Gilad Almosnino is an internationalization visionary who has spent the past 20 years transforming customer feedback into user experiences across Microsoft products including Windows, Edge, Xbox and Surface. He was successful at driving industry-wide standardization enhancements to the Unicode bidirectional algorithm and produced solutions which yielded two patent applications for user interface (UI) control during his work on Windows 8 development. In 2019 Gilad launched World Ready Guides, an independent software internationalization consulting firm that helps empower experiences across the globe by partnering with software designers and developers to build more inclusive locally relevant user experiences. In 2020 he was chosen by the Standard Institute of Israel to lead the Hebrew Support in computerized systems committee that is responsible for developing standards that address Israeli market requirements including UI mirroring, text handling and language quality.

As a dedicated and results-driven international growth specialist, Andy brings a unique blend of cultural acumen and business focus to the table, with a passion for all things international and a drive to help companies grow organically and sustainably internationally. With 10+ years of experience in ASO, SEO and product localization/internationalization, he’s developed a strong foundation in understanding challenging market dynamics and a proven track record of efficient operations and scalability. Andy likes to connect with like-minded professionals and explore new opportunities.

– Experience working with over 100 languages; and in-market teams across 20 countries.
– Built international programs from scratch into 50+ languages
– Created, optimized and actively managed ASO portfolios for organic user acquisition into more than 70 languages and 7 different app stores.
– Hired, trained and coached teams with 15-20 direct reports managing over 100 people

Technology and innovation enthusiast Cristina Anselmi has worked in the video game industry for nearly 15 years, with several different roles all related to project and program management. She has taken care of the localization of several AAA titles to make sure to deliver the best player experience possible. Her focus for the last five years has been implementing AI technologies to automate workflows, acting as a program manager and product owner for several developments around machine translation and AI. Her goal is to pave the way for AI and technology to be welcome and used in daily life and be seen as an aid rather than an enemy, a powerful tool that can enhance productivity without ever jeopardizing quality and creativity.

Diplom-Volkswirt Christian Artopé has worked in communication and marketing since 1999 and is a shareholder and general manager at campaign agency GUD.berlin, a creative studio for a new generation. He works with an experienced core team that is complemented by a multidisciplinary group of freelance experts. GUD.berlin capitalizes on the unique Berlin creative scene. Christian has an international background working in Asia in the early startup years and is a regular speaker at international conferences such as GIZ and Social Media Week.

Adam Asnes is the CEO and founder of Lingoport, a company that helps software developers continuously deliver internationalized and localized software, enabling that software to work well in every target language and locale format. Lingoport’s software and internationalization professional services have major impacts on its clients’ worldwide customer outreach and revenue growth. Adam lives and works in Boulder, Colorado and enjoys cycling and all the mountains have to offer.

Hilary Atkisson Normanha is the senior internationalization program manager for Spotify. During her career in the localization industry, she has worked on both the client and vendor sides in Brazil and the US. Hilary holds a degree in psychological sciences and has over 15 years of experience in the globalization industry. She is passionate about process innovation and enabling globally scalable products.

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

Sara Basile recently joined XTM International as a product manager following almost ten years of experience in the localization industry on the buyer side. After graduating in technical translation and conference interpreting at the University of Trieste, Italy, she worked for big enterprises in different roles and responsibilities such as translation and proofreading, project management, program management and training. Sara’s passion for translation technology and customer-oriented approach finally led her to XTM, where she is now mainly responsible for the development roadmap and operational excellence.

Leading expert in globalization strategy, tech stack definition and implementation, process automation and change management for global companies looking to expand reach and maximize revenues.

Proficient in all major European languages, Alessandra has dedicated her professional life to advocating for international users and to create, market, and support products and services that engage customers in all continents.

She is the principal consultant of Global Sights Consulting, member of the Board of Advisors of the Process Innovation Challenge, a former Board Member of the Globalization and Localization Association (GALA).

Adam Bittlingmayer is CEO and co-founder of ModelFront – AI for accelerating human-quality translation which provides private custom models for automatic post-editing and machine translation quality prediction. Adam brings engineering experience from Google Translate as well as other products such as Android and Adobe Creative Suite. He founded the Machine Translate Foundation – open information and community to make machine translation more accessible.

Sathish Chander is a senior product manager at Booking.com where he manages natural language processing products — neural machine translation, moderation, chatbot and semantic search capability. Previously he worked at an Indian automotive eCommerce company on business-to-consumer and business-to-business products with a core focus on improving user experience and conversion. Prior to that, Sathish built a recommendation engine for a leading eCommerce player (PayTM) in India. Sathish graduated from the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta with an MBA in economics and strategy.

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).

Craig Cornelius has worked in internationalization (I18N) at Google since 2007. He is a member of the I18N libraries team and contributes to open source for Unicode and the Common Locale Data Repository. As part of his work at Google, he has been privileged to work with a number of language communities that are beginning to use their languages and writing systems on the internet with modern computing and mobile platforms. These include Cherokee, Osage and other Native American languages, the writing systems of Myanmar, and Pular/Fulani in the Adlam script. Craig serves on the governing council of the Endangered Languages Project and is a member of the advisory board of the Australian Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language. He is an occasional presenter at IMUG — The International Multilingual User Group. Prior to joining Google, Craig worked in medical research at Stanford University as an engineer and scientist in medical imaging, and was a college professor in the departments of computer science and chemistry at Luther College in Iowa. He holds a PhD in chemistry and an MS in computer science from Stanford University and a BA from Luther College (chemistry and mathematics.) Among other things, he loves science fiction, history, cats and bicycling.

As the founder of CSA Research in 1999, Don DePalma has been instrumental in establishing the company as the preeminent market research firm in localization and globalization. He initiated CSA’s coverage of localization maturity, enterprise language processing, business-driven globalization, machine translation, return on investment for localization and multicultural domestic marketing. Don holds a doctorate in linguistics from Brown University, with specializations in generative grammar, computational linguistics and the historical phonology of Slavic languages. He also studied at Moscow State University and Moscow Linguistic University in Russia, Charles University (Univerzita Karlova) in the Czech Republic and ILISA in Costa Rica.

Olga Deputatova grew up in a multicultural family, with relatives speaking Hindi, Farsi, French, English, German, Polish, Belorussian, Armenian and Russian. That upbringing inspired her to learn languages. Since 2000, Olga has been working as a freelance translator, editor and transcreator from English, French and Spanish into Russian. Now she is a localization manager at Tortuga. Olga actively participates in the language industry and regularly takes part in national and international events as a speaker. She is a proud member of the Union of Translators of Russia (UTR). Olga has a keen interest in continuous learning and developing her expertise.

During his career, Paul Doherty has set up two language service companies: The Language Technology Centre, which became a $25M business merged into Xerox Language Services, and Multilingual Technology Ltd., which he sold to Berlitz during the .com era. Since then, he has been managing director of UK, German, Polish and Slovakian companies for Berlitz, Bowne and Lionbridge. Paul has led European sales for Lionbridge and SDL and has worked as a strategic consultant to Moravia. He is currently a director at Strategy Management Consultants Ltd, helping companies to implement transformative change.

Abdallah El Sahhar is a computer engineer with an engineering management diploma from AAST. He has worked in the localization industry for more than two decades. Abdallah joined the industry as an Arabic language lover and defender, working with Arabic teams to establish industry standards for the Arabic language. For 14 years in multiple roles, Abdallah delivered successful projects with Saudisoft. He then moved to SAP in 2011 as a quality engineer and Arabic language specialist where the company obtained a USA patent for a program to measure translation quality.

Rikkert Engels is the founder and director of Xillio which he started in 2004 out of frustration with a migration project he was working on. There must be a better way, he thought, and it involves automation. Xillio has developed a powerful API platform for content integration projects and was awarded “Cool Vender” by Gartner in 2017. In 2019, LocHub was developed on top of this API to help automate multilingual content delivery processes.

With more than ten years in the translation and localization industry, Damián Fernández currently owns the quality frameworks and methodologies for language solutions at Booking.com, ensuring that the multilingual copy matches linguistic, stakeholders’, and end users’ quality needs and expectations.

Nancy Ferreira da Rocha is senior localization program manager at FedEx Express International where she has been leading, creating and rolling out the digital localization strategy since November 2015. Originally from Caracas, Venezuela, Nancy graduated with a degree in translation in 2002. She moved to the Netherlands in 2004, where she has several years of experience in the adaptation of global marketing and advertisement campaigns to local markets.

Mario Ferrer is a senior (or señor) user experience (UX) writer. He started UX Writers Spain to build a local community of practice, help others get into the discipline and help companies discover the value of the UX writer role within a product team. Mario is always trying to find the best tacos in town, listens to stand-up comedy and teaches his two kids about Mexican Lucha Libre. 

Klaus Fleischman has been active in the field of global content delivery with a focus on terminology. His company, Kaleidoscope, is a language solutions provider implementing processes, tools and delivering language services. Klaus infuses his terminology passion into enterprises that want to roll out a corporate terminology process, as well as university students and localization event participants.

Małgorzata Gembala has more than ten years of experience in the geographical information system industry, with a focus on analyzing geodata and coordinating quality control in a variety of international projects. With a great fascination for foreign languages and a desire to “go global” in her professional life, Małgorzata decided to switch her career path and began working as a globalization program manager in June 2019. Małgorzata is a member of the globalization team at Precisely and manages the EngageOne portfolio, supporting business communication from small businesses to enterprises. She enjoys photography, cycling and discovering the power of globalization.

Massimo Ghislandi joined SDL in 2006 to manage marketing activities for the translation productivity business unit that was formed after the acquisition of Trados. Under his leadership, SDL drives a product and commercial transformation that combines on-premise and cloud capabilities to deliver the most advanced hybrid solution for translation productivity. Massimo has expanded his role and leads a large sales and marketing team with a focus on building collaboration with every part of SDL to drive the business further. He has a strong background in sales, revenue-focused marketing, lead generation and driving growth within multinational environments. In the past decade at SDL, Massimo has gained a deep understanding of the localization industry and how technology can help companies with their global content challenges. He has over 20 years’ experience working in international sales and marketing roles for engineering and technology companies. Before joining SDL, Massimo worked for Avery Dennison, ITT Corporation and Acterna (now JDSU).

Houman Gieleky studied management information systems at university and founded Toptranslation in 2010. With his team of 40 developers, project managers and translators, he aims to revolutionize the translation industry to make the translation process faster, more transparent and more efficient. Today the company connects more than 7,000 native-speaking translators and industry experts in 73 countries, has customers in over 20 countries and also develops its own SaaS solutions.

Alexander Gigga grew up in Bad Kreuznach in the Rhine Valley in Germany, a stone’s throw from the French border. After his studies of industrial engineering at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, he joined Adidas, then world-renowned Fraunhofer Institut and eventually founded lengoo, a tech startup focusing on uniting the world’s best expert linguists with cutting-edge custom trained neural networks. As chief marketing officer, Alex is also the chief evangelist for neural machine translation, and language to him is the ultimate catalyst for creation.

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 Computer Science from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Anna Golubeva has more than 15 years of experience in translation connected to communication, knowledge management, digitalization and marketing. Her background is in education, linguistics and intercultural communication at Moscow Pedagogical University. Anna enjoys working with languages for the life-at-home brand, as there are so many opportunities and challenges. Having previous experience in retail, marketing and production management, she is currently focusing on multilanguage initiatives at Inter IKEA Systems B.V., a worldwide IKEA franchisor to connect language topics with the business agenda and enable the reach of the brand for more people in the world.

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.

Melanie Heighway leads product localization at Atlassian, managing localization of Atlassian’s range of products including Jira and Confluence. She is a passionate advocate of international customers and enjoys evangelizing localization within organizations. Prior to joining Atlassian in 2019, Melanie managed localization of all content as a one-person team at an Australian startup, Invoice2go. Over the past 15 years, she has worked on both client and language vendor sides in Australia and the UK. Melanie has managed a diverse range of language tasks, including speech and language technology projects, mobilization and management of face-to-face speech and sign language interpreters, and medical device document localization at companies such as Cochlear, Appen, SDL and LanguageLine.

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

Larry Hochman is a popular keynote speaker, presenting more than 500 speeches in 72 countries. He is a former European Business Speaker of the Year, and an influential advisor on building organizations that deliver exceptional customer experiences. Before beginning his speaking career, Larry held a number of senior positions at British Airways and the loyalty management company, Air Miles, in both New York and London. His roles included director of customer service and director of people and culture (he was the first person in Europe to have this role and title which became a benchmark for reinventing human resource departments all over the world). Larry was also a pioneer of corporate mentoring in Europe and has been the personal mentor to many top executives.  Originally from America, he has lived in Europe for the past 27 years and currently resides in both London and Venice. His best-selling book The Relationship Revolution, published in 2010, focuses on customer loyalty in the digital age.

Christian Jaekl is a senior developer on Shopify’s international growth team. Based in Ottawa, Canada, he works with staff around the world to adapt the ecommerce platform for success in international markets. Before joining Shopify in 2018, Christian worked for 1WorldSync in Tokyo, Japan, customizing that German-American company’s product data software for the Asia/Pacific market. If he’s not working, he’s probably drinking coffee, baking bread or helping his daughters with their French homework.

Rafał Jaworski, PhD, is an academic lecturer and scientist specializing in natural language processing techniques. His alma mater is Adam University in Poznań, Poland where he works at the Department of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Rafał’s scientific work concentrates around developing robust AI algorithms for the needs of computer-assisted translation. These include automatic lookup of linguistic resources and computer-assisted post editing. Apart from the research and teaching, he works as a linguistic AI expert at XTM International leading a team of young and talented developers who put his visions and ideas into practice.

Konstantin Josseliani is the founder and CEO of Janus Worldwide. Combining his 20+ years of experience in localization with a decade-plus expertise in strategic planning and organizational development, his focus as the company’s architect is to improve its production capabilities, service offerings and infrastructure. Konstantin holds diplomas in linguistics and management.

Gabriel is an industry researcher, consultant, and content producer. With over a decade in the language industry, Gabriel has worn many hats, from onboarding new clients as a business developer to hands-on work on projects in 100+ languages, from deconstructing industry trends to advising clients on how to talk to global audiences. Yet the biggest challenge lies ahead of us – how do professionals and companies grow and reinvent themselves while the industry is transformed by new technology? Through his varied projects, Gabriel has re-confirmed what we all know: global business is a people business. And our industry will continue to have a fundamental role to play in enabling it.

Tarja Karjalainen runs the localization program at OURA, the sleep-tracking smart ring startup. She has a keen interest in languages and user experience (UX), with a passion for serving as the cross-functional link between the two. Tarja previously led a team of UX writers and localization managers in the wearables industry at Polar, as well as running an international UX-driven localization program at HappyOrNot. For the past ten-plus years, she has worked in the language and software industries in various roles from translation to program management, and continues to advocate for localization and internationalization in all her endeavors.

István Lengyel is the founder of BeLazy, the project management automation company that makes continuous localization efficient across the entire supply chain. He also works as a technology consultant for Nimdzi Insights. Previously, István cofounded Kilgray, the makers of memoQ, and also worked as a translator and director for customer success for On Global. István holds several degrees in economics and translation including a PhD in translation studies from the ELTE University of Budapest.

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.

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

Giorgio Mattiuzzo graduated in classics but found his passion for localization through the gaming industry more than ten years ago. He has held many different roles until he joined National Instruments in 2016. Since 2018 Giorgio has been senior project manager focusing on vendor and quality management, with particular attention to the interaction between technology, automation and complex business organizations. When not busy with a conference call, you may find him riding his bicycle around the Bavarian Alps.

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

Phil Mirmov is a passionate localizer with experience in subtitling, dubbing and mobile phone user interfaces. Hailing from a multicultural and multilingual background, he is fueled by his admiration for learning new languages, and the cultures to which they correspond.

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.

Andrey Moiseev is an expert in translation, interpretation and internationalization business with more than 15 years of experience. He worked as the head of language services for the 2018 FIFA World Cup Russia Organizing Committee. He is also an independent language services consultant for various language service providers. Andrey was previously the director of language services for the 2014 Sochi Organizing Committee and subsidiary director of an international translation company in Kiev, Ukraine. He has organized linguistic support for a number of international events with Russian and international top-level authorities. He graduated from Moscow State University and Korean University.

Prerna Munjal has been part of Google’s international growth team and leads localization programs for APAC clients since early 2016. She is currently based in Singapore at the Google Asia Pacific office. Prerna works closely with a wide range of APAC companies on their global expansion strategy, using Google solutions to help them reach and engage users across the globe. Prior to Google, she was a global brand manager for a luxury brand and has also worked on global growth strategy for an internet startup in APAC. Prerna has engineering and MBA degrees and merges her education with a strong passion for cross-border and multicultural businesses.

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.

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.

Luke Niederer is native of Stuttgart, Germany, but has lived far away from his “home” for most of his adult life. He has been working in the translation and interpretation industry since he was a student in Berlin in the 1990s. For two years Luke worked as an escort interpreter for the Federal Press Office (Bundespresseamt) accompanying foreign guests of the federal government on trips through the new federal states and Berlin. After he moved to the United States and graduated from the Monterey Institute of International Studies (MIIS) in 2000, Luke started working for eBay in San Jose, California, helping to build the localization department from scratch. In July 2007 he became the European language lead for the language specialists located in Europe (Belgium and Poland) and then in October 2007 Luke moved to Germany to work from the eBay office there, working closely with the other European eBay offices. In March of 2011 he became localization manager Europe, initially responsible for 14 languages. In 2014 the new field of machine translation (MT) was added to Luke’s responsibilities and he is currently managing three MT language specialties — French, Italian and German — and potentially adding more in 2015.

Robert O’Shaughnessy is a product and solutions manager at Amplexor. Previously, he was founder and CEO of Reverbeo, a translation technology startup acquired by Amplexor. Robert drives a suite of website localization and marketing connectivity solutions as product/developer/manager, along with consulting with Fortune 500 clients on website globalization strategy.

With over 20 years in the industry, Patricia Paladini Adell is a leading globalization consultant specializing in designing and building scalable and agile localization programs. Patricia is the Founder and CEO of Paladini Global. The firm expertise in continuous localization and systems integration makes Paladini Global a key parent to accompany companies to efficiently adapt their offerings for international markets. Proficient in translation technologies such as translation management systems, machine translation, large language models (LLMs), and terminology management, Paladini Global ensures high-quality, culturally relevant content delivery. Paladini Global excels in change and stakeholder management, guiding organizations through complex transitions and securing support at all levels. The firm’s advocacy for Agile methodology fosters collaboration, flexibility, and rapid iteration, accelerating time-to-market and enhancing global operations. Dedicated to helping corporations.

Kristina Podnar is a digital policy innovator. For over two decades, she has worked with high-profile companies to balance the risk and opportunity of conducting business in the digital age. Kristina has a BA in international studies and an MBA in international business from the Dominican University of California and is certified as both a Change Management Practitioner (APMG International) and a Project Management Professional (Project Management Institute). Her book, The Power of Digital Policy was published in March 2019.

Frances Provine graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a degree in journalism and political science. After stints working as a journalist, English teacher and paralegal in different countries, she discovered her love for translation eight years ago and has been working in the industry ever since. Frances currently heads up the English team at Supertext, an ISO-certified translation and copywriting agency specializing in creative texts.

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.

Since joining Skyscanner in 2016, Hristina Racheva has focused on setting up a strong localization team and robust processes as well as increasing the team’s visibility and profile inside and outside the organization. Presently, a team of over 15 localization managers and engineers is building internal tailor-made solutions to support Skyscanner’s ambitious mission to lead the global transformation to modern and sustainable travel. When not solving problems for global travelers, Hristina leads Locommunity, an online mentoring community for localization professionals and co-hosts a localization meetup in Barcelona.

As a trained laboratory chemist and with a degree in technical editing, Christopher Rechtien worked at Rheinmetall Technical Publications GmbH documenting complex maintenance and troubleshooting procedures for Airbus aircraft. He moved to kothes in 2011 as a branch manager of the Bremen office and established the innovation management team. Since 2016 he has been a full-time innovation manager.

Lukasz Rejter is a technical strategist at Spark with 13 years of experience in the translation and localization industry. He is skilled in linguistics, localization, translation, product management and sales as well as translation workflow optimization and automation. Lukasz is passionate about new technologies and creating new solutions and products.

Yi-Qun Ren is an innovative software expert from Micro Focus Globalization group with almost 20 years in software development and research. Seven of those years involved software localization domain. Currently, he focuses on how to enhance the efficiency of testing and developing localized software. Yi-Qun’s innovations focus mainly on software localization and software testing tools. He holds eight American patents, including three patents about software localization. In addition, Yi-Qun is good at turning his innovations into realities, including two patents about testing tools for localized software.

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.

Inés Rubio San Martin is a localization veteran with experience in product and technical documentation, ecommerce, and marketing, among other fields. Her interest in scalability supported by technology and outsourcing solutions drove her to research language AI applications to localization before the Google neural machine translation landmark. Inés currently applies her passion to translation and localization processes at NI (National Instruments), a leader in software-defined automated testing and measurements driven by the concept to #EngineerAmbitiously while connecting people and technology.

Kristy Sakai is CEO of Supertext USA, Inc, a company that takes a creative approach to localization by focusing on how to drive impact with multilingual copy. After a decade of working as a copywriter and transcreator in the UK, Japan, and Germany, Kristy joined Supertext as a language manager. In 2016, she spearheaded Supertext’s expansion to the US, coming full circle to sunny Santa Monica, California. Supertext USA has since helped unicorn startups and multinationals reach global audiences with streamlined strategies and effective copy. Kristy is passionate about writing, multiculturalism, and food.

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.

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

Scott Schwalbach has been in the localization and globalization business for 35 years, working for and with some of the largest companies in the world. He has worked with the sales, solutions and operations divisions of service companies ensuring that they delivered solutions that drove their customers to success. At Microsoft, Scott worked in various business units and for the CFO. In addition, he now teaches various courses in communications and customer expectations, group dynamics as well as advises start-ups on globalization best practices. Scott’s free time involves biking, hiking and other adventures as well as discovering new food in places around the world.

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.

20+ years into Localization, Kirill runs ContentQuo – a translation technology company that makes it easy for enterprise loc teams, government translation departments, and Global Top-100 LSPs to automate & scale their Language Quality Assessment (LQA) programs with the help of GenAI. Formerly a Global Director of Localization at a Unicorn tech company, he’s still traumatized by the experience and is compelled to keep helping fellow localization directors as a way to atone for his earlier sins. In his spare time, fathers an 8-year old boy & plays Irish traditional music on tenor banjo. Based in Tallinn, Estonia, Northern Europe.

Johan Sporre is an engineering manager for digital global language services and a leader with great passion for languages, people, and technology. His team provides localization solutions to IKEA to simplify multilanguage communication for their customers and coworkers at a faster rate and a smaller price tag.

Mitja Sternkopf began work as an apprentice IT management assistant in Germany followed by several years in the UK where he completed additional training in customer-facing service and relations. He returned to Germany in 2007 to work in the translation industry and in 2013 joined kothes in translation management where he learned about the entire lifecycle that information goes through from creation to translation.

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

As a cofounder of Straker Translations, Grant Straker has extensive experience in the translation market. He is a member of the New Zealand Institute of Directors and along with Merryn Straker, was the winner of the 2018 master category for New Zealand Entrepreneur of the Year. A New Zealander of Maori decent, prior to founding Straker in 1999, he served in the British Army as an elite paratrooper. After leaving the Army, Grant taught himself to program computers and founded Straker as a technology company. He has since taken the company from startup to an IPO and built it to more than 180 staff with offices in ten countries.

Martin Svestka is the chief product officer at Memsource, the Prague-based translation management system development company. He heads Memsource’s team of product managers and user experience designers, and personally specializes in continuous localization. Martin is passionate about leveraging technologies to automate localization processes and enabling customers to achieve maximum efficiency. He has been managing the development of software products for most of his career and cannot imagine a better calling.

Angelique Tesar has a background as a quality assurance engineer in the video game industry and as a Ruby and Python software developer for eCommerce. She has worked for eBay since 2017 as a machine translation specialist.

Ryan Webb has worked in digital advertising for over 20 years. During that time he’s improved the advertising and website performance of more than 400 companies including Mars, Allianz, Panasonic, Bose, Legoland and Grant Thornton. Ryan’s team improve the measurement and effectiveness of clients’ websites through analytics and conversion optimization. They are currently immersing themselves in the world of localization and working with a variety of groups across Welocalize to improve international digital content performance. Ryan regularly speaks at advertising and conversion and analytics events, sharing client stories and experiences.

John Weisgerber is a battle-scarred veteran of countless localization campaigns. For over 20 years he has earned first-hand experience in every corner of the industry: freelance translator, project manager for both translation service providers and global enterprises such as HP, independent consultant, operations manager, and machine translation developer. In recent years John has leveraged the breadth and depth of his experience to build world-class translation management technology as a solutions architect with leading translation management systems like XTM Cloud.

Johannes Widmann has a degree in linguistics and political science from Tübingen University, Germany. He has worked as a terminologist in corporate environments for ten years. Johannes’ focus is on making terminology data ready for the twenty-first century challenges. This includes increasing data quality and terminological consistency so that both machine learning algorithms and company users across different departments can profit. Over the past five years, he has explored the potential of concept maps as an additional data layer for applying terminology in use cases not related to translation.

Smith Yewell cofounded Welocalize with his wife Julia in 1997, building it to one of the top ten localization firms in the industry. Both Smith and Welocalize have been recognized in many ways including the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year award, Deloitte & Touche’s “Technology Fast 500″ for 13 consecutive years and the Inc. 500/5000 award for ten consecutive years. Smith holds a BA in English from Tulane University. Prior to starting the company, he served in the US Army as a field artillery officer and received the Bronze Star for service in Operation Desert Storm during the first Persian Gulf War. Smith is also actively involved in philanthropic efforts and serves on the advisory boards of The Rosetta Foundation, The Aslan Foundation and Color Me A Cure Foundation.

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.