Marco Angiuoni is a program manager for the VMware product localization team. He has been involved in the localization industry for 20 years, starting as a graduate translator and later moving into team coordination and program management roles on both client and vendor sides. Marco is currently involved in several initiatives aimed at improving VMware localization strategy in terms of ROI and customer satisfaction. In his spare time he can be found playing board games and video games or enjoying a walk with his dog.

Cristina Anselmi is a video game localization expert with 15 years of experience. She has covered many roles in the industry, starting by translating video games, to managing complete localization cycles of several AAA titles and managing teams of localization specialists. For the past 8 years she has specialized in AI implementation in localization workflows, building a team and a strategy from the ground up, and successfully implementing machine translation at Electronic Arts.
She’s also very active in the industry, sharing her knowledge and expertise at conferences and organizing workshops and events to connect people and talk about localization technologies. Her current focus is on helping companies integrate AI technologies in the localization workflows, with clear and well structured plans, to make the most out of this technology without jeopardizing quality and keep sharing insights and knowledge in the industry.

Based in Paris, Michal Antczak is the head of localization technology for PayPal’s World Ready Team. In his previous roles on the client side, he managed VMware’s localization operations for Asia-Pacific-Japan out of Singapore, led enterprise product localization engineering and quality assurance, as well as tool development teams at Symantec in Poland. Michal also held various positions with major language service providers.

Tim Arata has over 18 years of hands-on localization management experience. His expertise spans the entire global content workflow and the technologies that support it. Tim has a passion for building holistic localization strategies and international teams. Prior to cofounding Locale Solutions, he was at Apple where he helped pioneer and manage Apple’s localization processes, technologies, and quality assurance programs. Other experience includes WhatsApp (1 1/2 years where he grew and managed the content and localization teams); Localize Technologies (multilanguage vendor); and Idiom Technologies (the original enterprise translation management system). Tim has long been curious about the ubiquitous us/them aspect of the localization sales process.

Melissa Biggs is a cofounder and consultant with Locale Solutions, providing localization strategy consulting for companies in technology. Previously at Sun Microsystems/Oracle, she held senior management positions, managing both program managers and globalization strategies. Melissa expanded into marketing localization management and initiatives at Informatica and Check Point Systems. She has served on globalization industry-wide boards including TAUS, the Localization Institute, and is a member of the GILT Leaders Forum. Melissa is active in nonprofits, including the US State Department TechWomen program, and as a board member of the Global Lives Project.

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

Alina Birsan is an optimistic extrovert, avid learner, culture connector, Eastern European, Romanian-based enthusiastic woman entrepreneur helping partner companies reach external markets. She is a true believer in partnerships, engagement, visibility, and transparent communication who would rather be part of the story than just watch it. That is why Alina has been working as an Elia board member since 2019, taking on the challenge of running its first online conference in 2020. Having been constantly in love with the language industry for the past 15 years, she is grateful to a young, experienced, dynamic and resourceful team that is always eager to understand clients’ needs and come up with the best fit-for-purpose solutions. Alina’s favorite quote: “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” (Maya Angelou)

Catherine Christaki has been an English-Greek translator since 2001 and a partner at Lingua Greca Translations since 2012. She specializes in software, app and web localization — a Greek language lead for Apple software and apps since 2011, and translated the Translation: Getting It Right guide. Catherine was born and raised in Greece, studied modern languages and translation in the UK, and lives in Guelph, Canada. She enjoys sharing localization events and articles online. Catherine is an active volunteer for the ATA as a mentor and blogmaster of The Savvy Newcomer, and for Women in Localization as the Americas GEO Manager and former chapter manager of the Eastern Canada chapter.

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

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

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

Esther Curiel is a global content and localization expert. Her mission is to help brands achieve international growth objectives by integrating localization, content strategy, and global user experience. She is currently the globalization manager at Zoetis, an animal health company operating in over 100 countries.

With over 25 years in the software industry and a decade in data and applied science, Agustín Da Fieno Delucchi​ excels in transforming complex data into strategic business solutions. He leverages machine learning and AI to drive innovation and evidence-based decision-making. Leading global, cross-functional teams, he ensures alignment with business goals, data integrity, governance, and compliance. His leadership in AI has been pivotal in internationalization and localization efforts, spearheading innovation in software development. As a polyglot, he creates accessible, culturally relevant technology experiences, driven by curiosity and a commitment to excellence in the evolving tech landscape.

A graduate of Stockholm University, Sweden, Adam Dahlström worked in production roles as a translator and project manager, gradually moving into managing translation software and infrastructure. After ten years in different roles at Sandberg Translation Partners, a mid-sized Nordic languages regional language vendor headquartered in the UK, he currently operates as Sandberg’s IT manager, overseeing infrastructure management, development of building management system software, and translation workflow integration.

Barbara Dassinger is a translator and EQCA certified terminology manager. As the deputy team leader of the localization team at AUCOTEC AG, she focuses on the localization of AUCOTEC’s product range. Barbara also manages the introduction of a company-wide terminology management.

Tommy Davin has over 15 years of localization experience in various roles from pricing, vendor, project, and program management. At United Language Group he is passionate about building teams that are intensely focused on providing high levels of service along with innovative and cost-effective solutions to their customers.

Sankeshwari Deo is a linguistic quality manager at Autodesk and is responsible for designing and implementing efficient and scalable linguistic quality frameworks across localized content. With 15 years of experience in the localization industry, both on the client and vendor sides, she has worked closely with cross-functional teams to fit linguistic requirements in end-to-end localization processes. In her past roles at Lionbridge, SDL, Cisco, and Tag Worldwide, Sankeshwari specialized in managing and setting up processes related to language quality improvement and transcreation management. Building on existing processes and workflows to create efficient, bespoke solutions are Sankeshwari’s passions and key strengths.

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

Akash Dubey works with iManage, Chicago, as director of technical publications and localization. He has over 20 years of experience in the field of technical communication with multinationals such as Hewlett Packard, Siemens, Cisco Systems, and EMC Corporation. In addition, Akash heads India’s largest and oldest community of technical communicators and language professionals, Technical Writers of India (TWIN). He has made several presentations on API documentation, Alexa-based help, and content management systems at regional and national conferences/learning sessions. Akash participates in many national and international panel discussions on leadership and project management challenges in emerging economies.

Ibrahim El-Yakub is a humanitarian worker based in Northeast Nigeria with over six years of experience. He held the position of Shuwa Arab team lead for three years at Translators without Borders before transitioning to the role of chatbot engagement officer as part of the Multilingual Chatbot Team. Ibrahim believes that with technology, effective communication can be improved and language barriers reduced. Ibrahim speaks English, Arabic, Hausa, Kanuri, and Shuwa Arab.

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.

Carrie Fischer is the globalization services manager at Subway, headquartered in Milford, CT, and Miami, FL. She is responsible for all globalization-related strategies for the company. She has over 30 years of localization experience and has held previous localization positions at Bodybuilding.com, Hyperion/Oracle, and Transparent Language as the managing editor. She owns her own consulting company, Carrie Fischer Consulting, LLC which helps businesses with their localization needs. She is also the 2023 President of Women in Localization and a mentor.

Daniela Fleck is a terminologist at Philips. She is dedicated to ensuring clear, consistent terminology that strengthens connections, reinforces trust, and enhances content clarity. With expertise in localization, content quality, and knowledge management, she integrates terminology into workflows to streamline global communication. She is passionate about shifting left and advocates for embedding terminology early in content creation to make information easier to understand and use. Her work ensures cohesive communication across content touchpoints, providing support to customers at every stage of their journey. She also explores the intersection of terminology, taxonomy, and knowledge management to support evolving content needs.

Klaus is a terminology aficionado who helps global companies harmonize and control their multilingual data and content. His company Kaleidoscope provides the collaborative workflow platform Quickterm, which manages, distributes and enforces corporate terminology. Quickterm is integrated into all major translation management systems, MT engines and more recently GenAI platforms, making it the central enterprise terminology hub.

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.

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.

Hannah Fry is an associate professor in the Mathematics of Cities at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis at the University College London where she studies patterns in human behavior. Her research applies to a wide range of social problems and questions, from shopping and transport to urban crime, riots, and terrorism. She is a mathematician, a best-selling author, an award-winning science presenter, and the host of numerous popular podcasts and television shows.

Ágnes Gazsó has 15 years in the language industry. She began with managing localization of video games, followed by a project manager career for language service providers. Her next step was becoming an account manager to help memoQ grow. Ágnes then joined BeLazy where she partnered with fellow automators to help them grow their business. She holds degrees in economics and communication (journalism).

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.

As the fonder and CEO of Way2Global, Laura Gori is a proud advocate for benefit corporations as well as a living business case as a regenerative entrepreneur. Using business as a force for good is the evolutionary outcome of her previous three decades leading a traditional language service provider. Laura believes a major shift is under way worldwide, and benefit corporations are a trailblazing driver for sustainable development. They are businesses that are committed and accountable for social and environmental issues, beyond pursuing profit. In the Covid-19 era, businesses and leaders must solve the greatest challenges we all face, and be part of the solution. This is the outcome of Laura’s journey and her new purpose.

Zak Haitkin graduated from Humboldt State University in Northern California in 2010 with bachelor’s degrees in Spanish language and international studies with an emphasis in Latin America. He is a nonnative, fluent Spanish speaker and has a fiery passion for language learning and linguistics. Zak began his journey as a driver with Lyft in July of 2013 and worked his way into a role at their headquarters in customer support in April 2014. Since then, he has worked at Lyft headquarters in several capacities including market operations, competitive intelligence, and localization and translation. Zak was an integral part of the launch of Lyft’s localization program in October 2018 and moved into the role of program manager to help oversee the translation, localization, and internationalization operations at the company. He currently works at Netflix as a localization project manager for product user interface focusing on the mobile, web, and new member and new market components.

Since January 2021, Siobhan Hanna has been responsible for strategy and customer solutions at TELUS International AI (TIAI), formerly Lionbridge AI and part of TELUS International. TIAI provides high-quality training data at scale, helping their customers build world class AI.

Vijay Hanumolu is a customer experience leader with over 20 years of experience helping global brands develop innovative digital capabilities. He serves as vice president of digital experience at insurance provider, Unum, where he heads up the company’s international digital experience team. Before Unum, Vijay oversaw the customer experience and digital strategy teams for the global customer experience and online strategy team at integrated circuit maker Analog Devices Inc.

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.

Stella Hodkin Paris is a versatile language service industry expert with a passion for languages and a belief in the power of global communication as a driver for change. With over 20 years of experience in language services, she is currently a member of the leadership team at CLEAR Global / Translators without Borders (TWB). As chief language services officer, Stella seeks to leverage the potential of TWB’s community-based model to provide nongovernmental organization partners and United Nations agencies with essential language services and support.

Jochen Hummel is cofounder and CEO of Coreon GmbH. He also heads ESTeam AB, a leading language operations company. As founder of TRADOS, Jochen established computer-assisted translation as a product category, with Semiox he is reinventing multilingual again. He is an internationally known software executive, business angel, and serial entrepreneur.

Naho Inuyama is an Amsterdam-based marketing localization team manager at the software development company, Atlassian. Active since 2010 in the localization industry, Naho has a unique background in both engineering and Japanese marketing management. She has worked at marketing firms, team specialization, and software engineering. Along with her extensive experience in team optimization, scripting languages, and web content management, Naho’s technical and marketing background has allowed her to build an effective strategy to focus on local needs, as well as grow a localization team with agile.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Georg Kirchner leads the machine translation program at Dell Technologies. Before focusing on automated translation and related machine learning capabilities, he managed translation management systems. Early on in his career, Georg spent 17 years on the production side as a staff translator, project manager, and project management office lead.

Eva Klaudinyova has been working in the localization industry since 2000, first managing localization programs at Medialocate, then leading localization teams and implementing new globalization, quality, and vendor management strategies for companies such as VeriSign, VMware, and Apple. She is a cofounder and advisory board member of Women in Localization. Eva is currently the program chair of the Translation and Localization Management (TLM) program at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, imparting her knowledge and longstanding localization and leadership experience to graduate students of localization management. She is from Slovakia, is multilingual, and holds MAs in foreign language teaching and translation.

Vassilis Korkas is the COO and a cofounder of lexiQA. Following a 15-year academic career in the UK, in 2015 he decided to channel his expertise in translation technologies, technical translation and reviewing into a new tech company. At lexiQA he is involved with content development, product management and business operations.

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

Joseph Kovalov has woked in the translation industry for over 20 years. He started as a full-time translator, worked as a project manager and ran his own agency in Ukraine. Joseph now is an in-house localization expert at Wix.com. He is an active participant in language service provider communities, sharing his expertise with others via publications, webinars, and training courses. Joseph also takes part in conferences as an attendee and speaker: UTIC 2013 and 2014, UTICamp-2016, UTICamp-2019 and UTICamp-2020 (program committee member), Regional ProZ.com Conference in Kharkiv, 2016 ITA Conference in Jerusalem, ELIA Together-2017 in Berlin, and ITA 2021 to name just a few.

Olivier Libouban is a French-born software developer and manager with over 30 years experience in four countries. He is currently the vice president of product development at Lingoport, a company that drives innovation around software internationalization and localization. Olivier has a diplôme d’Ingénieur from the National Institute of Applied Sciences in Rennes, France, and an MS in computer science from the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

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.

Zhenyu Luo joined VMware in 2015 as manager of the VMware test as a service (vTaaS) team. This team is developing an end-to-end testing platform that provides automation and integration service for users from different function teams. It was incubated from an innovation idea and now serves about 3,000 VMware internal engineers across business units and functions.

Wouter Maagdenberg started his first tech company during his BA studies at Erasmus University in 1996. He sold his former company, Calamares (Enterprise Video Content Management), to SDL in 2011. Wouter left his role as VP media worldwide at SDL in 2016 to start TXTOmedia. TXTOmedia technology transforms structured content into rich media in an automated way, procedures become interactive how-to videos on-the-fly. Wouter’s role combines product management with business development.

Kajetan Malinowski leads Lionbridge’s product strategy team and is developing their AI-enabled localization platform. His other specialties include e-business, product and program management, and business development.

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.

Zalán Meggyesi is a diplomat, scuba diver, translator, and software developer. He graduated from Corvinus University of Budapest before turning to software development. Zalán has worked alongside translators and content creators in the localization industry for the past five years at Easyling, sharpening the translation proxy’s capabilities to ever greater effect.

Miloš Milovanović joined TAUS as the head of business to help with business growth and steer business strategy using his nine years of experience in sales, business development and marketing. He has vast experience in business-to-business and business-to-consumer situations on operational, leadership and strategic levels, in a fast-paced international and dynamic environment. Miloš has a BS in international economics and an MS in quantitative finances from the Faculty of Economics, University of Belgrade, Serbia. He has a cheerful personality with a good sense of humor, and enjoys nature and biking.

Rafa Moral has over 30 years of localization experience in multiple roles. He oversees research and development (R&D) activities related to language and translation in which data and AI play key roles. Those R&D activities include machine translation, content profiling and analysis, linguistic quality assurance and control, integration of authoring and translation. Rafa focuses on creating a fully automated, data-driven workflow in which hybrid components can make decisions on how to best route content end-to-end. He collaborates with customers on joint R&D initiatives.

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.

Madalina Neamu believes that all of the steps she has taken during her 14-year career have helped her become the professional she is today. Madalina devoted the first ten years to learning, going through multiple roles from communication strategy to trade marketing, advertising production, account management, brand management, and managing director, building a 360˚ vision on the field she has chosen to work in: marketing and communication. Madalina believes both professionally and personally in communication, transparency, and accountability. These principles make her the person who can bring together complex projects, dynamic teams, and happy customers.

Sabrina Neudorfer studied English and Russian translation at the University of Innsbruck (Leopold-Franzens-Universität Innsbruck), Austria. In her thesis, she addressed the topic of comics and their translation. Her master’s degree focused on specialized translation. During her studies, Sabrina participated in an internship at KTM AG in 2017, and as part of the internship she wrote her master’s thesis “Naming and Defining Components and Functions at KTM AG”. Since 2019, Sabrina has worked full-time as a translation and terminology manager at KTM.

Kevin Nichols is an award-winning thought leader, digital industry expert, and author with more than 24 years of professional experience. He was a key contributor to creating the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) OpenCourseWare project, a web-based collection of university course content open and available to anyone with a connection to the internet. Kevin grew one of the largest content strategy teams globally at SapientNitro and has worked to solve complicated content challenges for dozens of global brands. At AvenueCX, he takes his passion for content and works with international brands to improve their overall content and customer experiences. He is the author of Enterprise Content Strategy: A Project Guide and co-author of UX for Dummies. Kevin is also the chair of the Content Strategy Alliance Best Practices initiative. He serves as the personalization wrangler for The Content Wrangler.

Daniel Ni is a staff engineer for the VMware globalization team and has been exploring the various globalization verification areas for the past ten years. He is an inventor of screenshot-based technologies to visualize the utilization in globalization. Currently, Daniel takes care of the hands-on globalization issue verification and troubleshooting from different technical perspectives, and focuses on the relevant innovations to empower users in their globalization practice.

Maiju Nurminen leads marketing and user experience localization at what3words — the tech company that’s given every three-meter square in the world an address of three random words, so far in 48 languages. She is passionate about delivering meaningful experiences across all languages, cultures, and platforms. As a translator herself, Maiju is keenly aware of the limits of translation in localizing experiences that convert. As such, she is an advocate for data-led localization, mixing localization methods, and counts design as a language.

Michael Oettli has an MS in classical studies from the University of Basel, Switzerland, and has worked in the localization industry for over 20 years. As the founder and managing director of NLG, he has been running the company since 2000. Michael’s aim for the company is to focus beyond just supplying translations. He is passionate about providing consulting, implementing process improvements, and offering customized technology solutions to truly take NLG clients to the next level.

Martina Pancot is the content operations director at Klook Travel Technology, where she leads localization, user experience writing, and product content areas. She started her career in the content management and online marketing fields. With no background in linguistics, but a strong interest in technology and travel, Martina picked up the challenge of establishing the localization department and strategy at trivago. She holds a degree and MBA in economics and tourism management. What Martina enjoys the most is developing new skills and during the lockdown, she has learned to code, crochet, and even to perform a haircut.

Miruna Parchirie’s first encounter with localization happened four years ago. Hailing from a small town in Romania, she has lived and worked in several countries before landing in Amsterdam. Miruna started in localization at a Fintech startup where she single-handedly set up the localization program for the company, learning-by-doing style. It was the best school of localization and an amazing opportunity to work in an industry that is exciting, immensely rewarding and packed with smart and interesting people. She is now helping KUDO reinvent multilingual meetings while breaking language and geographic barriers.

Mariette Pepping created and manages the ServiceNow marketing localization team, which is responsible for the translation and adaptation of marketing content and digital experiences to worldwide audiences. Since January 1, 2024, Mariette has relocated to Costa Rica, where ServiceNow opened a new office. Next to her marketing localization responsibilities she now also manages the Marketing Center of Excellence in Costa Rica. She has over ten years of experience in global digital marketing including designing and executing connected programs across the globe.

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

Jaime Punishill is chief marketing officer at Lionbridge and is responsible for leading global marketing and proposition development efforts. He earned a BA in history and political science from Stanford.

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.

Suchita Rao is a principal software engineer at Autodesk. She has over 12 years of experience in the software Industry. During her tenure at Autodesk, Suchita has led various cross-functional initiatives toward building a continuous localization platform that is highly scalable and resilient. She has also implemented various automated solutions for the globalization needs of Autodesk along with successfully integrating a DevOps pipeline for content localization. During her spare time, Suchita enjoys photography and traveling around the world.

Jessica Rathke has 30 years of localization sales experience and is currently the principal at FluentSales LLC, a London-based consultancy that helps translation industry leaders around the world increase revenue through training and consulting services. She holds an MBA and a bachelor of arts in foreign affairs and in German from Miami University in Ohio, USA. Jessica completed post-graduate German studies at the University of Salzburg. She has also been recognized as a translation industry influencer for the past several years.

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.

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.

Belén Rubalcaba is a localization manager with over 25 years of experience in translation and localization project and program management. She is passionate about localization technology and process efficiency. In her current role, Belén manages the PTC training localization program and is also a vendor manager for the localization department. Having been actively involved with the PTC terminology program since its beginning, she is in charge of driving terminology management across all PTC organizations to ensure that their terminology is accurate, consistent with industry standards, consistent across products, usable, translatable, and accessible inside and outside the corporation.

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

Iti Sahai has over 15 years of combined experience in international business and localization, delivering international growth through product-led localization strategy and best practices that fully engage targeted international audiences. Iti champions localization transformation into a strategic function and has been recognized for her ingenuity in identifying solutions that allow organizations to have a global mindset.

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.

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

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.

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

Marina Sedmak leads Rockwell Automation’s global team of technical writers, as well as overseeing the global translation team that supports all commercial, technical and web translation across the organization. She has over 20 years of experience in leading various technical writing teams at Rockwell. Most recently, Marina has focused on integrating the Rockwell’s technical content development and translation functions via formal content quality and terminology management programs.

Heather Shoemaker is the mastermind behind Language I/O’s core technology, which eliminates the need for expensive and time-consuming neural machine translation engine training by dynamically selecting the NMT engine that will best translate a given piece of content and imposing company-specific terminology onto any of the many NMT engines. and LLMs integrated into the Language I/O cloud solution. Prior to co-founding Language I/O, Heather was well-known for globalizing code for Fortune 500s. She was also the senior director of Product Management and Globalization for eCollege, which was acquired by Pearson Education during her tenure. While at Pearson/eCollege, Heather and her team built a next-generation, online college education platform, which was launched globally. Heather holds a Master of Science from the University of Colorado at Boulder College of Engineering as well as a Bachelor of Arts in Latin American Studies from the University of Washington in Seattle.

With 22 years in localization, Kirill has been deeply focused on Translation Quality Management and its automation for the past 10 — as a co-founder, CEO, and CPO of a localization technology company. His most recent interest is simplifying the benchmarking of language AI (LLM and NMT) output quality across various multilingual use cases such as translation, LQA, and more. Formerly a Global Director of Localization at a Unicorn tech company. he’s based in Tallinn, Estonia, Northern Europe. In his spare time, Kirill plays, teaches, and promotes Irish traditional music.

As part of the Phrase Marketing team, Francesca leads the localization program and the Loc Leaders community program. Francesca has been in localization for over 13 years in both client and vendor roles and she continues to be passionate about languages, curious about technology, and committed to implementing efficient processes.

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.

Val Swisher enjoys helping companies solve complex content problems. She is a well-known expert in content strategy, structured authoring, global content, content development, and terminology management. Val believes content should be easy to read, cost-effective to create and translate, and efficient to manage. Her fourth book, The Personalization Paradox, was published in 2021 by XML Press. She is on the advisory board for the Technical Communications Program at the University of North Texas. When not working with customers or students, Val can be found working on her latest quilt, and she also makes a mean hummus.

Peter Tan joined VMware in 2012 and worked on globalization quality for years. He is a member of the product globalization engineering team and works on VMware Test as a Service (vTaaS), which is an open platform that can integrate with functions such as globalization and accessibility. Peter was a quality engineer and IT administrator prior to VMware and outside of working hours, he likes walking, computer games and reading novels.

Giulia Tarditi is a localization professional with 15 years of experience setting up localization programs and teams on the client-side. She is a regular speaker for localization webinars, panels, talks, and social network debates. Giulia is known for her innovative approach and out-of-the-box ideas, and is highly praised for implementing data-first and highly customized operating models.

After earning an MChem in Chemistry with French from the University of Manchester, UK, and a PhD in Chemistry from the University of Cambridge, UK, Karen Tkaczyk’s early career was as a development chemist in Ireland and then the US. Later she established and ran McMillan Translation Inc. where she was a practitioner from 2005 to 2021. Karen now leads MasterWord’s activity for pharmaceutical, chemical, and energy clients. She is also an adviser for the MasterWord Institute, having extensive training experience. Karen gives back; among other roles she served as the secretary of the board of the American Translators Association from 2017 to 2021.

Benjamin  Tsou has worked in natural language processing for over 20 years. He and his team at Chilin (HK) Ltd. have cultivated a large database of over 300,000 parallel Chinese and English patents from which over 30 million high-quality sentence pairs ideal for machine translation training have been extracted. From these they obtained over one million bilingual technical terms and produced an award-winning innovative post-editing platform PatentLex. Their efforts in language database cultivation also includes a 25-year long synchronous corpus of media material from six major Chinese communities, LIVAC. It has provided a useful means to monitor linguistic and social-cultural trends comparatively.

Markus Umundum graduated in mechanical engineering and began working for Sandvik Mining and Construction as mechanical engineer in 1997. He completed the tekom certification for technical communication and since 2010 has been managing technical documentation for mechanical cutting products with teams in Austria, Australia, and India. Markus is a member of the documentation board of Sandvik Mining and Rock Solutions and is responsible for system implementations and pilot projects for his teams.

Angelika Vaasa works at the translation service of the European Parliament as the head of the quality unit. Her group is responsible for the development and maintenance of the quality policy of the translation service. Before taking up the position of the quality manager, Angelika worked as translator, interpreter, and trainer. She has degrees in linguistics, interpretation, teacher training and EU law. Angelika is also actively involved in the work on language and translation standards.

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.

Jennifer Vela-Valido is a localization strategist with over ten years of experience in various roles in the localization industry. She has recently completed a PhD in localization quality management and she collaborates with several universities as a researcher and guest lecturer specializing in localization strategies, vendor management, and linguistic quality management. Jennifer is a member of ASTM International’s  Subcommittee F43.03 on language translation and the ISO/TC 37/SC 5/WG 1 translation working group.

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

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

Hartmut von Berg is senior director of localization at GoTo, a company that helps people and businesses do their best work — simply and securely — from anywhere. He serves as the site leader of GoTo’s office in Karlsruhe, Germany, where he drives employee satisfaction, employer branding, and GoTo’s charity and youth education program, GoTo Gives. Over the past three year’s, Hartmut has transformed the localization function at GoTo from a translation service into a globalization consultancy driven by his passion to serve GoTo’s international customer base with compelling localized experiences.

Agnes Vonk-Lub graduated from the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen in business administration and started her career in the supply chain as logistics manager in plastic molding. She shifted to Philips to work as a master planner, then to Johnson & Johnson to work for Cordis in cardiology as a demand manager, and then worked at Neopost (B2B) as a group lead in logistics. Agnes went back to Philips in supply chain, but moved four years ago to a role in innovation as a group lead dealing with user manual creation. Her team creates content for all consumer products within Philips.

Peng Wang has been teaching, researching and practicing localization on three continents. She is the convener for EDUinLOC, a part-time professor at the University of Ottawa, and a freelance conference interpreter with the Translation Bureau of the Canadian government. Peng began conducting corpus-based translation studies at the University of Liverpool and later she worked in the Corpus Research Lab at Northern Arizona University. She is an expert in approaching technology in the context of culture and humanities. Peng’s current research interests include human learning vs. machine learning, machine translation risk management, terminology and multilingual data analysis.

Barny Westfold is an entrepreneurial industry executive with dedicated experience from within EMEA sales and marketing in the healthcare, pharmaceutical, and medical device sectors.

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.

Joern Wuebker is director of research at Lilt and leads development of the startup’s adaptive neural machine translation system. He has published about efficient interactive machine translation and adaptive learning at several major natural language processing conferences. Joern holds a PhD from RWTH Aachen University, which was advised by Professor Hermann Ney.

John Yunker is cofounder of Byte Level Research, the first company dedicated to best practices in website and content globalization. Since 2000, he has published 16 editions of The Web Globalization Report Card. John authored the first book devoted to website globalization, Beyond Borders: Web Globalization Strategies as well as the most recent book Think Outside the Country (also available in Japanese). He writes the popular blog Global By Design.

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.

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

Zhenjun Zhuo joined VMware as a globalization engineer in 2013. He now focuses on developing workflows and tools for globalization and testing teams.