Britta Aagaard is chief business officer at Semantix and is responsible for the total business within localization and advanced language solutions. With an academic background in philosophy and the science of language, coupled with an entrepreneurial mindset, Britta joined the language industry in 2004. Today she is enjoying the privilege of providing executive leadership to her organization and thought leadership to the language community. Britta serves on the board of directors of GALA and LT-Innovate and is part of the LIND Expert Group of the European Commission, with the ambition to position the language industry in the intersection of humanity and AI. Britta has a clear vision and commitment to creating a scalable business platform through sustainable integrations of people, technology, and solutions for a prosperous and democratic digital future.

Ilenia Bellucci is the localization coordinator for Trustpilot, one of the largest and fastest-growing global online review communities. With a background in languages and translation, she trains and coordinates a team of 20 in-house translators, as well as streamlining localization workflows to provide translated content to the entire company. Sitting in the technology department, Ilenia ensures localization requirements are met as early as the initial development stages, working in close collaboration with copywriters, developers and user experience designers.

Localization visionary and professional contrarian, Renato Beninatto has done it all – freelance translation, vendor management, sales and marketing, CEO, and everything in between. He has a passion for passing on his extensive industry knowledge to others and helping companies grow. Renato is a co-author of  The General Theory of the Translation Company, an adjunct professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in Monterey (MIIS), and a co-founder of Nimdzi Insights, a market research and advisory firm specializing in the language industry, and co-owner of MultiLingual Media, publisher of MultiLingual magazine.

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

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.

In her role as service owner for the onboarding service (mergers and acquisitions) at SAP, one of the world’s leading business software enterprises, Kerstin Bier is responsible for supporting SAP’s mergers and acquisitions in setting up and managing efficient localization processes and projects in the post-merger integration phase and beyond. Coming from an acquisition herself to SAP in 2012, Kerstin leads a team of account and delivery managers, project managers and a localization engineer, and puts a strong focus on establishing strong working relationships with the goal to set up efficient and scalable processes that help all sides. In her previous role at Sybase, acquired by SAP in 2010, Kerstin was responsible for managing European localization projects. She initiated and drove the introduction of statistical machine translation for one of their product areas and presented challenges and lessons learned at various conferences.

Jonathan Bowring graduated in computer science and worked for the UK Ministry of Defence and Hewlett-Packard before joining Canon. As Canon’s EMEA localization director, he built an independent services division with its own profit and loss of £15 million. Jonathan trained as a mentor and coach and founded Riversight in 2016. Riversight unlocks the potential within leaders, teams and organizations. It provides coaching and facilitation to small and medium-sized enterprises and corporate clients.

Tetyana Bruevich leads the global readiness team at LinkedIn. In her current role, she drives localization engineering efforts by developing tools, processes and concepts to enable everyone to create and deploy globally ready products. Tetyana holds an MS in engineering and an MBA from Kyiv National Economic University. She is an active member of the Women in Tech community at LinkedIn.

Veronica Carioni leads the Product localization program at Skyscanner, where she drives strategies to enhance the language experience in over 35 locales. Over the past year, she has driven the Localization Quality Program, exploring AI-powered solutions to ensure quality at scale and boost productivity. Previously, she led localization efforts at Vistaprint, focusing on process optimization and technology.

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.

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).

Heading Peakon’s team of organizational development specialists, Michael Dean’s work has led to the development of Peakon’s unique employee engagement methodology. In concert with Peakon’s real-time technology platform, this new approach to organizational development has helped hundreds of enterprises across the world to become more agile and fulfilling places to work. Previously Michael lead the apps team at Citrix Podio.

Chris Dell leads the Content Agency at Booking.com, the world’s largest platform for booking travel. He is responsible for a range of content topics including localization, copywriting, geodata, and content moderation. Chris’ passions at work are how humans and technology can coexist, and how we can build effective and inclusive organizations. Outside of work he runs, travels, writes, and coaches.

Pavel Doronin is a product manager at Smartcat and localization geek with strong and diverse experience in localization projects ranging from cybersecurity products to computer games to chatbots.

Dawid Dorynek is a translation manager at BSH Home Appliances Group, supervising the corporate translation management system. He is currently coordinating the implementation of a custom machine translation solution into the company’s localization processes. Dawid is also a freelance translator in his free time. Linguistic technologies and audiovisual translations remain his main fields of interest.

Margaret Ann Dowling is an Irish national with a 25-year career in  lifestyle and business publishing in Central European markets. Having published many of the worlds most iconic brands such as Cosmopolitan, National Geographic, Elle, SHAPE, Glamour, Marie Claire and InStyle in multiple Central European languages, she has a unique view of the localization of content.  Margaret Ann launched the first Polish chapter of the Singularity University and believes strongly in the power of exponential technology to positively impact our world. As the world further converges she believes that healthy, meaningful, fact-based content is a social imperative to the development and betterment of our digital world.

Giulia Dugo is an international experience manager within the globalization team at Adobe Systems. She works on the localization of marketing projects for the Digital Experience Cloud, as well as running the company’s internal community to leverage international speakers. Giulia also manages the team’s brand management and relationships with the regional offices. She holds a joint BA in marketing and international business, with joint minors in French and Spanish from the University of San Diego.

Active in the language industry for 30 years, Robert Etches has worked with every aspect of it, from freelance translation to top management and everything in between, achieving particular success as CIO at TextMinded from 2012 to 2017. Always active in the community, Robert was cofounder of the Word Management Group, the TextMinded Group and the Nordic CAT Group. He served four years on the board of GALA (two as chairman), and four on the board of LT-Innovate. In a fast-changing world, Robert believes there has never been a greater need to implement innovative initiatives.

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.

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.

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.

Wojciech Froelich has 18 years of experience in localization engineering. He is CTO at Argos Multilingual where he leads a team of experienced engineers who are responsible for building customer-oriented localization workflows and providing internationalization consultancy and software engineering support to Argos partners. Wojciech focuses on integrating authoring, automated translation management and multilingual publishing systems.

Ulrika Fuchs is the localization manager at Vistaprint. After ten years of working in different industries, she earned a BA in Spanish and started her journey in the localization industry as a project manager at a global language service provider. Ulrika later joined Vistaprint as an in-house translator, where she quickly took an interest in translation technology and led several technology implementation and workflow automation initiatives. She currently manages Vistaprint’s in-house localization team, ensuring that the business’ localization needs can be fulfilled as the company evolves.

Jarosław Ganczarenko is language technology specialist at GET IT, a leading Polish language service provider based in Warsaw. At GET IT, he is responsible for language technology and machine translation (MT) solutions. Jarosław manages the MT process: data preparation, engines training and testing, quality, MT deployment and monitoring. He has nine years of experience in the language industry where he can combine his passion for languages with interest in technology.

Leonid Glazychev graduated with honors from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology specializing in plasma physics and computer simulation. He started as an engineer at the Moscow Radiotechnical Institute and two years after graduation received a PhD degree in physics and mathematics and soon became a senior research associate. Leonid joined one of the first software localization projects in 1991, and that turned out to be a life-changer. In 1993 he cofounded Logrus and has served as the company’s CEO since then and also became CEO of Logrus IT in 2016. True to his scientific background, Leonid is continuing research and publishing papers on issues such as language quality assurance methodology and process, industry revelations and myths, and others. His goal is to bring some hardcore, fundamental, objective and unbiased scientific approach and knowledge to the areas traditionally occupied by project managers and linguists. Leonid is relentlessly challenging common knowledge, traditional ways and widespread prejudice, and enjoys working with people demonstrating creative thinking.

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.

Patricia Gómez Jurado is a global content strategy and localization leader with more than ten years of experience on both the corporate and localization provider sides. She currently works at King as head of content design and previously managed diverse teams of user experience (UX) writers, content strategists and localization specialists at eDreams Odigeo and Google. Patricia’s passion is building bridges between localization and UX writing in order to deliver great digital experiences to users.

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

João Graça is a cofounder and CTO of Unbabel. He received his PhD in natural language processing and was a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, where he developed a new statistical learning method that allowed for the insertion of declarative knowledge during learning, unlocking previously impossible-to-tackle problems for solving. João was also awarded a Marie Curie, Welcome II program (2011) scholarship, which he ended up declining to pursue entrepreneurship. He is also one of the cofounders of the Lisbon Machine Learning Summer School (LxMLS).

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.

Jan Hinrichs is the founder and CEO of Beluga, a European-based translation company that powers scale-ups and global organizations with strong translation and localization teams to run smoothly in over 40 languages. He is also a professional multitasker — especially when participating in online conferences while walking the dogs. Jan is the father of the @LocLunch community, (as Andrej Zito put it), to power conversation and knowledge sharing in and around the translation, localization, and globalization industry. He is also studying about carbon removal and carbon credits.

Mark Jeremy Hunt is a biomedical research scientist (PhD in pharmacology, University of Cambridge) and currently assistant professor at the Nencki Institute, Poland. He has authored over 25 international peer-reviewed papers and has served as a reviewer for a number of international academic journals. In 2014, Mark cofounded eCORRECTOR to provide proofreading and translations for academics. Since then, eCORRECTOR has experienced significant growth and currently provides language support for many of the leading universities across Poland and larger language service providers. Mark oversees quality control to ensure texts reach the strict language demands required by journal editors and end users.

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.

Ewa Jabłonowska leads a global team that provides translations for product-related software, documentation and training at Motorola Solutions. During her professional career of  15+ years  she has worked as an interpreter for business and cultural events, and a linguist for top-notch financial institutions and IT companies. Ewa graduated from English studies at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow and Ernst & Young Academy of Business. She is great fan of bespoke traveling and a collector of all sorts of cook books.

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

David Jasinski manages Boston Scientific’s cutting edge Neuromodulation division in the Nordics, Eastern/Central Europe, Eurasian Union, Middle East and Africa. With an undergraduate degree in economics and political science from New York University as well as an MBA from Penn State, he has specialized in launching and developing new markets and technologies while leading diverse multinational teams. David believes that the keys to success in managing very diverse marketplaces is the ability to align global strategies to local realities through the understanding of cultural nuances and sociopolitical realities.

Tatiana Kachuk is a localization professional with over ten years of experience in the industry. For most of her professional life she worked at leading Silicon Valley companies such as Cisco and LinkedIn. Currently, Tatiana is a senior language manager and terminologist on the dynamic localization and global experience team at LinkedIn, and a huge enthusiast and supporter of Women in Tech programs and initiatives.

Paulina Kamyk specializes in corporate communications (public relations and internal communication), corporate social responsibility, as well as implementation of scientific and social projects. She is a board member of Fundacja RiM, a newly established charity for autistic children. Before joining RiM, Paulina worked for the World Hearing Center, promoting hearing screening programs in school-age children within the European community.

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

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

Christel Weber Kristensen Gouas started her career in the localization industry 21 years ago and has spent the past 13 years nurturing language at large industrial companies. Today, she is working at Ørsted (formerly DONG Energy), an energy company with 6,200 employees. Christal is responsible for global language service provider management, the company’s language policy, language project management, business intelligence reporting, language guides and processes related to the company’s language services. Creating value for the company through high-quality language, localization, transcreation and machine translation in close cooperation with external language partners is always top of mind — as is continuous improvement by leveraging technology.

Barbara Krupa is the staff language manager for Polish at LinkedIn. For the past seven years she has worked on localization of the company features and products onsite and managed the team of Polish translators working remotely. Barbara manages the process of certification emails and notifications sent to LinkedIn members globally in 23 languages. She has worked in the localization industry since 2008, providing testing and translation services for major high-tech companies in Silicon Valley: Seagate, Cisco, Apple and Sony. Barbara holds a master’s degree in library and information science from both the University of Warmia and Mazury in Olsztyn, Poland, and San Jose State. In Poland she worked as a librarian, then a journalist.

Inger Larsen is the founder of Larsen Globalization, which has provided recruitment services to the localization industry worldwide since 2000. In their recruitment efforts they use an integrated platform with video presentation, psychometric candidate profiling and assessment, plus English business language tests. Inger has worked in localization since 1984, first as a freelancer then as an in-house software localizer and project manager for IBM in Oslo, teaching localization at Surrey University in the UK, as a project and program manager for Microsoft in Dublin and in account management and sales for Xerox in Slough, UK and for Lernout & Hauspie (now Lionbridge).

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

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

Julio Leal is the head of the localization team at Rover, where he leads initiatives to adapt content and services for global markets. Prior to joining Rover, he directed the localization program at Spendesk for nearly two years, enhancing the company’s international presence. Julio has also contributed his expertise to industry leaders such as Wayfair, Ciena, and SAP.

Fluent in Spanish, English, and German, Julio holds a Master’s degree in Translation and Interpreting Studies from the University of Granada in Spain. He also earned an MBA and possesses executive certificates in Digital Team Management, Web Globalization Management, and Global Marketing.

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.

Maxim Lobanov is a localization expert with over 15 years of experience in localization quality management, translator training and process development. For the past seven years, as Google’s quality manager first for Russian and then later Bulgarian, Czech, Greek, Hungarian, Romanian, Slovak and Ukrainian, he has led and driven efforts across localization vendors, marketing, public relations, engineering and sales teams to ensure that Google’s voice sounds natural and authentic for users in these markets. Maxim is also part of the Google quality evaluation (QE) taskforce, leading development of the linguistic side of QE. Additionally, he authored Google’s Style Training process for translators and reviewers. Prior to joining Google, Maxim spent nearly seven years with CBOSS, a leading telecommunications software development company. He holds degrees in philology and civil law.

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.

Jay Marciano, director of machine translation outreach and strategy at Lengoo, has spent 25 years at the forefront of developing and applying machine translation (MT). He has held senior positions  at SDL (2001-2010) and Lionbridge (2010-2020), where he was responsible for the global strategy of using MT to increase translation efficiency. Jay is president of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas (AMTA) and presents widely on MT, AI, and the future of the translation industry. He is a leading figure in building understanding among language professionals of the power and potential of MT and other AI-driven technologies.

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.

 A pioneer in the mobile and data analytics industries since the 2000s, Fortune and TIME have described Inma Martinez as one of Europe’s top talents in social engagement through technology, Red Herring ranked her among the top 40 women in technology, and FastCompany labelled her a “firestarter”.

After her career in Telecoms heading IP services strategy for Cable & Wireless in the 1990s, Inma was part of the core data team that created one of the first AI systems to personalize in real time the mobile WAP portals of the main European mobile operators and media companies. Her second company, Visual Radio Oy (Finland) was the pioneer of visual and music streaming on mobile devices and was acquired by Nokia in 2007. Since then, she has been behind the creation and launch of key technological innovations, both at startups and at large corporates worldwide creating products for IBM, HP, Nokia, LG and other technology corporations.

Since 2001 she has served as an independent technology advisor to the EU Technology Commission, recently participating as Big Data expert at the EU2016NL CIO summit and collaborating with various digital working groups across Europe. In 2010 she was appointed by the British government to serve as a spokesperson on technology development and entrepreneurship at the UK Trade & Industry Catalyst Programme.

Professionally, she is a Venture Partner at Deep Science Ventures, Imperial College’s tech-sciences innovation accelerator where she mentors data sciences and product innovation projects. She consults as a Data Scientist on data analysis projects that focus on human behavior modeling (BL), and the detection of anomalies affecting mindsets and attitudes, deploying ML and other methodologies, applying this to the creation of product innovation.

Inma’s most requested keynotes focus on the digital acceleration affecting Life, Work and Play, and how businesses should reorganize within to leverage from this transformational forces and be more innovative. In addition, she often presents new approaches to emerging sectors such as IoT, Smart Cities and Artificial Intelligence deployed to create products and services.

Steve Maule is a business development director at Welocalize, based in Manchester, UK. He started his sales and management career in 1997, joined the localization industry in 2009 and holds a BA (Honors) in business studies from the University of Sheffield. Steve’s clients are in technology, consumer and engineering. They often have large and complex needs, expect a long-term and transparent relationship and are committed to accelerating through the localization maturity model.

A content strategist since long before they were called content strategists, Sheri McLeish helps clients effectively manage content across people, processes and technologies for digital transformation. With hands-on experiences as an editorial leader as well as a business strategy consultant, Sheri worked as a journalist, editor and managing research editor before serving as an analyst with Forrester Research, a content strategy manager with Thomson Reuters and her current role as an associate creative director with SapientRazorfish. Her specialties include insights and analysis, editorial strategy and operations, taxonomy, market and channel strategy, migration planning and support, optimization and emerging technologies.

A passionate linguist at heart and a language industry advocate, Kay Meinertz has a solid track record of 20+ years in translation, language mediation, multilingual brand communications and training. Formerly Ralph Lauren’s translation and localization manager for Europe, she consults with key individuals from project and management teams at established and startup firms on localization processes and cultural customization. Content marketing topics include transcreation, linguistic quality, development and management of brand terminology. Kay is industry-certified in global digital marketing and localization by The Localization Institute and holds an MA in communication science, organizational psychology and psycholinguistics from the LMU University of Munich.

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.

Apart from being the global product marketing manager for Donnelley Language Solutions, Jordi Mon is also the organizer of Product Hunt Madrid, a local chapter of Product Hunt. Its principal aim is to get Madrid’s tech community together, to provide it with transparent presentations of interesting digital products or services and eventually take away some solid product learnings. Jordi also organizes Madrid C and C++ meetup as well as edits the ISO standard website that brings the latest news on C++ developed products to a global community.

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.

Valeria Nanni works as a localization manager at Skyscanner, where she is responsible for workflows implementation, translation technology quality, and the successful run of localization operations. She started her career ten years ago as a technical translator and moved into web and mobile localization management in 2012. Since then, Valeria has covered several roles in tech companies focusing primarily on processes optimization, automation and machine translation. She holds a BA in translation and interpreting, and an MA in cultural mediation.

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.

Irving Navarrete is the web product manager at Alfresco Software, a company building enterprise content and process management software. He focuses on building excellent data-driven web experiences for marketing prospects and the developer community.

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.

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

Kürşat Özel is CEO and cofounder of Saylon, a language solutions partner in the fields of translation, localization and consulting established in 2002 and located in Istanbul, Turkey. He is a serial entrepreneur who successfully partnered with Smartcat, Globalese and Protemos for the Turkish market. Kürşat is a firm believer in new technologies and finds them crucial to fit in the ever-evolving translation and localization industry.

Milica Panic is the product marketing manager at TAUS, a neutral industry organization and resource center that helps translation buyers and service providers advance their global content delivery. She is responsible for communicating the value of TAUS services to the market. Milica’s background is in localization, project management and content marketing in an ecommerce environment. Outside of work, she is passionate about continuously inventing new ways to teach languages.

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.

Juliana Pereira has over 15 years of experience in marketing and ecommerce. She has worked across various verticals and industries, from nonprofits and publishing to tech and fashion, including key roles at Ralph Lauren, The Met Store at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Ziff Davis and eMusic. In addition to her passion for all things digital and marketing, Juliana is a semiprofessional violinist, an advocate for music education and an activist philanthropist for women’s issues. She holds a BA from Brown University, and an MA from the New School.

Paul Perrotta is a content strategist working with The Content Wrangler. He has over 30 years of experience in technical publishing, leadership and operations and has worked with high-tech companies such as Juniper Networks, Cisco Systems, EDS, Siemens, Pyramid Technology and ROLM Systems.

Ola Persson graduated from the University of Växjö, with a degree in Marketing in 1987. During his initial work in a software company, he developed his language technology skills and formed his own company, WordFinder Software, in 1990. Their main product, WordFinder Unlimited, is a subscription-based dictionary service that complements other CAT tools. Between 1995 – 2007 Ola was also running TRADOS Scandinavia as a franchisee, giving him a wide understanding of the needs of translation suppliers and clients and how translation tools can assist them.

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

Anna Pietruszka is a change maker with extensive experience in business model design, transformation and shaping. She is a transformation leader with a wide range of experience in designing and managing complex change processes. Anna is also a business model creator, developing and implementing strategies around company growth and mergers and acquisitions.

A self-confessed language nerd and digital marketing addict, Sarah Pokorná has over eight years of experience in the localization industry. Although starting her career as a military-trained translator, she moved into marketing after completing her master’s in digital marketing. Having noticed how well localization and marketing go together, Sarah set up Retro Digital to bridge the gap between the two industries and help companies conquer new markets through multilingual digital marketing solutions.

Alan Porter is an industry-leading content strategist and author of The Content Pool. He is also a regular conference speaker, workshop leader and writer on content marketing, content strategy, customer experience, brand management, and content and localization strategy.

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.

María Fernanda Ramírez graduated in communications with an emphasis in linguistics in Mexico. She started her career as a writer and editor in several literary journals. Eventually, María moved to the UK to study a masters in literature and tranlation at the University of Edinburgh, where her life as a translator began. In 2008, she crossed the Atlantic one more time and ended up in San Francisco where she shifted her path to the world of localization. María has two passions: books and films. The latter combined with her experience as a translator in Silicon Valley, landed her a position at Netflix, where she has worked since 2014. At Netflix, María is the Spanish (LATAM) language manager, leading a team of translators responsible for the localization of Netflix user interface platforms, metadata, marketing assets, public relations and partner marketing materials, surveys and customer service content.

Jenny Reid’s background includes a variety of localization roles, including quality assurance testing, linguistic quality management, localization engineering, vendor management and project management. She has ten years of experience in client-side translation management systems implementation and administration. Jenny joined Guidewire in the San Francisco Bay area in February 2017 and is the scrum product owner for tooling to support continuous localization and contextual translation.

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.

Michael Rosinski is the CEO of Astoria, A Transperfect Company. He has led a dynamic 25-year career as a technology executive in the enterprise application software industry. Before joining Astoria, A Transperfect Company, Michael was a founding member of American Software’s management team, where he was executive vice president of sales — growing revenues to over $100M and responsible for the company being named to “Forbes Best 200 Small Companies.” At American, he completed one of the first initial public offerings (IPOs) in the enterprise resource planning market segment, and later was responsible for the company’s successful spin-off IPO of Logility, Inc. in the supply chain management space. Michael also served as senior vice president of worldwide sales and business development at Avolent, where he grew sales over 140%. Prior to Avolent, he leveraged his international experience as president of Augeo Software, a French/Dutch company in the professional services automation space. Under his direction, the company instituted marketing, sales and funding partnerships with J.D. Edwards, Daimler Chrysler and ABN Amro resulting in Augeo being named by Computerworld as one of the “Top 100 Companies to Watch in 2000.” Michael also held key executive positions at Nestle USA and Johnson & Johnson. He holds a bachelor’s degree in management and organizational behavior from Rider University and has completed a graduate MBA study at Fairleigh Dickinson University.

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

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

Florian Sachse is chief evangelist of memoQ Ltd. where he advocates for memoQ, its strategy, and positioning in the localization industry. He has worked for memoQ since 2013 and previously worked as a C++ developer, developer team lead, head of development, and CTO. One of his first development projects dating more than 40 years back was to get the German umlaut into an English word processor application. In 1998, Florian started working with language technology when PASS Engineering introduced the leading software localization solution PASSOLO to the market. As managing director of PASS Engineering, his initial focus was the development of mission critical software for clinical analyzers.

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

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.

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.

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

Miguel Sepulveda is a localization geek, blogger, toastmaster, avid reader of management and self-growth books, PMP, proud father of two great kids and a video games player with not enough time to master (yet) the new version of FIFA. He will never forget his first localization project in 1995 as a localization Spanish specialist for Microsoft Excel ’95, the early days of the localization industry when the pillars were being constructed at Microsoft Dublin.

Haseeb Shaik is digital transformation director at Adapt Worldwide, a Welocalize Company, a multilingual digital marketing agency based in London. He leads the research, design, strategy and execution of enterprise-wide digital transformation programs. Haseeb has played an integral role in enabling the design, deployment and management of the digital transformation initiatives for three major brands.

A Localization Institute-certified localization project manager, Robert Shaw has 17 years of content management experience and is based in London. Since graduating from City University of London with a BS (Hons) in business computing systems, his career has to date taken in ebooks, satellite navigation, local radio and rock music. Most recently at OpenTable, the world’s leading provider of online restaurant reservations, he ensures that all content on all websites and mobile apps engages with diners and restaurateurs from all over the world, enabling diners to discover and book their restaurant visits — and restaurateurs to make their restaurants discoverable and bookable.

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

Ondrej Sirocka is a product manager at Kentico Cloud, and is responsible for leading the strategy of content modeling and authoring experience within the product, with the vision of turning omnichannel projects shipment into a seamless and transparent process.

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.

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.

David Talbot leads Yandex.Translate — a machine translation platform operated by technology company Yandex. At Yandex, his team develops translation tools for language service providers, language professionals and consumers that take advantage of recent advances in neural machine translation. Previously he was a research scientist at Google, working for five years on Google Translate. David holds a PhD in informatics from the University of Edinburgh and a BA Honors in modern languages and literature from the University of Oxford.

Aleš Tamchyna joined Memsource in the spring of 2017 as the first member of the new artificial intelligence (AI) team. He works on integrating smart solutions based on machine learning and AI in the Memsource platform. Before joining the company, he was an academic researcher with machine translation as his primary research topic.

Gábor has a background in computer science and linguistics, and before co-founding memoQ he worked on a rule-based machine translation system. His experience as a technical translator informed many aspects of memoQ TMS. In his current technology-focused role he is driving AI innovation at memoQ. He has a keen interest in learning languages, and has at one point almost achieved fluency in Mandarin.

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

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.

Andrejs Vasiļjevs is the cofounder and executive chairman of Tilde, a European language technology and localization company. He drives innovation and fosters large scale industry and academia collaboration to advance multilingual solutions for digital Europe. Andrejs serves as a board member of the BDVA and deputy chair of Multilingual Europe Technology Alliance META-NET. He has a PhD degree in computer sciences from the University of Latvia and is an Honorary Doctor of the Academy of Sciences of Latvia.

Ray Walsh is an American content consultant. A former journalist, English language teacher and later employee communications manager, he has broad experience in content creation for a variety of industries. Ray is based in Prague and has been working in Europe for more than 15 years. He recently joined the global employee communications and engagement team for DXC Technolog. Ray is the author of a manual on localization and employee communications, planned for publication in 2018.

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.

Arthur Wetzel has been an executive director of 24translate Holding since 2017. He holds responsibility for the areas of marketing, sales and strategic product development. Arthur is a known digital expert — in the past he has worked as an executive director and advisor for some of the big names in the European internet sector, including Strato AG and VeriSign. He also teaches marketing and design thinking at various private academies. As a keen film fan, Arthur spends his leisure time at the cinema or actively engaging in sailing or martial arts.

Claire Wiley leads the business-to-business (B2B) digital team at Canon Europe Ltd, based in London.  In a career at Canon of nearly 15 years, Claire has moved through a variety of local and European roles, most recently taking on responsibility for driving some of Canon’s key digital transformation initiatives in the B2B market relating both to end customers and also partners.

Szymon Wroblewski is a playwright, dramatist, author of audiobooks as well as a translator into Polish of contemporary plays. He works for The Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Poland, promoting Polish theater and dance abroad. In his free time, Szymon is a city activist for The City is Ours (Miasto Jest Nasze) in Warsaw.

With nine years of experience in the language services industry in both project management and sales roles, Marek Zapalski has balanced expertise where he draws from senior project management skills and sales training to offer customized solutions to his clients. Responsible for seeing to the needs of life sciences clients in Eastern Europe, he has efficiently developed strategies to improve internal and external processes and effectively managed cross functional workflows with vendors and the technology team to deliver high-quality results. Educated at the University of Warsaw, Marek holds a master’s degree in management as well as a master’s degree in sports psychology from the Academy of Physical Education in Warsaw. He is a native Polish speaker with fluent English and basic Spanish.

Krzysztof Zdanowski devotes his time to discovering new paths of doing global business. Following studies in applied linguistics, he worked as a translator. Having first-hand experience, Krzysztof set up his own translation company – Summa Linguae. He’s been successful in establishing his own expansion strategy, focused on organic growth and mergers and acquistitions and he’s managed to oversee six Polish and two international transactions. Krzysztof’s now the CEO of Summa Linguae Group, a global, technology-focused language service provider with offices in Europe and Asia. He’s constantly trying new ways to innovate, inspire and improve by following his life values – transparency, security and flexibility.

Alex Zekakis has been in the localization industry for more than 13 years, starting off as a localization project manager on the vendor side. After a few years in the industry he moved into different roles, initially leading production teams and then focusing on delivering solutions, before he joined XTM International. Alex currently holds the role of director of support services at XTM International, where he is primarily focused on driving the customer experience throughout presales and onboarding as well as continuous support.

Effective leaders never stop learning. Roman Zelenka leverages that fact in his business consultation services. His 20+ years of working at and leading a family company put Roman in a unique position to guide others through the learning process, while helping them never lose sight of all the amazing humans that make their success possible.

Angelika Zerfaß studied Chinese/Japanese and computational linguistics at the University of Bonn, Germany. After her studies she worked for the Japanese Embassy in Bonn and then for Trados in Japan, Germany and the US. Since 2000 she has been providing independent consultancy, training and technical support for translation tools from her company based in Germany for clients all over the world. She is a frequent speaker at translation and localization industry events.

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

Britta Aagaard is chief business officer at Semantix and is responsible for the total business within localization and advanced language solutions. With an academic background in philosophy and the science of language, coupled with an entrepreneurial mindset, Britta joined the language industry in 2004. Today she is enjoying the privilege of providing executive leadership to her organization and thought leadership to the language community. Britta serves on the board of directors of GALA and LT-Innovate and is part of the LIND Expert Group of the European Commission, with the ambition to position the language industry in the intersection of humanity and AI. Britta has a clear vision and commitment to creating a scalable business platform through sustainable integrations of people, technology, and solutions for a prosperous and democratic digital future.

Ilenia Bellucci is the localization coordinator for Trustpilot, one of the largest and fastest-growing global online review communities. With a background in languages and translation, she trains and coordinates a team of 20 in-house translators, as well as streamlining localization workflows to provide translated content to the entire company. Sitting in the technology department, Ilenia ensures localization requirements are met as early as the initial development stages, working in close collaboration with copywriters, developers and user experience designers.

Localization visionary and professional contrarian, Renato Beninatto has done it all – freelance translation, vendor management, sales and marketing, CEO, and everything in between. He has a passion for passing on his extensive industry knowledge to others and helping companies grow. Renato is a co-author of  The General Theory of the Translation Company, an adjunct professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in Monterey (MIIS), and a co-founder of Nimdzi Insights, a market research and advisory firm specializing in the language industry, and co-owner of MultiLingual Media, publisher of MultiLingual magazine.

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

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.

In her role as service owner for the onboarding service (mergers and acquisitions) at SAP, one of the world’s leading business software enterprises, Kerstin Bier is responsible for supporting SAP’s mergers and acquisitions in setting up and managing efficient localization processes and projects in the post-merger integration phase and beyond. Coming from an acquisition herself to SAP in 2012, Kerstin leads a team of account and delivery managers, project managers and a localization engineer, and puts a strong focus on establishing strong working relationships with the goal to set up efficient and scalable processes that help all sides. In her previous role at Sybase, acquired by SAP in 2010, Kerstin was responsible for managing European localization projects. She initiated and drove the introduction of statistical machine translation for one of their product areas and presented challenges and lessons learned at various conferences.

Jonathan Bowring graduated in computer science and worked for the UK Ministry of Defence and Hewlett-Packard before joining Canon. As Canon’s EMEA localization director, he built an independent services division with its own profit and loss of £15 million. Jonathan trained as a mentor and coach and founded Riversight in 2016. Riversight unlocks the potential within leaders, teams and organizations. It provides coaching and facilitation to small and medium-sized enterprises and corporate clients.

Tetyana Bruevich leads the global readiness team at LinkedIn. In her current role, she drives localization engineering efforts by developing tools, processes and concepts to enable everyone to create and deploy globally ready products. Tetyana holds an MS in engineering and an MBA from Kyiv National Economic University. She is an active member of the Women in Tech community at LinkedIn.

Veronica Carioni leads the Product localization program at Skyscanner, where she drives strategies to enhance the language experience in over 35 locales. Over the past year, she has driven the Localization Quality Program, exploring AI-powered solutions to ensure quality at scale and boost productivity. Previously, she led localization efforts at Vistaprint, focusing on process optimization and technology.

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.

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).

Heading Peakon’s team of organizational development specialists, Michael Dean’s work has led to the development of Peakon’s unique employee engagement methodology. In concert with Peakon’s real-time technology platform, this new approach to organizational development has helped hundreds of enterprises across the world to become more agile and fulfilling places to work. Previously Michael lead the apps team at Citrix Podio.

Chris Dell leads the Content Agency at Booking.com, the world’s largest platform for booking travel. He is responsible for a range of content topics including localization, copywriting, geodata, and content moderation. Chris’ passions at work are how humans and technology can coexist, and how we can build effective and inclusive organizations. Outside of work he runs, travels, writes, and coaches.

Pavel Doronin is a product manager at Smartcat and localization geek with strong and diverse experience in localization projects ranging from cybersecurity products to computer games to chatbots.

Dawid Dorynek is a translation manager at BSH Home Appliances Group, supervising the corporate translation management system. He is currently coordinating the implementation of a custom machine translation solution into the company’s localization processes. Dawid is also a freelance translator in his free time. Linguistic technologies and audiovisual translations remain his main fields of interest.

Margaret Ann Dowling is an Irish national with a 25-year career in  lifestyle and business publishing in Central European markets. Having published many of the worlds most iconic brands such as Cosmopolitan, National Geographic, Elle, SHAPE, Glamour, Marie Claire and InStyle in multiple Central European languages, she has a unique view of the localization of content.  Margaret Ann launched the first Polish chapter of the Singularity University and believes strongly in the power of exponential technology to positively impact our world. As the world further converges she believes that healthy, meaningful, fact-based content is a social imperative to the development and betterment of our digital world.

Giulia Dugo is an international experience manager within the globalization team at Adobe Systems. She works on the localization of marketing projects for the Digital Experience Cloud, as well as running the company’s internal community to leverage international speakers. Giulia also manages the team’s brand management and relationships with the regional offices. She holds a joint BA in marketing and international business, with joint minors in French and Spanish from the University of San Diego.

Active in the language industry for 30 years, Robert Etches has worked with every aspect of it, from freelance translation to top management and everything in between, achieving particular success as CIO at TextMinded from 2012 to 2017. Always active in the community, Robert was cofounder of the Word Management Group, the TextMinded Group and the Nordic CAT Group. He served four years on the board of GALA (two as chairman), and four on the board of LT-Innovate. In a fast-changing world, Robert believes there has never been a greater need to implement innovative initiatives.

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.

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.

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.

Wojciech Froelich has 18 years of experience in localization engineering. He is CTO at Argos Multilingual where he leads a team of experienced engineers who are responsible for building customer-oriented localization workflows and providing internationalization consultancy and software engineering support to Argos partners. Wojciech focuses on integrating authoring, automated translation management and multilingual publishing systems.

Ulrika Fuchs is the localization manager at Vistaprint. After ten years of working in different industries, she earned a BA in Spanish and started her journey in the localization industry as a project manager at a global language service provider. Ulrika later joined Vistaprint as an in-house translator, where she quickly took an interest in translation technology and led several technology implementation and workflow automation initiatives. She currently manages Vistaprint’s in-house localization team, ensuring that the business’ localization needs can be fulfilled as the company evolves.

Jarosław Ganczarenko is language technology specialist at GET IT, a leading Polish language service provider based in Warsaw. At GET IT, he is responsible for language technology and machine translation (MT) solutions. Jarosław manages the MT process: data preparation, engines training and testing, quality, MT deployment and monitoring. He has nine years of experience in the language industry where he can combine his passion for languages with interest in technology.

Leonid Glazychev graduated with honors from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology specializing in plasma physics and computer simulation. He started as an engineer at the Moscow Radiotechnical Institute and two years after graduation received a PhD degree in physics and mathematics and soon became a senior research associate. Leonid joined one of the first software localization projects in 1991, and that turned out to be a life-changer. In 1993 he cofounded Logrus and has served as the company’s CEO since then and also became CEO of Logrus IT in 2016. True to his scientific background, Leonid is continuing research and publishing papers on issues such as language quality assurance methodology and process, industry revelations and myths, and others. His goal is to bring some hardcore, fundamental, objective and unbiased scientific approach and knowledge to the areas traditionally occupied by project managers and linguists. Leonid is relentlessly challenging common knowledge, traditional ways and widespread prejudice, and enjoys working with people demonstrating creative thinking.

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.

Patricia Gómez Jurado is a global content strategy and localization leader with more than ten years of experience on both the corporate and localization provider sides. She currently works at King as head of content design and previously managed diverse teams of user experience (UX) writers, content strategists and localization specialists at eDreams Odigeo and Google. Patricia’s passion is building bridges between localization and UX writing in order to deliver great digital experiences to users.

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

João Graça is a cofounder and CTO of Unbabel. He received his PhD in natural language processing and was a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, where he developed a new statistical learning method that allowed for the insertion of declarative knowledge during learning, unlocking previously impossible-to-tackle problems for solving. João was also awarded a Marie Curie, Welcome II program (2011) scholarship, which he ended up declining to pursue entrepreneurship. He is also one of the cofounders of the Lisbon Machine Learning Summer School (LxMLS).

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.

Jan Hinrichs is the founder and CEO of Beluga, a European-based translation company that powers scale-ups and global organizations with strong translation and localization teams to run smoothly in over 40 languages. He is also a professional multitasker — especially when participating in online conferences while walking the dogs. Jan is the father of the @LocLunch community, (as Andrej Zito put it), to power conversation and knowledge sharing in and around the translation, localization, and globalization industry. He is also studying about carbon removal and carbon credits.