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.

Gábor Bessenyei has always been enthusiastic about the combination of languages and computers — two totally different worlds. One is human and always escapes from the trappings of rules, the other is very formalized and is driven by rules. Gábor started his career in 1994 as an SAP translator. Between 1997 and 2001, he was IT manager, translation coordinator and member of the board at SAP Hungary. Since 2001, Gábor has been the founding managing partner and CEO of MorphoLogic Localisation, a language service provider and language technology company located in Budapest, developer of Globalese NMT.

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

Originally from Dublin, Ireland, Conor Bracken has lived in Thailand since 1992. He founded Andovar in 2007 and has decades of experience in localization and dealing with Asian-language localization issues.

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.

Celina Cao is the outsourcing lead of Alibaba International User Experience Division (over 350 employees) where she is responsible for finance, overseas procurement, outsourcing management and internal and external communication. Celina has over ten years of content related working experience at Alibaba and Hewlett Packard (content strategy lead of Alibaba.com, localization vendor manager, marketing and communication, technical writing team lead).

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.

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).

Mayank Dutt is a quality management professional with quality project management experience across Scrum and Waterfall development models. At Adobe, he has been working as an engineering manager in quality and international markets, taking care of digital media localization testing and managing different parallels covering the Behance Family, Creative Cloud mobile apps and software development kits, and Creative Cloud web workflows. Mayank’s core areas of expertise include test management: test planning, scheduling, test estimation, tracking and risk management; vendor management: task distribution and resource planning; and business process reengineering. Mayank is also deeply involved in customer advocacy initiatives and has administered large customer advocacy events and workshops at Adobe India.

Nozomu Fujiwara is a marketing supervisor at the Yamaha Corporation where he leads the product planning and marketing of digital musical instruments. Since Yamaha products are sold globally, his focus is on understanding each customer and market, and creating the right marketing concept. Nozomu’s career has changed from just making the product to developing and delivering a superior customer experience to create excitement and cultural inspiration with people around the world.

Luis Garcia Navarro is the founder and general manager of Shinyuden, a game developer, localization and communication agency based in Tokyo. He has been working as a Spanish localizer for 11 years, mainly translating titles for the Final Fantasy saga, holding several positions both as internal and outsource partner for Square Enix, Nintendo and Gree while working on his own video game projects. Luis is currently collaborating with several indie game studios to release their games in Japan.

Salvatore “Salvo” Giammarresi is head of localization at Airbnb. Previously he held leadership roles at several technology companies in Silicon Valley including PayPal and Yahoo. Salvo holds a PhD in applied linguistics from the University of Palermo (Italy), where he later was a visiting professor, teaching localization. He is a published author on the topics of globalization, localization project management, international product management, formulaic sequences, translation studies, and translation memory systems. Salvo enjoys giving back and he currently does this as an executive board member at CLEAR Global, as an advisor to a few startups, and speaking at conferences. He started his professional career as an Italian-English-Italian freelance translator.

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

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

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

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.

Anubhav Jain is an engineering manager at Adobe Systems and leads a team of internationalization engineers. He has extensive experience in translation technologies. Anubhav is responsible for managing international content at the Adobe Learn and Support website and the delivery of products such as Adobe Indesign, Illustrator and After Effects to global markets. He is a regular speaker at international conferences including the Internationalization & Unicode Conference 36, LocWorld22 London, Adobe Tech Summit 2013 and AEM Hub 2014.

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.

Mihee Ji has been with E4NET since 2012 and has changed positions from engineer manager to global marketing manager. As a localization engineer, she participated in the early development of machine translation services, especially for Asian languages, and made an effort to provide efficient services for E4NET customers.

Tucker Johnson is the author of The General Theory of the Translation Company and cofounder of Nimdzi Insights, which are both joint projects with his partner, Renato Beninatto. As a coauthor and a cofounder, he takes Renato’s crazy ideas and puts them into action. Specialized in vendor-side operations, global team management, large program outsourcing and supply chain governance, Tucker eagerly shares his operational experience, whether it is through writing, speaking, teaching or consulting clients.

With a major in electric engineering, Megumi Kato has been working with localization teams for IT companies, from large to small startups. Currently she is a senior manager of a Japanese localization team at VMware where one of her main responsibilities is to provide high-quality marketing localization services to VMware Japan for web, marketing materials, event presentations, video, eLearning and campaign assets. Megumi’s daily work includes dealing with local stakeholders who have high quality expectations of marketing localization as well as meeting with US headquarter stakeholders who have high expectations of the cost and time-to-market efficiency.

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.

Keita Kuno first joined favy in 2015 while studying at Sophia University. Since then, he has been in charge of content marketing, crowdfunding and food and beverages projects. Keita is currently responsible for the management of the inbound gourmet media at favy Japan and business development.

Yuka Kurihara is the senior director of globalization services at Scaled Agile, Inc., where she leads international expansion and localization. Passionate about bringing products to global markets, Yuka has successfully navigated the complexities of localizing software, hardware, and diverse content in numerous languages. Since joining Scaled Agile in 2020, she has been instrumental in expanding the company’s global reach and defining its localization strategies. With multiple SAFe certifications, including SAFe® Practice Consultant and Agile Product Manager, Yuka thrives in both the localization and agile worlds.

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.

Lishan (Andrea) Liu is the lead localization project manager at R2Games. She has built a professional team of localization project managers and leads the team under the localization director to carry out best practices on managing the standards, workflow and resources for localizing video games. With academic backgrounds in both localization and media, Andrea has worked as a localization professional for six years, having a portfolio covering video games, apps, websites, books and other media products.

Ewandro Magalhaes is a language industry executive with over 25 years of experience. He is also a senior diplomatic interpreter and former chief interpreter of a United Nations agency in Geneva, where he helped introduce a groundbreaking system of interactive remote participation in all six languages of the United Nations. Ewandro is currently the vice president of communications of KUDO, a Manhattan-based startup that is pushing the envelope on new cloud-based solutions for multilingual meetings.

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.

Yumiko Metsugi represents XTM International in Japan and is an XTM specialist. With more than a decade of experience in the translation industry, she has a vast knowledge of computer-assisted translation tools and translation management systems. She understands the complex issues multinational enterprises face when localizing content, and can recommend creative solutions to overcome them.

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.

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 25 years of experience in the industry, Yuka Nakasone owns Global Bridge, a consultancy company in Barcelona, Spain, that provides globalization strategies and its execution for a variety of clients. As its name suggests, Global Bridge’s mission is to bridge different cultures and countries. Yuka has held various leadership roles including globalization and localization director at Beabloo in Spain, and Intento in the USA. She also drives innovation as well as professional and leadership development in the industry through her activities including LocWorld’s Process Innovation Challenge and Translation Commons’ leadership portal.

Takeyoshi Nakayama is a solutions engineer. He has worked for over ten years in developing localization software and machine translation (MT) systems and supporting customers. His focus is on making all parties happy, including end users, clients, translators and translation vendors.

Swati Narwal is a business consulting professional, a public speaking enthusiast, a die-hard optimist and a positive-minded person. She is motivated especially by change, learning new skills and being a part of a dynamic team. Swati has an international and diverse experience spanning over ten years in different fields of retail, banking, education and the IT industry, and has a multifaceted leadership experience in decision making positions. She has core experience in change management, communication and employee relations. As part of her quest for learning and knowledge, Swati has spent the past four years in the localization industry creating, implementing and supporting a comprehensive and acknowledged localization process for IKEA Group, focusing on various aspects such as quality, ways of working, processes and managing localization vendors.

Yuka Ogasawara studied applied linguistics at Waseda University in Tokyo and started her career as a marketer at an IT company. Through three years of experience as a marketing manager, she learned the importance and the effectiveness of word choice through her online/offline marketing projects. Yuka was a freelance translator as well throughout the years, and with a passion for movies and translation she joined Netflix in 2016. She has been working very closely with the local marketing team at the Netflix Tokyo office to provide the best localization quality for the product and marketing campaigns.

Luciano Oliveira is the CEO of The Translation Company Group LLC (TTC Group), a US company providing technical translation and localization services in 200+ languages. The TTC Group is headquartered in New York City, NY, with offices in Dallas, TX, and abroad. In addition to his role as leadership council member of the American Translators Association’s  Translation Company Division, Luciano participates in the development of technologies for the localization industry such as plugins and automated quote systems. Before working with localization and language technologies, he spent about a decade working with web technologies as a senior consultant for KPMG.

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.

Vasco Pedro is the cofounder and CEO of Unbabel, an AI powered platform that enables modern enterprises such as Microsoft, Logitech, and Uber to serve customers in their native languages. Based in Lisbon, Vasco holds a PhD in language technologies from Carnegie Mellon University, and is a faculty member of Singularity University.

Stephanie Riches Harries has worked at Cochlear Ltd.’s global head office in Sydney, Australia, as a localization project manager since 2012. She holds a graduate diploma in translation from Western Sydney University and continues to work as a freelance translator. Stephanie’s current portfolio at Cochlear Ltd. includes cross-cultural research, globalization awareness and surgical implant documentation.

Suguru Sakanishi is CEO of Yaraku, Inc., which develops the online translation tool YarakuZen and is based in Tokyo, Japan. After working for an online marketing company in New York for several years, he returned to Japan and started the business in 2010.

Jeffrey Sandford is WOVN.io’s cofounder and CTO. He was born in Illinois, USA, and studied computer science at the University of Texas, Austin. After working as a freelance engineer, Jeffrey founded Tokago Creative in 2009. He moved to Japan in 2011 and joined WOVN.io in 2014.

Phanitanan Sanitprachakorn is a CEO of EQHO Group where she has managed the EQHO Group across a mix of domains and guided the company to significant year-on-year growth and subsequently a spot in Asia’s top 20 language service providers. Phanitanan holds certificates in localization and localization project management from California State University. She spent years as an operations director and a production manager where she learned the importance of strategic planning, decisive leadership and managing cross-cultural teams across various levels to satisfy organization’s goals. Bringing a wealth of experience in the localization industry and solid knowledge of cross-cultural communication solutions, Phanitanan has been a guest speaker at many events worldwide during her ten years in the localization industry.

Over 30 years ago, Kaori Sasaki established UNICUL International, Inc., a communications consultancy that provides translation and interpretation in seventy languages to global corporations across a broad range of business sectors. She founded ewoman Inc., an influential think tank and diversity consultancy that provides marketing, branding, product development and training to major corporations in 2000. She also founded and produces the International Conference for Women in Business in 1996, now the largest annual working women’s conference in Japan.

Ms. Sasaki also currently serves on the boards of directors of several public companies as well as on advisory boards and management councils for various ministries and major organizations.

Recognized as an expert on workplace diversity, Ms. Sasaki has made over 1500 speeches in Japan and abroad and countless media appearances. She has written several bestsellers and is credited with creating the day-planner boom in Japan when she designed and launched Action Planner, a perennial best seller.

Gen Sato has been in localization since 1999. He started as a translator and then experienced various roles including reviewer, vendor manager and language team manager. For ten years, Gen worked on various projects both for Japanese and foreign clients. He was also involved in special projects such as computer-assisted translation tool training, post-editing, quality assurance for European languages, software user interface localization and style guide creation. In 2009, Gen joined SDL Japan as a sales representative for translation software. He was responsible for the Japanese language service provider market. Gen has also spent a significant amount of time writing blogs and talking at seminars to explain the features of SDL Trados Studio in detail. He became a sales manager in 2016 and a sales director in 2017. Gen is training internal resources and promoting SDL software, trying to expand the localization market in Japan. He is also proactively involved in localization industry events to share his views toward its future.

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.

Kohta Shibayama is the director of operations Japan at Venga Global. He started his career in the localization industry as a localization project manager at a single language vendor in Japan. Kohta then moved to a multilanguage vendor where he became a project manager and then led the project management team. He later went on to head the localization project management group in Japan and China. Over the past 14 years Kohta has been focusing on operations management in Japan.

Masa Shigeki is a consultant at TalentA, serving professional service, customer success and product marketing for software as a service human resource (HR) tech products especially for the talent management field. She has experience in Japanese localization and Japan roll out of multiple HR tech products such as SilkRoad and HireVue. Masa is the very first certified HireVue implementation consultant in Japan.

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.

Andrea Tabacchi is the chief customer officer at Phrase where he utilizes his extensive experience in building customer-centric language technology solutions for multinational corporations and global translation companies. He and his teams work with clients to develop solutions to address their translation technology needs, including innovative ways to optimize the Phrase platform and liaise between clients and internal teams to suggest platform improvements. 

Kenji Takaoka is the founder and CEO of Export Japan Inc., a company specialized in developing multilingual websites for Japanese organizations. He started the business in 2000 when he was an MBA student at Kobe University, after abandoning his career as a professional boxer. In 2013, while still running Export Japan, Kenji started a new business, QR Translator, a multilingual solution for signage or printed materials. The business received investments from several venture capitals. QR Translator is currently used in many places such as Kansai International Airport, Seven-Eleven convenience stores and Coca-Cola vending machines. He is also a member of the board of japan-guide.com and several tourism-related associations.

Takao Tanaka is a legal representative and solutions architect at Moravia’s Japan office. He joined Moravia as a project manager, then managed the whole production team in Tokyo until moving to business development and establishment of new services. Takao is involved in most of the hiring in Tokyo, including cooperation with internal/external (domestic/international) recruiting teams.

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

Kirsty Taylor is a senior manager of documentation and localization for the ABB Enterprise Software product group and is based in Brisbane, Australia. She is responsible for product and content localizations globally for the ABB enterprise software products, which means she is used to juggling international time zones and advocating for thinking and being global.

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.

Cedric Wagrez is the vice president of operations at Gengo. He and his team manage all processes required to build teams and deliver quality work at scale for multiple services including translation. Cedric has 15 years of experience in the IT field in many industries in Japan bringing a technical angle to the running of operations at large scale.

Frank Wei is the founder and president of Master Translation Services (MTS), a language service provider headquartered in China. He founded MTS in 2000 and managed its growth into a Common Sense Advisory (CSA Research) ranked Global 100 language service provider with seven offices in mainland China, Taiwan and the United States. As a council member of the Translators Association of China (TAC) and deputy director of the TAC Translation Service Committee, he is actively involved in the language industry, managing the company and communicating with clients from the US and Europe. Frank also takes part in the activities of language associations worldwide, sharing with people about industry trends, language technology development and new business models.

Tadayuki Yoshida has been working at IBM for about 20 years. He started his career working with Linux internationalization, then moved his focus to globalization, internationalization and localization for open technologies such as web services, XML, Eclipse and so on. Now Tadayuki is developing the IBM Cloud service Globalization Pipeline, and working with IBM Cloud users and developers to seek innovative solutions using automated translation through this service.

Anson Zhang is a globalization operation program manager at VMware and he is focusing on localization technology, process, efficiency and experience. Anson has been in the localization industry for about ten years.

Jingyu (Eva) Zhang is a globalization professional in the field of gaming, She holder a master’s degree in linguistics from Kobe University and an executive MBA from Hult International Business School.

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.

Gábor Bessenyei has always been enthusiastic about the combination of languages and computers — two totally different worlds. One is human and always escapes from the trappings of rules, the other is very formalized and is driven by rules. Gábor started his career in 1994 as an SAP translator. Between 1997 and 2001, he was IT manager, translation coordinator and member of the board at SAP Hungary. Since 2001, Gábor has been the founding managing partner and CEO of MorphoLogic Localisation, a language service provider and language technology company located in Budapest, developer of Globalese NMT.

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

Originally from Dublin, Ireland, Conor Bracken has lived in Thailand since 1992. He founded Andovar in 2007 and has decades of experience in localization and dealing with Asian-language localization issues.

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.

Celina Cao is the outsourcing lead of Alibaba International User Experience Division (over 350 employees) where she is responsible for finance, overseas procurement, outsourcing management and internal and external communication. Celina has over ten years of content related working experience at Alibaba and Hewlett Packard (content strategy lead of Alibaba.com, localization vendor manager, marketing and communication, technical writing team lead).

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.

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).

Mayank Dutt is a quality management professional with quality project management experience across Scrum and Waterfall development models. At Adobe, he has been working as an engineering manager in quality and international markets, taking care of digital media localization testing and managing different parallels covering the Behance Family, Creative Cloud mobile apps and software development kits, and Creative Cloud web workflows. Mayank’s core areas of expertise include test management: test planning, scheduling, test estimation, tracking and risk management; vendor management: task distribution and resource planning; and business process reengineering. Mayank is also deeply involved in customer advocacy initiatives and has administered large customer advocacy events and workshops at Adobe India.

Nozomu Fujiwara is a marketing supervisor at the Yamaha Corporation where he leads the product planning and marketing of digital musical instruments. Since Yamaha products are sold globally, his focus is on understanding each customer and market, and creating the right marketing concept. Nozomu’s career has changed from just making the product to developing and delivering a superior customer experience to create excitement and cultural inspiration with people around the world.

Luis Garcia Navarro is the founder and general manager of Shinyuden, a game developer, localization and communication agency based in Tokyo. He has been working as a Spanish localizer for 11 years, mainly translating titles for the Final Fantasy saga, holding several positions both as internal and outsource partner for Square Enix, Nintendo and Gree while working on his own video game projects. Luis is currently collaborating with several indie game studios to release their games in Japan.

Salvatore “Salvo” Giammarresi is head of localization at Airbnb. Previously he held leadership roles at several technology companies in Silicon Valley including PayPal and Yahoo. Salvo holds a PhD in applied linguistics from the University of Palermo (Italy), where he later was a visiting professor, teaching localization. He is a published author on the topics of globalization, localization project management, international product management, formulaic sequences, translation studies, and translation memory systems. Salvo enjoys giving back and he currently does this as an executive board member at CLEAR Global, as an advisor to a few startups, and speaking at conferences. He started his professional career as an Italian-English-Italian freelance translator.

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

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

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

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.

Anubhav Jain is an engineering manager at Adobe Systems and leads a team of internationalization engineers. He has extensive experience in translation technologies. Anubhav is responsible for managing international content at the Adobe Learn and Support website and the delivery of products such as Adobe Indesign, Illustrator and After Effects to global markets. He is a regular speaker at international conferences including the Internationalization & Unicode Conference 36, LocWorld22 London, Adobe Tech Summit 2013 and AEM Hub 2014.

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.

Mihee Ji has been with E4NET since 2012 and has changed positions from engineer manager to global marketing manager. As a localization engineer, she participated in the early development of machine translation services, especially for Asian languages, and made an effort to provide efficient services for E4NET customers.

Tucker Johnson is the author of The General Theory of the Translation Company and cofounder of Nimdzi Insights, which are both joint projects with his partner, Renato Beninatto. As a coauthor and a cofounder, he takes Renato’s crazy ideas and puts them into action. Specialized in vendor-side operations, global team management, large program outsourcing and supply chain governance, Tucker eagerly shares his operational experience, whether it is through writing, speaking, teaching or consulting clients.

With a major in electric engineering, Megumi Kato has been working with localization teams for IT companies, from large to small startups. Currently she is a senior manager of a Japanese localization team at VMware where one of her main responsibilities is to provide high-quality marketing localization services to VMware Japan for web, marketing materials, event presentations, video, eLearning and campaign assets. Megumi’s daily work includes dealing with local stakeholders who have high quality expectations of marketing localization as well as meeting with US headquarter stakeholders who have high expectations of the cost and time-to-market efficiency.

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.

Keita Kuno first joined favy in 2015 while studying at Sophia University. Since then, he has been in charge of content marketing, crowdfunding and food and beverages projects. Keita is currently responsible for the management of the inbound gourmet media at favy Japan and business development.

Yuka Kurihara is the senior director of globalization services at Scaled Agile, Inc., where she leads international expansion and localization. Passionate about bringing products to global markets, Yuka has successfully navigated the complexities of localizing software, hardware, and diverse content in numerous languages. Since joining Scaled Agile in 2020, she has been instrumental in expanding the company’s global reach and defining its localization strategies. With multiple SAFe certifications, including SAFe® Practice Consultant and Agile Product Manager, Yuka thrives in both the localization and agile worlds.

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.

Lishan (Andrea) Liu is the lead localization project manager at R2Games. She has built a professional team of localization project managers and leads the team under the localization director to carry out best practices on managing the standards, workflow and resources for localizing video games. With academic backgrounds in both localization and media, Andrea has worked as a localization professional for six years, having a portfolio covering video games, apps, websites, books and other media products.

Ewandro Magalhaes is a language industry executive with over 25 years of experience. He is also a senior diplomatic interpreter and former chief interpreter of a United Nations agency in Geneva, where he helped introduce a groundbreaking system of interactive remote participation in all six languages of the United Nations. Ewandro is currently the vice president of communications of KUDO, a Manhattan-based startup that is pushing the envelope on new cloud-based solutions for multilingual meetings.

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.

Yumiko Metsugi represents XTM International in Japan and is an XTM specialist. With more than a decade of experience in the translation industry, she has a vast knowledge of computer-assisted translation tools and translation management systems. She understands the complex issues multinational enterprises face when localizing content, and can recommend creative solutions to overcome them.

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.

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 25 years of experience in the industry, Yuka Nakasone owns Global Bridge, a consultancy company in Barcelona, Spain, that provides globalization strategies and its execution for a variety of clients. As its name suggests, Global Bridge’s mission is to bridge different cultures and countries. Yuka has held various leadership roles including globalization and localization director at Beabloo in Spain, and Intento in the USA. She also drives innovation as well as professional and leadership development in the industry through her activities including LocWorld’s Process Innovation Challenge and Translation Commons’ leadership portal.

Takeyoshi Nakayama is a solutions engineer. He has worked for over ten years in developing localization software and machine translation (MT) systems and supporting customers. His focus is on making all parties happy, including end users, clients, translators and translation vendors.

Swati Narwal is a business consulting professional, a public speaking enthusiast, a die-hard optimist and a positive-minded person. She is motivated especially by change, learning new skills and being a part of a dynamic team. Swati has an international and diverse experience spanning over ten years in different fields of retail, banking, education and the IT industry, and has a multifaceted leadership experience in decision making positions. She has core experience in change management, communication and employee relations. As part of her quest for learning and knowledge, Swati has spent the past four years in the localization industry creating, implementing and supporting a comprehensive and acknowledged localization process for IKEA Group, focusing on various aspects such as quality, ways of working, processes and managing localization vendors.

Yuka Ogasawara studied applied linguistics at Waseda University in Tokyo and started her career as a marketer at an IT company. Through three years of experience as a marketing manager, she learned the importance and the effectiveness of word choice through her online/offline marketing projects. Yuka was a freelance translator as well throughout the years, and with a passion for movies and translation she joined Netflix in 2016. She has been working very closely with the local marketing team at the Netflix Tokyo office to provide the best localization quality for the product and marketing campaigns.

Luciano Oliveira is the CEO of The Translation Company Group LLC (TTC Group), a US company providing technical translation and localization services in 200+ languages. The TTC Group is headquartered in New York City, NY, with offices in Dallas, TX, and abroad. In addition to his role as leadership council member of the American Translators Association’s  Translation Company Division, Luciano participates in the development of technologies for the localization industry such as plugins and automated quote systems. Before working with localization and language technologies, he spent about a decade working with web technologies as a senior consultant for KPMG.

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.

Vasco Pedro is the cofounder and CEO of Unbabel, an AI powered platform that enables modern enterprises such as Microsoft, Logitech, and Uber to serve customers in their native languages. Based in Lisbon, Vasco holds a PhD in language technologies from Carnegie Mellon University, and is a faculty member of Singularity University.

Stephanie Riches Harries has worked at Cochlear Ltd.’s global head office in Sydney, Australia, as a localization project manager since 2012. She holds a graduate diploma in translation from Western Sydney University and continues to work as a freelance translator. Stephanie’s current portfolio at Cochlear Ltd. includes cross-cultural research, globalization awareness and surgical implant documentation.

Suguru Sakanishi is CEO of Yaraku, Inc., which develops the online translation tool YarakuZen and is based in Tokyo, Japan. After working for an online marketing company in New York for several years, he returned to Japan and started the business in 2010.

Jeffrey Sandford is WOVN.io’s cofounder and CTO. He was born in Illinois, USA, and studied computer science at the University of Texas, Austin. After working as a freelance engineer, Jeffrey founded Tokago Creative in 2009. He moved to Japan in 2011 and joined WOVN.io in 2014.

Phanitanan Sanitprachakorn is a CEO of EQHO Group where she has managed the EQHO Group across a mix of domains and guided the company to significant year-on-year growth and subsequently a spot in Asia’s top 20 language service providers. Phanitanan holds certificates in localization and localization project management from California State University. She spent years as an operations director and a production manager where she learned the importance of strategic planning, decisive leadership and managing cross-cultural teams across various levels to satisfy organization’s goals. Bringing a wealth of experience in the localization industry and solid knowledge of cross-cultural communication solutions, Phanitanan has been a guest speaker at many events worldwide during her ten years in the localization industry.

Over 30 years ago, Kaori Sasaki established UNICUL International, Inc., a communications consultancy that provides translation and interpretation in seventy languages to global corporations across a broad range of business sectors. She founded ewoman Inc., an influential think tank and diversity consultancy that provides marketing, branding, product development and training to major corporations in 2000. She also founded and produces the International Conference for Women in Business in 1996, now the largest annual working women’s conference in Japan.

Ms. Sasaki also currently serves on the boards of directors of several public companies as well as on advisory boards and management councils for various ministries and major organizations.

Recognized as an expert on workplace diversity, Ms. Sasaki has made over 1500 speeches in Japan and abroad and countless media appearances. She has written several bestsellers and is credited with creating the day-planner boom in Japan when she designed and launched Action Planner, a perennial best seller.

Gen Sato has been in localization since 1999. He started as a translator and then experienced various roles including reviewer, vendor manager and language team manager. For ten years, Gen worked on various projects both for Japanese and foreign clients. He was also involved in special projects such as computer-assisted translation tool training, post-editing, quality assurance for European languages, software user interface localization and style guide creation. In 2009, Gen joined SDL Japan as a sales representative for translation software. He was responsible for the Japanese language service provider market. Gen has also spent a significant amount of time writing blogs and talking at seminars to explain the features of SDL Trados Studio in detail. He became a sales manager in 2016 and a sales director in 2017. Gen is training internal resources and promoting SDL software, trying to expand the localization market in Japan. He is also proactively involved in localization industry events to share his views toward its future.

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.

Kohta Shibayama is the director of operations Japan at Venga Global. He started his career in the localization industry as a localization project manager at a single language vendor in Japan. Kohta then moved to a multilanguage vendor where he became a project manager and then led the project management team. He later went on to head the localization project management group in Japan and China. Over the past 14 years Kohta has been focusing on operations management in Japan.

Masa Shigeki is a consultant at TalentA, serving professional service, customer success and product marketing for software as a service human resource (HR) tech products especially for the talent management field. She has experience in Japanese localization and Japan roll out of multiple HR tech products such as SilkRoad and HireVue. Masa is the very first certified HireVue implementation consultant in Japan.

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.

Andrea Tabacchi is the chief customer officer at Phrase where he utilizes his extensive experience in building customer-centric language technology solutions for multinational corporations and global translation companies. He and his teams work with clients to develop solutions to address their translation technology needs, including innovative ways to optimize the Phrase platform and liaise between clients and internal teams to suggest platform improvements. 

Kenji Takaoka is the founder and CEO of Export Japan Inc., a company specialized in developing multilingual websites for Japanese organizations. He started the business in 2000 when he was an MBA student at Kobe University, after abandoning his career as a professional boxer. In 2013, while still running Export Japan, Kenji started a new business, QR Translator, a multilingual solution for signage or printed materials. The business received investments from several venture capitals. QR Translator is currently used in many places such as Kansai International Airport, Seven-Eleven convenience stores and Coca-Cola vending machines. He is also a member of the board of japan-guide.com and several tourism-related associations.

Takao Tanaka is a legal representative and solutions architect at Moravia’s Japan office. He joined Moravia as a project manager, then managed the whole production team in Tokyo until moving to business development and establishment of new services. Takao is involved in most of the hiring in Tokyo, including cooperation with internal/external (domestic/international) recruiting teams.

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

Kirsty Taylor is a senior manager of documentation and localization for the ABB Enterprise Software product group and is based in Brisbane, Australia. She is responsible for product and content localizations globally for the ABB enterprise software products, which means she is used to juggling international time zones and advocating for thinking and being global.

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.

Cedric Wagrez is the vice president of operations at Gengo. He and his team manage all processes required to build teams and deliver quality work at scale for multiple services including translation. Cedric has 15 years of experience in the IT field in many industries in Japan bringing a technical angle to the running of operations at large scale.

Frank Wei is the founder and president of Master Translation Services (MTS), a language service provider headquartered in China. He founded MTS in 2000 and managed its growth into a Common Sense Advisory (CSA Research) ranked Global 100 language service provider with seven offices in mainland China, Taiwan and the United States. As a council member of the Translators Association of China (TAC) and deputy director of the TAC Translation Service Committee, he is actively involved in the language industry, managing the company and communicating with clients from the US and Europe. Frank also takes part in the activities of language associations worldwide, sharing with people about industry trends, language technology development and new business models.

Tadayuki Yoshida has been working at IBM for about 20 years. He started his career working with Linux internationalization, then moved his focus to globalization, internationalization and localization for open technologies such as web services, XML, Eclipse and so on. Now Tadayuki is developing the IBM Cloud service Globalization Pipeline, and working with IBM Cloud users and developers to seek innovative solutions using automated translation through this service.

Anson Zhang is a globalization operation program manager at VMware and he is focusing on localization technology, process, efficiency and experience. Anson has been in the localization industry for about ten years.

Jingyu (Eva) Zhang is a globalization professional in the field of gaming, She holder a master’s degree in linguistics from Kobe University and an executive MBA from Hult International Business School.