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.

Víctor Alonso Lion has been dedicated to internationalization and localization for more than 15 years. His experience covers, among other things, localization engineering, international project management, localization training and globalization consultancy. After providing localization project management to a wide range of areas, such as life sciences, IT and the financial industry, Víctor now works with interactive media such as eLearning and games. He is a frequent speaker on international project management and localization. Víctor serves the game industry as client services director for Pink Noise, the game localization company focused on the European and Latin American Spanish markets.

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

Diana Ballard is dedicated to global account management. She brings 20 years’ experience to the localization and content creation industry. In the early days, as technical publications manager in a fast-paced Japanese manufacturing environment for over six years, Diana quickly understood the culture of “right first time, every time.” She has engaged in countless conversations committed to matching customer need with localization service solution. Graduating from the University of Liverpool with Joint Honours in languages and a major in English, Diana spent her early career years in management consulting gaining an insight into how businesses manage process improvements across the enterprise.

Sasan Banava is the head of localization at Uber, starting the in-house localization team at the San Francisco headquarters. Previously, he was a localization program manager at Google and had driven the localization of over 25 product lines in 70+ languages, including the international launch of Google+ mobile in multiple platforms. Sasan was responsible for the globalization of Google My Business and other geo products across desktop and mobile platforms. He has over ten years of project and program management experience and is certified from Stanford University in advanced project management. Sasan holds a BA from UC Berkeley in Near Eastern studies with emphasis on Persian language and he spent two years of his academic life studying computer science. He also holds a commercial pilot’s license.

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.

Aldo Bermudez leads digital marketing, marketing technology and globalization at Lookout. His true passion is having the ability to communicate with prospective customers by engaging them with optimal experiences no matter where they are from.  Aldo is responsible for supporting all global marketing messaging with campaigns and digital experience, and owns all marketing localization for Lookout.  He has over 20 years of experience in digital marketing and has worked in localization over the past 10 years with companies like Cisco WebEx, NetApp, Workday and Lookout.

Alessandra Binazzi is a leading expert in globalization strategy, tech stack definition and implementation, process automation and change management for global companies looking to expand reach and maximize revenues. Proficient in all major European languages, Alessandra has dedicated her professional life to advocating for international users and to create, market, and support products and services that engage customers in all continents. She is the principal consultant of Global Sights Consulting, member of the Board of Advisors of the Process Innovation Challenge, a former Board Member of the Globalization and Localization Association (GALA).

As FirstVoices coordinator for the First Peoples’ Cultural Council, Shay Boechler conducted training workshops and managed much of the day-to-day community-based FirstVoices programming. She currently manages outreach efforts for the Endangered Languages Project, an online collaborative network that aims to strengthen endangered languages. Shay holds a BA degree in applied linguistics from the University of Victoria.

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.

Wayne Bourland is recognized as an agent for change, driving innovation and process efficiencies across global organizations. He is currently responsible for translation of Dell.com and marketing collateral for more than 100 organizations across Dell. With no background in linguistics, he approaches the industry with a different perspective, focusing on end value and customer acceptance versus traditional industry key performance indicators. Wayne is a member of the TAUS advisory board and has been published in MultiLingual magazine, The Economist, Brand Quarterly and numerous industry blogs.

Laura Brandon is GALA’s executive director. She oversees operations, staffing and programming for the association of companies in over 50 countries. Laura currently serves on the advisory board of the Localization Certification Program for the University of Washington and previously was a member of the ASAE Small Staff Associations Council and Task Force on Small Staff Community. She is on the volunteer committee for the Seattle Localization User Group (SLUG).

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.

Janice Campbell, PMP, SCM, is a senior program manager in the Globalization Group at Adobe. Her current focus is driving the machine translation program strategy across the company as a key component in widening content availability for international customers. On occasion, Janice assumes the identity of an international persona in end-to-end customer experience test scenarios. Janice has been a strong advocate for international community engagement. She has contributed to industry articles and presented at industry conferences on topics such as translation crowdsourcing and analytics for localization decision-making. Prior to her career in high-tech, Janice taught linguistics at several universities in the US and abroad. Janice volunteers her time mentoring participants in STEM programs such as Girls Who Code, TechWomen and Adobe Digital Academy.

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.

Michele Carlson is a globalization leader with over twenty years of experience in the industry. She is currently working at Apple as a senior marketing localization manager. Previously she served as the globalization director at SurveyMonkey where she spearheaded localization and international growth from the ground-up. She was also the director of localization for Sony Computer Entertainment America where she led the PlayStation localization team. Before Sony, Michele spent eight years at Yahoo! where she held various positions including the director of localization. She is also involved in Women in Localization, where she served on the board, director of global expansion, and the Silicon Valley chapter manager. She holds a BA in international relations from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and an MBA from Thunderbird School of Global Management.

Alfonso Carrillo is an engineer by education, with an MS in administration. He has worked in development and supply chain, and is currently working in globalization at Cisco Systems to help it to become more global in worldwide markets. Alfonso was born and raised in Mexico. His hobbies include brewing beer, model trains and astronomy.

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.

Simone Chiaretta is a web architect and developer who enjoys sharing his development experiences and almost 20 years’ worth of knowledge on web development with ASP.NET and other web technologies. He is currently working at the Council of the European Union where he leads the public website team. Simone has been a Microsoft Model-View-Presenter on ASP.NET for eight years, authored several books about ASP.NET Model-View-Controller, organized several developer conferences and spoken at many international conferences as well. When not writing code, blog posts or taking part in the worldwide .NET community, he is training for Ironman triathlons.

Since 1998, Yoko Chiba has had various localization experiences as an operations manager, project manager, engagement manager and consultant. With 20 years of experience in the industry, she served as head of a worldwide localization team at the TOIN Corporation. Yoko enjoys bringing creative ideas to any challenge and developing practical solutions for customers. Since 2015, she has been engaged as the assistant chapter manager for Women in Localization, a nonprofit organization for women working in the localization industry.

Steve Chu has more than 20 years of diversified management experience in general management, sales, marketing and operations. After spending more than a decade in the translation industry managing Asia operations, US operations, technology, product development and marketing, Steve saw an unfilled demand in the translation and localization industry for management and technology consulting services. He founded Treehouse Strategy in 2010 with the specific goal of meeting that demand by providing strategic planning, management consulting and technology advisory services to translation and localization companies. Through Treehouse Strategy, Steve and his associate as well as partners have helped translation companies develop their sales strategies and operations plans as well as implement business and technology solutions. He received his BA from Columbia University and his MA in communication from Iowa State University.

Fabiano Cid is a Brazil-based executive with over 20 years of experience in the localization industry. He is the founder and managing director of Ccaps Translation and Localization, a company that supports the language needs of global brands in Latin America. As an ambassador for the Globalization and Localization Association (GALA), Fabiano kicked off the Gender Equality in the Language Services Industry project. He has also served as GALA’s chairman of the board and was the cocreator of Think Latin America, an event series designed to educate investors about Latin America as a business region.

Lydia Clarke leads Acclaro’s San Francisco office to deliver localization and translation services with hands-on customer service. Lydia guides clients through strategic decision making for long-term globalization results. She brings years of experience in engineering, project management and program management for a well-rounded approach to the world of localization. A Cornell graduate, Lydia spent her student years immersed in books about Latin American studies, Spanish and international relations. When not running international translation campaigns, she spends time with her three sons, alternating between their hobbies and her own.

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

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

Karen Combe recently retired from her position as vice president of localization at PTC, where she was responsible for product localization as well as for localization support for PTC University, technical support, and marketing. Since its inception, she has been a member of the GILT Leaders Forum, a community of peers in the localization industry. Previously, Karen was senior vice president at International Language Engineering, where she managed client services, sales, and marketing. She holds a BA in linguistics from the University of California at Berkeley and a post-graduate degree in social anthropology from the University of Cambridge. Karen served in the Peace Corps in Senegal and in International Voluntary Services in Algeria. In addition, she worked for eight years on a ranch in northwestern Colorado training horses and looking after a large herd of cattle.

Jim Compton is a localization industry veteran, technologist and optimist interested in the application of technology toward big-picture globalization challenges. As the manager of RWS Moravia’s technology partnerships team, he seeks out capabilities that can be leveraged into customer solutions. In his spare time, Jim likes to make rock music on the Commodore 64.

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.

Vladimir Cruz is a labeling specialist with extensive experience in the medical device labeling field. He has designed and implemented symbol based labeling for St. Jude Medical, presently Abbott. In his current role, Vladimir analyzes and interprets labeling standards and government regulations as well as creates educational material for the company’s labeling, supply chain and business unit teams. He also strategizes and implements process improvements in Edwards’ labeling systems. Vladimir is currently designing and implementing symbol based labeling at Edwards Lifesciences in Irvine, California.

Ronald Cummings-John is the author of the definitive book on testing, QAOps: How the right QA can increase your speed, scale and global growth. His passion for quality assurance (QA) has sent him around the world working with the top QA and product teams from companies such as Facebook, Microsoft, King.com, Spotify, Dropbox and many more. Ronald founded Testathon, a hackathon for testers, and is also cofounder of Global App Testing, which was selected as one of the fastest growing technology companies in the United Kingdom.

As cofounder and president of XLOC, Stephanie Deming is focused on enhancing the customer experience for all clients while strengthening and expanding XLOC’s business and strategic relationships. Over the course of her career, Stephanie has worn many hats that now benefit XLOC customers, from software development producer and production consultant to operations executive for worldwide award-winning educational and entertainment leaders, including Activision, Electronic Arts, Capcom and 2K Games. With over 15 years of localization expertise, she has successfully sim-shipped hundreds of language versions of high profile titles, including the Call of Duty®, Destiny™, NBA2K™ series, League of Legends®, BioShock® and many more. Stephanie holds degrees in both psychology and sociology from the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Francesca Di Marco spearheads Pinterest’s internationalization and global development program, where she fuels her passion for crafting multinational organizations from the ground up. Dedicated to implementing scalable globalization and localization strategies, Francesca excels at connecting teams across functions and regional offices. A lifelong language enthusiast and former lecturer on the history of modern Japan, Francesca channels her curiosity into documentary filmmaking during her downtime.

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.

Jeff Edwards has been employed by the Cherokee Nation for 17 years and has always worked to help preserve the Cherokee language. For the past nine years, as a language technologist, he has been working with large tech companies such as Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Apple to ensure the Cherokee language is represented on their phones, tablets and operating systems. The Cherokee Nation is the only native tribe to have their language — the Cherokee Syllabary — on a phone and tablet, and the graphical user interface of Windows entirely in the Cherokee language.

Tarrence Egbert has been a software engineer for most of his career. In the past five years, he has revisited his career and emerged as a globalization engineer. Tarrance has worked at about ten different companies and currently resides at Adobe Systems where he has been working for ten years now.  He very much enjoys the globalization community and is proud to be a part of it.

Paula Estrella joined Moravia as machine translation and post-editing subject matter expert and is also a member of the natural language processing research group at FaMAF-UNC, Argentina. She holds an MS in computer science from Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Argentina, and a PhD in multilingual information processing from Faculté de Traduction et d’Interprétation, Geneva, Switzerland.

When Shannon Rose Farrell-Jackson is not outdoors with her daughters, taking her dog on a hike or attending an “old girls” rugby match, she is speaking across the globe on life sciences localization strategies and building dynamic teams to support these initiatives. Shannon got her start at a small software company where she developed an appetite for international business and processes. From there she entered into the life sciences localization realm where she found a true passion for helping multinational life sciences companies realize their global potential through innovative quality processes and cutting-edge technology solutions. Shannon is now the senior vice president of global sales and life science strategy for Argos Multilingual.

Gina Fevrier is a localization project manager and technical writer at BMC Software. Her responsibilities include managing the localization of software and product documentation into multiple languages. Along with 13 years’ experience in localization and 17 years in technical writing, Gina has degrees in French, education and instructional technology, as well as a background in teaching and training. She is also pursuing a master’s degree in French language and literature with a focus on Francophonie in the Americas.

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.

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.

Mikel Forcada is professor of computer languages and systems at the Universitat d’Alacant. He is president of the European Association for Machine Translation. Mikel has also worked in fields as diverse as quantum chemistry, biotechnology, surface physics, machine learning (especially with neural networks) and automata theory. He is the author of more than 70 articles in international journals, papers in international conferences and book chapters. In 2004, after heading several publicly- and privately-funded projects on machine translation, Mikel started the free/open source machine translation platform Apertium, where he is currently the president of the project management committee.

Kimon Fountoukidis is chairman and founder of Argos Multilingual, a mid-sized language service provider (LSP) with it’s global headquarters in Krakow, Poland, and its US headquarters in Boulder, Colorado. He has led three successful acquisitions of US-based LSPs and is a strong believer in mergers and acquisitions as a powerful growth tool available to all LSPs. Kimon was born in New York and moved to Krakow in 1993 where he currently lives. A podcast of Kimon’s story can be found at http://projectkazimierz.com/kimon-fountoukidis-translating-success-for-krakow.

Tomas Franc is a lead sales solutions architect at Lokalise, where he designs tailored localization processes. He has over 22 years of experience in the localization industry and has designed and implemented truly agile, state of the art localization processes for the biggest technology brands. Tomas was the LocWorld Process Innovator of the Year USA 2017 and is an occasional LocWorld conference speaker.

Kathleen Glennon is responsible for globalization vendor management at Dell EMC, working closely with globalization services and technology partners to build and maintain strategic partnerships. She is a graduate of Cal State Fullerton with a degree in computer science and over 27 years of experience in development organizations for software, retail and aerospace industries including over ten years of experience in software globalization.

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.

Spence Green is Lilt’s co-founder and CEO. Prior to founding Lilt, Spence was a graduate student at Stanford University. He received a PhD and MS in computer science from Stanford and a BS from the University of Virginia. He has published papers on machine translation, language parsing, and mixed-initiative systems and given talks on translator productivity.

Jan Grodecki has experienced localization from different angles and in various roles, from work on the client side as developer, localization engineer, and project manager to the localization supplier side. This knowledge enables him to advise partners in their decisions on localization strategies, technology, and processes. Jan has a passion for education. He has been teaching localization engineering and project management since 2004 at the University of Washington.

Trevor Gunn is vice president of international relations for Medtronic, a medical technology company. He was formerly director of the Commerce Department’s Business Information Service for the Newly Independent States, the clearinghouse for US government information for doing business in the former Soviet Union. Trevor has served continuously for the past 24 years, and currently serves, as adjunct professor at CERES/School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University, where he is a Vicennial Silver Medalist. He received his BA from the University of San Francisco and his PhD in international relations from the London School of Economics. Trevor speaks Swedish, French and Russian.

Richard Hamilton is publisher at XML Press. He began his career at Bell Laboratories developing computer software and has worked at AT&T, Unix System Laboratories, Novell and Hewlett-Packard in jobs ranging from software development to product management to documentation management. In 2008, Richard founded XML Press, which is dedicated to producing high-quality, practical publications for technical communicators, content strategists, managers, marketers and tools builders. He is the author of Managing Writers: A Real-World Guide to Managing Technical Documentation.

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

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

Ján Husarčík is a localization solutions architect at Akorbi where he focuses on assessing customers’ needs and mapping them to products and services. With a background in design and development, Ján contributes to process improvements and optimization and handles various activities around implementation.

Roza Huysainova graduated from the Penza State Teacher-Training University in 2006 and moved to Moscow. She worked as an English teacher at the Moscow State University of Machine-Building and Informatics for two years. After that Roza worked as a project manager for a couple of small translation agencies then in 2011 was happy to join Logrus International as a project manager. In May 2016, she joined the team of Logrus Global, where she is a senior multilingual project leader and localization quality assurance lead. Roza is fond of her job because it is challenging, appealing, exciting and full of new developments.

Brenda Inman has worked in the medical device industry since 1992 in the areas of clinical research, regulatory affairs, technical writing and localization. She is currently a localization manager at Abbott (formerly St. Jude Medical, acquired by Abbott in January 2017). Brenda’s team is responsible for all instructions for use and software localization across the legacy St. Jude Medical business.

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.

Riki Izawa is an account manager at Kawamura International, providing the company’s localization solutions to customers around the world. He started his career in localization in 2004 when he joined Kawamura International after studying psycholinguistics. Riki has worked in various corners of the localization industry including project management, desktop publishing, localization engineering and account management. With his knowledge and interest in both localization and IT, Riki merges the two disciplines and provides solutions to the company’s customers with new values.

Jasmin Jelača is a localization lead at Nordeus, an award-winning independent gaming company based in Belgrade, Serbia. Being raised in the multicultural environment of Berlin, it was unavoidable to become a specialist in various languages and cultures. Jasmin went on to study German literature in Belgrade and, after some freelancing as a translator, he found his new home at Nordeus. Currently he works with different departments such as marketing and customer relations, making sure Nordeus’ players enjoy top-notch localization quality in every facet of the gaming experience.

Katell Jentreau has 20+ years of experience in the language industry, both on the vendor and client sides. She built and led the globalization effort at Box for 3 years, before joining Netflix in 2015 as the company was getting ready to launch globally. At the start of 2024, Katell joined Expedia Group where she has been leading the Globalization function for all EG brands, and helping drive global growth.

Katell is a known industry speaker in conferences, events and podcasts, as well as a Women in Localization volunteer – and served on the board from 2013 to 2015.

Colleen Jones founded and leads Content Science, which has advised some of the world’s leading companies, nonprofits and government agencies on content issues as they undergo digital transformation. Content Science created the innovative content intelligence software ContentWRX, publishes the online magazine, Content Science Review and runs Content Science Academy. Colleen wrote the cornerstone content book, Clout: The Art and Science of Influential Web Content and she speaks at events around the world from San Francisco to Sydney.

Hanna Kanabiajeuskaja is product manager for infrastructure at Uber. She develops internationalization software that allows Uber teams to quickly ship local experiences for their customers. Previously, Hanna managed localization and internationalization at Box, ran social media for the Silicon Valley Chapter of Women in Localization and was on the advisory board of Translation Commons.

Shaun Kelly joined the small but mighty localization team at Box for the summer of 2017 as a localization project management intern, where she maintained continuous localization of Box products into 20 languages. She is currently finishing an MA in Japanese translation and localization management at Middlebury Institute of International Studies.

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

Daniel Koenig has worked in technical communications for more years than he’d care to admit. His experience spans the transition from light tables and IBM Selectric typewriters to modern era computer assisted translation systems. For the past decade, Daniel has designed and managed human and technology-based translation processes and systems for Beckman Coulter, Inc., a global medical device manufacturer.

Richard Korn has over 20 years of experience in the fields of technical communications, labeling, and localization. He has established and managed teams in the medical device/life sciences space – with a deep focus on labeling, localization, technical writing, and content management solutions. Richard has held leadership positions at Edwards Lifesciences and St. Jude Medical (currently Abbott). He currently runs the technical communications department at Medtronic Diabetes in Los Angeles, California. Richard codeveloped and served on the advisory board for the Life Sciences Business Roundtable at LocWorld conferences. He continues to play an active role in the life sciences technical literature and labeling community. Richard holds a bachelor’s degree in psychology and French from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and a master’s degree in international relations and cross-cultural communication from American University in Washington, DC.

Sussu Laaksonen started her localization career as a Finnish language specialist at Google and learned the ropes of vendor and quality management at scale there. She managed the external language specialists for over 40 languages and worked on Google’s language quality program. Sussu was one of the originators of the Google Endangered Languages Project. At Netflix, Sussu worked on the company’s expansion to the Nordic market and launched a Multidimensional Quality Metrics (MQM)-based initiative. She is currently the quality program manager, responsible for implementing and managing an end-to-end MQM localization quality program. Sussu had a 13-year career as a film and television writer in Finland before moving to California.

Yves Lang is senior director, business development at Amplexor, based in Colorado. With 30 years of experience in the translation and localization arena and, as a dynamic sales executive, he has a proven record of helping major brands with their global content lifecycle, from digital marketing to international expansion. He loves being a consultant for his customers and has built lifelong partnerships.

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.

Mark Lawyer is the general manager of Trados at RWS Group, where he leads the development and implementation of go-to-market strategies across product development, sales and marketing, account management, and partnerships. With over two decades of experience in the industry, he has worked with some of the world’s leading Fortune 500 companies, demonstrating his passion for global content and translation technology. Mark’s dedication to personal integrity and executive leadership has helped him develop and lead high-performing teams now focused on helping the localization industry eliminate barriers to communication by translating everything. He is based in New York, holds a degree in communication and international business, and resides with his family in New York.

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.

Kåre Lindahl has over 25 years of globalization experience working in the software and localization industry. Since 2010, he has been the CEO of Venga Global, a specialized localization and transcreation company working with some of the biggest names in the technology industry. During his career, Kåre has gained first-hand experience working with requirements from countries around the globe, and has extensive knowledge in multiple areas including global brand management, agile localization, cloud/software as a service-based products and eLearning/voiceover. He grew up in Sweden and lived in the United Kingdom for ten years before relocating to the US to join the IT boom in Silicon Valley.

Jon Ann Lindsey works with writers, editors and researchers to create clear, friendly Help Center content for Google users worldwide. She mastered explanatory writing as a newspaper reporter and editor, then moved online to the front page of Yahoo! when it was the number one site on the internet. Later, at PayPal, Jon Ann got her first exposure to writing for translation. She is inspired by the fact that for billions of people, online Help is the only direct contact they have with Google. Jon Ann’s team strives to solve problems in easy-to-understand language, no matter where users are in the world.

Arle Lommel is a senior analyst with independent market research firm Common Sense Advisory (CSA Research). He is a recognized expert in quality processes and interoperability standards. Arle’s research focuses on technology, quality assessment and interoperability.

Steven Loomis, a member of IBM’s Global Foundations Technology Team for nearly 20 years, is the technical lead for the International Components for Unicode for C/C++, IBM’s primary representative to Unicode Technical Committee and the chair of the ULI Technical Committee. He was a cofounder of the Unicode Common Locale Data Repository project, and develops and maintains its survey tool data collection application. Past speaking engagements include NodeSummit, JavaOne, the IUC conferences, the International Mac Users Group, the Localization Certification Program of CSU Chico, as well as internal IBM events. Steven’s hobbies include Maltese language advocacy.

Koji Maeda is the director of KI Hong Kong, a group company of Kawamura International. Based in the hub of Southeast Asia, he manages the company’s localization projects specifically for the Asian languages. Koji joined Kawamura International in 2005 and built his carrier in localization through managing localization projects for many major global companies. After leading the successful launch of the company’s multilingual localization services, he moved his base to Hong Kong, the company’s first expansion outside of Japan, and worked to develop partnerships and business around Asia.

Toni Mantych describes her professional purpose and passion as “Enabling organizations to solve client problems with content, and content problems with technology.” She is currently director, content strategy at ADP. In that role, Toni leads the content strategy and architecture team for the Information Development Services (IDS) group and also facilitates cross-functional enterprise content strategy efforts. She initiated and led the adoption of DITA and component content management within IDS and ADP. She has also taught numerous courses in the graduate technical and professional communications program at Portland State University and speaks regularly at content industry conferences.

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

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

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

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

Markus Meisl is a member of the management team of the language services and technology department at SAP, one of the world’s leading providers of enterprise software. His current role is comanaging the people aspects of translation and localization service teams that deal with localization of product units for technologies, platforms and acquisitions. Markus’ passion is to develop organizations and individuals toward more self-organization, distributed leadership and life-long learning. Previously, he headed the central corporate translation team for German and English at SAP. Since joining SAP’s implementation methodology group in 1998, Markus has held various roles within knowledge and product management ranging from translation and coordination of technical documentation, product definition and early training, to rollout and partner relations. In the 1990s, he worked as a freelance translator and interpreter in Vancouver, Canada, where he became involved in his first localization projects. Markus also worked as a freelance interpreter for the European Commission in Brussels. He holds a degree in conference interpreting for German, Spanish and Portuguese from the University of Heidelberg.

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

Marc Mittag is the head of MittagQI – Quality Informatics and project lead of translate5, an open-source cloud translation system. He started developing software in 2000 and has worked in language industry IT since 2002. In 2009 he founded MittagQI, which focuses on software and technical consulting for the language industry. Prior to 2009 he worked as head of translation IT at Transline.

Miyuki Mori is an independent consultant in marketing and business process. With over 20 years of experience with global and Japan IT companies like Cisco and AT&T, Miyuki has focused on introducing thought leadership and a future brought by technology to the Japan market. Her areas of expertise and experience spread across business/marketing strategy and planning, localization for marketing, change management, process reengineering and operational excellence. Miyuki currently serves as APAC geo manager for Women in Localization and has led its Japan Charter as chapter manager since the beginning of 2017.

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

Amy Grace O’Brien is a no-nonsense terminologist, AI wrangler, and localization troublemaker at Adobe. She’s on a mission to make terminology management actually work—cutting through the noise, cleaning up the mess, and building AI-driven solutions that scale. From revamping translation quality processes to leading industry-first innovations in multilingual term extraction, she’s all about impact. A frank-speaking Northerner with a sharp eye for efficiency, Amy bridges the gap between linguists, tech, and business, ensuring words do what they’re meant to. If it’s broken, she’ll fix it. If it’s inefficient, she’ll automate it. And if it’s boring, she’ll make it fun.

Adrian O’Sullivan has worked with assorted automation technologies since 1998 when he began his career in localization, and has also developed automation solutions for several companies. In his current role with Veritas, Adrian and his team are responsible for developing various solutions for automated globalization testing.

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

Erica Orange is executive vice president and chief operating officer of The Future Hunters, one of the world’s leading futurist consulting firms. She evaluates emerging social, technological, economic, political, demographic and environmental trends — and identifies the strategic implications (the “so what?”) of those trends for several of the most influential Fortune 500 companies, trade associations and public sector clients. Erica’s ability to connect the dots, spot patterns, think critically and analytically, and translate that into actionable strategies is what has made her an invaluable asset to clients. She frequently speaks to a wide range of audiences about global trends that are shaping the landscape today. Erica has also authored numerous articles, book chapters and industry white papers on cutting-edge, future-focused topics. She is recognized in the industry as having a unique, innovative and fresh perspective.

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

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

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

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

Elzbieta Petlicka is a multilingual professional with varied localization experience. In the past ten years, she has experienced localization from different angles and in different roles. Elzbieta has worked as a translator, project manager and program manager. She helps both small and large multinational organizations design and execute large-scale localization programs that drive companies to go global. On the back-end, Elzbieta leads an internal team of localization project managers, assesses the current state of processes and tools, establishes a plan for implementing new solutions and executes with cross-departmental resources. She holds master’s degrees in Scandinavian studies and translation studies, as well as additional certification in audiovisual translation and hands-on experience in translation and localization.

Yury Petyushin holds a degree in linguistics and is a certified process improvement expert, a designation that led him to work in metallurgical plants, coal mines, environmental organizations, hospital emergency rooms and other random places. However, his passion for language and building systems finally led Yury to join All Correct Games as the head of the localization department. All Correct is one of Eastern Europe’s largest localization firms, with offices in Toronto and Dublin, where Yury now holds the title of chief financial officer.

Hillary Pierce manages the Google developer’s translation pipeline working closely with content creators, product area leads, regional teams and translation vendors to ensure consistency in voice and messaging. She is responsible for creating a localization strategy and process for the content her team produces, which ranges from blog posts to videos to technical documentation to online courses. This year Hillary is focusing on glocalization and introduced translation forethought into the original content creation. She hopes that this alteration at the beginning of the process will prove to have a deeper impact on their non-English speaking audience.

Jean-Bernard Piot is currently leading the adoption of globalization tools and best practices across the Adobe Digital Marketing organization. He has extensive experience in product management, software engineering and innovation.

Andrzej Poblocki is a globalization architect who is passionate about delivering a software that will delight international customers. During his 15-year career in the globalization industry he has held various positions, starting in quality assurance then quickly moving to localization tools and engineering, internationalization engineering and finally to the architect role where he is responsible for the globalization systems, processes and integrations as well as the internationalization architecture of the company’s products.

Lelani Prévost provides strategy and technology support to multiple business units including research and development, marketing and customer success. With a background in linguistics and writing, she by chance found herself on the fun side of languages. In her spare time, Lelani enjoys volunteer opportunities and has recently joined the board of Haiti on the Rise, a nonprofit that funds programs for those affected by the 2010 earthquake and Hurricane Matthew in 2016.

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

Raphael Racine is a software engineering manager at Autodesk. He joined the company 20 years ago as a quality assurance engineer in Neuchâtel, and has had a career in a variety of increasingly responsible jobs both in Switzerland and in Singapore. In his current role in globalization solutions, Raphael images, designs and creates engineering concepts, processes and tools to overcome challenging business’ needs while taking most advantages of the technology evolution and the latest industry trends. His education history includes an engineering degree from the University of Applied Science at Neuchâtel, Switzerland, and a master’s in organizational leadership and strategic management at Lausanne, Switzerland.

Antonio Renna is a professional localization/globalization software engineer who’s been working at Autodesk for about 20 years. During this time, he has held different functional roles, implemented localization software processes and testing strategies to increase efficiency and collaborated with development teams to increase globalization awareness. Recently, Antonio expanded his expertise in fields such as human-centered methodologies, customer experience and data analytics to influence projects and initiatives decisions and execution. His education history includes two bachelor degrees, one in electrical and electronics and one in business information technology, both from the University of Applied Science of Neuchâtel, Switzerland.

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.

Phil Ritchie directs research, development, and process innovation activities at Vistatec. His technical expertise covers software development, commercial enterprise workflow and content management systems, AI, machine translation, and collaboration portals. Phil is a recognized industry expert and often a speaker at international events.

Bill Rivers has 25 years’ experience in languages for economic development and national security. He is the executive director of the Joint National Committee for Languages (JNCL) and the National Council for Languages and International Studies, representing more than 130 language organizations to the Federal Government and business community. Before JNCL, Bill was the chief technology officer of a research company, and spent 15 years in higher education. He taught Russian at the University of Maryland, worked as a freelance interpreter and translator for aerospace projects, and lived and conducted field work in Kazakhstan. Bill holds a PhD in Russian from Bryn Mawr College.

Kathy Rokni is director of globalization at Netflix, where she leads localization and internalization of Netflix services around the world. Kathy has extensive exposure to cross-cultural dynamics and multinational business practices in Asia Pacific, Europe, Latin America and North America. An international business leader first and foremost, she has led different aspects of international businesses for different companies in Silicon Valley including Google, where she led global content and localization as well as global policy operations. Before Netflix, Kathy was vice president of international operations at Tubemogul, where she led the company’s operational expansion internationally.

Lilian Rossi is a senior software engineer at Autodesk and a global citizen. Originally from Brazil, she has lived in the United States, Switzerland, China and is now based in Singapore. During her 12-year career, Lilian has transformed from a vendor localization engineer to a globalization solutions engineer where she leads software engineering, quality management and publishing technologies teams to deliver localized products. Her role mainly involves identifying the right tools for localization, managing content, troubleshooting localization issues, providing localization-specific guidance to product development teams and technical support to internal and external stakeholders.

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.

Gaya Saghatelyan is responsible for globalization enablement at HubSpot. As an internal consultant she enables teams to scale globally and create an equitable experience for users regardless of the language they speak. Gaya was born in Armenia, raised in the United States and now lives in Germany. She’s passionate about language accessibility and education.

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.

After receiving a PhD in 2008, Konstantin Savenkov led research and development efforts for online content services, then worked as CTO at Zvooq and as a chief operating officer at Bookmate. In 2016, he contributed his experience in artificial intelligence (AI), technology, and operations to found Intento, Inc., where they build tools to source, evaluate, and use machine translation and other cognitive AI services.

Mai Sawamura started her career in the localization industry over 20 years ago as a desktop publishing operator. Currently, Mai has a profound interest in translation capability expansion involving machine translation for Asian to Asian language pairs as well as Asian to English language pairs. She has been supporting the expansion of Women in Localization Japan Charter as an assistant chapter manager since the first Japan chapter meeting in 2015.

For the past ten years, Vikas Saxena has been working as senior software engineer with the localization team at Autodesk. He has been part of testing strategy revamps, test tool implementations, process improvements and process automations. Vikas has 17 years of experience working on a variety of products across industries with specialization in software testing and automations. He holds a master’s degree in manufacturing from the University of Pune, India.

Anja Schaefer leads Lionbridge’s Global Solution Team, which supports the company’s revenue growth by building winning solutions for prospective and existing customers across all industries. With close to 20 years of experience, she has a deep knowledge of the language services industry. Anja is passionate about helping brands take their message to a global audience and achieve a best-in-class global customer experience. Originally from Germany, she has made her home in Los Angeles, California. Anja is fluent in English, German and French, and functional in Italian and Spanish. She holds a degree in English and French from Georg-August University in Göttingen, Germany.

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.

Anna Schlegel is the vice president, product, international and globalization at Procore. She has worked in the tech industry in the Silicon Valley for over 20 years, leading teams at NetApp, Cisco, VMware, Xerox, and Verisign. Anna served as the global executive sponsor of NetApp’s Women in Technology organization, where she focused on developing female leaders in the tech industry. She is also the cofounder of Women in Localization, the leading professional organization for women in the localization industry with over 5,000 members worldwide.

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.

Karen Scipi is a principal user experience engineer on the Oracle applications user experience team. She has held various enterprise applications design and development roles at Oracle, Microsoft and PeopleSoft. Karen is passionate about writing visual and language design patterns and driving and communicating language design and pattern alignment among application architecture, design, software code, user interface and content to enable a modern, flexible, intuitive and understandable user experience.

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

With over 20 years of experience in the translation industry, Janis Shea has worked closely with device and pharma companies alike to develop global launch strategies to ensure cost containment and reduction as well as reduced time to market. Janis is based in Southern California and has presented at translation industry events such as LTEN, STC and previous LocWorld events.

Cornelia Sittel leads the localization team at Salesforce Commerce Cloud. After working for over a decade in various software quality assurance management roles, seven years ago, she returned to the career she originally trained for, and built a localization team and processes at Demandware (which became Salesforce Commerce Cloud 2016). Cornelia’s team is proud to enable the global reach of a world-class eCommerce software suite. She holds a master’s degree in translation from the Ruprecht-Karls-University in Heidelberg, Germany where she also pursued a doctorate in applied modern linguistics, which ultimately took her to Boston University. Cornelia is a native speaker of German, and besides English, is fluent in French, Italian, Spanish and Dutch as well as an avid student of Japanese. Her main interests include internationalization engineering, automated quality assurance, speech technologies and machine translation. She holds five US patents in internationalization/location.

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.

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.

Jeannette Stewart is a cofounder of Translation Commons, an online volunteer-based public charity aiming to offer and share tools and resources and to facilitate community initiatives. She is the former CEO of CommuniCare, a life-sciences translation company with offices in London, Paris, Athens, Budapest and Los Angeles. Jeannette has been involved in high-profile projects such as the Genome Project and prototyping the online Unified Submission Process for the European Medicine Agency. She writes a column in MultiLingual on community initiatives. Jeannette has founded, served on the board of directors, moderated and volunteered in various educational and health charities.

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.

Asu Su is a globalization software engineer for IBM China Development Lab. She has solid experience in software development works for multicultural support.

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.

Software engineer working on improving translation models at Google Translate.

Chase Tingley is vice president of engineering at Spartan Software, Inc. He has 15 years of experience developing localization tools, specializing in translation management system development and content extraction. An advocate for the greater adoption of both standards and open source tools within localization, Chase is a core contributor to the Okapi Framework and a member of the OASIS XLIFF and XLIFF-OMOS technical committees.

Max Troyer is passionate about preparing future professionals to join the localization industry. He’s a Professor of Professional Practice and Grover Hermann Endowed Chair for the Translation and Localization Management (TLM) program at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey (MIIS). His courses include Media and Audiovisual Localization, Advanced Media and Audiovisual Localization, Programming for Internationalization and Localization, and Games Localization. He believes in project-based teaching and assessment, and is constantly researching best practices for tools and techniques to incorporate into his program and courses. When not teaching, he is a consultant helping clients automate, reduce costs, and increase efficiencies with their localization processes and workflows.

Claire Tsai is currently leading globalization and international expansion at Cloudflare. She has specialized in international digital marketing strategy, global product management and localization program optimization for the past decade in her previous roles at VMware, Intuit and Ubisoft. Claire holds an MA in translation and localization management from the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey. She also has completed two Wharton Executive Education programs at the University of Pennsylvania in strategic marketing and marketing metrics.

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.

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.

Ana Velázquez Verges Andreato joined Expedia in 2012 as localization quality manager, Latin American (LATAM) Spanish languages. In 2014 she became regional quality manager, LATAM, where she is responsible for the quality of the Expedia point of sales in Latin America and the Iberic Peninsula. Prior to joining Expedia, Ana was marketing communications manager for SICPA, a leading Swiss multinational leader in the security inks industry, and a consultant for LHC, the consulting division of Ecole hôtelière de Lausanne, the first hospitality management school in the world. Ana has lived and worked in four different countries and is happy to have settled in her native Mexico, more precisely Cancun, where she enjoys going to the beach on weekends.

Erik drives innovation at Argos Multilingual by nurturing strategic growth and fusing customer needs with robust technology solutions. By fostering scalability and seamless integrations, solutions meet customer demands and elevate team performance and company growth.

Erik’s passionate about crafting solutions, grounded in a comprehensive understanding of business realities and finding practical applications of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Translation. The mission is to develop business models that are viable and deeply embedded in a core value proposition that resonates with global markets.

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.

For the past three years, Varden Wang has been the machine translation engineering lead for Google’s localization team. He is responsible for machine translation (MT) quality and deciding upon MT strategy. Prior to Google, he developed custom MT solutions for FactSet Research Systems. Varden has an MS in computational linguistics from the University of Washington. He is also very keen on exploring how machine learning can benefit other aspects of localization.

Jack Welde is a technology early-adopter, serial entrepreneur, software patent-holder, product evangelist and combat-decorated Air Force pilot. Before founding Smartling, he served as senior vice president of product at eMusic and COO/CTO at SheSpeaks and RunTime Technologies. Jack also cofounded Trio Development, a software company that created the first personal information manager, which was acquired by Apple in 1993. He holds a BS in computer engineering from the University of Pennsylvania, where he also studied linguistics and interned with Professor William Labov, and an MBA from Cameron University in Germany.

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.

Alvin Yang is vice president of global development and internationalization at GoDaddy. He is responsible for GoDaddy’s internationalization initiatives, setting strategy for global development, driving localization and the growth of Godaddy products in global markets. Alvin started his career at Microsoft where he held multiple roles including regional manager, director of test for the international team and localization management. Prior to GoDaddy, he was senior vice president and head of the strategic account business group of Beyondsoft.

Jee Yi earned her BA in computer science from UC Berkeley and has been working as a software developer in Silicon Valley for more than ten years. Jee is currently a senior software developer at Box where she is one of the main contributors of Mojito, an open sourced automation platform that enables continuous localization for software development. Jee is passionate about connecting people around the world by building global products and providing the best experiences in their native culture. Before working at Box, she worked at Yahoo! where she built a self-serve localization platform called Dragonfly. Jee has also worked on in-context review for iOS on Simulator.

Jost Zetzsche is a translation industry and translation technology consultant, an author on various aspects of translation, and an ATA-certified English-to-German technical translator. In 1999, Jost cofounded International Writers’ Group, LLC, on the Oregon coast. Originally from Hamburg, Germany, he earned a PhD in the field of Chinese translation history and linguistics at the University of Hamburg. The Translator’s Tool Box, his computer guide for translators is now in its thirteenth edition, and his technical journal for the translation industry goes out to more than 11,000 translation professionals.

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.

Víctor Alonso Lion has been dedicated to internationalization and localization for more than 15 years. His experience covers, among other things, localization engineering, international project management, localization training and globalization consultancy. After providing localization project management to a wide range of areas, such as life sciences, IT and the financial industry, Víctor now works with interactive media such as eLearning and games. He is a frequent speaker on international project management and localization. Víctor serves the game industry as client services director for Pink Noise, the game localization company focused on the European and Latin American Spanish markets.

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

Diana Ballard is dedicated to global account management. She brings 20 years’ experience to the localization and content creation industry. In the early days, as technical publications manager in a fast-paced Japanese manufacturing environment for over six years, Diana quickly understood the culture of “right first time, every time.” She has engaged in countless conversations committed to matching customer need with localization service solution. Graduating from the University of Liverpool with Joint Honours in languages and a major in English, Diana spent her early career years in management consulting gaining an insight into how businesses manage process improvements across the enterprise.

Sasan Banava is the head of localization at Uber, starting the in-house localization team at the San Francisco headquarters. Previously, he was a localization program manager at Google and had driven the localization of over 25 product lines in 70+ languages, including the international launch of Google+ mobile in multiple platforms. Sasan was responsible for the globalization of Google My Business and other geo products across desktop and mobile platforms. He has over ten years of project and program management experience and is certified from Stanford University in advanced project management. Sasan holds a BA from UC Berkeley in Near Eastern studies with emphasis on Persian language and he spent two years of his academic life studying computer science. He also holds a commercial pilot’s license.

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.

Aldo Bermudez leads digital marketing, marketing technology and globalization at Lookout. His true passion is having the ability to communicate with prospective customers by engaging them with optimal experiences no matter where they are from.  Aldo is responsible for supporting all global marketing messaging with campaigns and digital experience, and owns all marketing localization for Lookout.  He has over 20 years of experience in digital marketing and has worked in localization over the past 10 years with companies like Cisco WebEx, NetApp, Workday and Lookout.

Alessandra Binazzi is a leading expert in globalization strategy, tech stack definition and implementation, process automation and change management for global companies looking to expand reach and maximize revenues. Proficient in all major European languages, Alessandra has dedicated her professional life to advocating for international users and to create, market, and support products and services that engage customers in all continents. She is the principal consultant of Global Sights Consulting, member of the Board of Advisors of the Process Innovation Challenge, a former Board Member of the Globalization and Localization Association (GALA).

As FirstVoices coordinator for the First Peoples’ Cultural Council, Shay Boechler conducted training workshops and managed much of the day-to-day community-based FirstVoices programming. She currently manages outreach efforts for the Endangered Languages Project, an online collaborative network that aims to strengthen endangered languages. Shay holds a BA degree in applied linguistics from the University of Victoria.

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.