business team at Global Tone Communication Technology, leading them to reach strategic cooperation with reputable companies and organizations, such as Alibaba Cloud, Baidu, Wikipedia, iReader, American Translation Association and Conférence Internationale Permanente d’Instituts Universitaires de Traducteurs et Interprètes. In addition, he has successfully planned the business layout in the global market and introduced YeeCloud and YeeSight into North America, Europe and South America. YeeCloud is a language service ecosystem based on language big data and artificial intelligence technology and YeeSight is a cross-language big data analysis platform offering language and big data analysis service for users in more than 40 countries around the world.

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

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

Before joining Blizzard in 2010, Elvis Zhang worked for five years at HP on software development and testing, with certificates in PMP, Scrum Master and 6 Sigma Green Belt. He then worked several years for the localization and quality assurance team of Blizzard China, becoming the supervisor of the Blizzard China quality assurance team, responsible for localization testing, process and quality improvement. Elvis’ responsibility is to make sure all Blizzard products localized in Chinese are delivered with quality that matches Blizzard standards.

Jing Zhang is the founder and CEO of Tmxmall, and deputy director of the Association of Language Service Providers. He graduated from Northwestern Polytechnical University and received a master’s degree from Tianjin University. Previously, Jing worked for Baidu.

Kirk Zhang graduated from Dublin City University in information technology. He has worked in the university research center for many years. Kirk’s research area covers multimedia information retrieval, content management, language processing and wireless sensor network technology. In recent years, he has been engaged in the system development and operation management for the localization industry. In 2015, Kirk founded Wiitrans – a technology-driven localization company.

Michael Zhang is a vice president of a global investment bank’s research department. Prior to this role, he was a research associate with Morgan Stanley Huaxin Securities Company Limited for more than five years. In 2008, Michael developed a computer-assisted translation-based translation workflow for investment bank research reports when he worked as an on-site translator for UBS’s Shanghai branch. He holds a BA in Chinese literature from Shanghai University. Michael has more than ten years of translation/editorial experience in the financial services industry; is a proactive innovator and coach in translation workflow of global investment banks with a strong track record; and has hands-on expertise with machine translation, computer-aided translation and speech-to-text.

Professor WeiHe Zhong is president of Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, China. He is a leading scholar in interpreting and translation studies in China. WeiHe is a committee member for discipline development and academic programs under the Ministry of Education. He is chairman of the advisory board of ELT and chairman of the National Supervisory Committee for the interpreting and translation program under the Ministry of Education of China. WeiHe is also vice chairman of the National Committee for Translation and Interpreting Education in China, and executive vice president of the Translators’ Association of China. He is an award winner of the New Century Outstanding Talents Program of the Ministry of Education, Leading Scholar of the “New Century One Hundred, One Thousand, and Ten Thousand Talent Project”, and an expert enjoying special subsidy from the State Council. WeiHe has published extensively in interpreting and translation studies, and foreign language education.

Joe Zhou is an associate professor and director of the MTI Education Center, Ludong University in Yantai, China. He has rich knowledge and experience in translation technologies, teaching courses such as computer-aided translation, project management, localization, post-editing and more. Joe is also a freelance translator, good at software user interface (UI) localization and technical document translation. He is a memoQ certified trainer, Memsource certified trainer and has SDL Trados Studio and SDL MultiTerm 2014 and 2015 six certificates respectively. Ludong University is a TAUS academic member, KantanMT.com university partner, Memsource UI localization partner and a member of the Localization Service Committee at the Translators Association of China.

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.