Ọpẹ́yẹmí Adémólá is a researcher, community builder, and founder of SpredC, a language technology and culture community with demonstrable experience driving community management and leveraging media education and language technology. With over 200 community members, the community has been hosting monthly webinars about language technology to support and create employment opportunities for youth in the industry. The webinars have been graced by experts from Apple, Women In Voice, Oxford Dictionary, Google, and scholars from different institutions. His focus is on delivering successful projects and using languages to preserve quality education. Ọpẹ́yẹmí is dedicated to maintaining a community and investing in people.

Abake Adenle is the founder of ajala, a startup developing enterprise voice automation solutions for African languages. She holds a PhD in information engineering from Cambridge University where she was a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow. After completing her PhD, Abake transitioned into the industry, working for various investment banks and hedge funds. She is a recipient of the 2021 Women in Voice diversity, equity, and inclusion award, a 2020 Leshner Fellow in artificial intelligence, and was named a 2018 innovator by Global Finance Magazine.

Belén Agulló García is a multimedia localization professional with over a decade of experience in the localization industry in various roles in multiple companies, mainly language service providers, research and consultancy firms, and technology service providers. In her professional career, she has touched upon almost every role in the industry, including linguist, project manager, quality program manager, language technology deployment manager, researcher, educator, customer success manager, and vendor relationship manager, among others. This unique mix of experiences gave her a unique and deep understanding of the industry, which she is developing further at Deluxe as AI strategy director. In her current role, Belén’s focuses on leading teams in devising and implementing long-term AI strategies, fostering strategic partnerships, and defining go-to-market strategies for AI services across key verticals. She earned a Ph.D. with a dissertation entitled “Subtitling in immersive media: A user-centered study.”

Yinka Ajibola is a PhD student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research area centers around information communication technologies for development (ICTD). Within ICTD, Yinka is interested in language translation technologies, AI ethics within the developing context, and smart city technology in Africa. He is a member of the African Languages Lab.

Living in Nigeria, one of the most linguistically diverse countries with over 500 spoken languages, and working directly with conflict-affected populations, has made Usman Ali Monguno understand the importance of communication in all we do. He speaks English, Hausa, and Kanuri and is currently learning Arabic. Usman majored in administration and public policy but language stole his heart and he made a paradigm shift. He is happy working in the language industry and looking forward to making an impact in all that he does.

André Désiré Amougou Zeh is a certified English/French translator and interpreter. He holds bachelor’s degrees in English and French, a master’s degree in translation studies, and a professional master’s degree in public management. André Désiré has a good mastery of translation and interpreting techniques, translation and terminology project management, and computer-aided applications thanks to his diversified and considerable experience in freelance translation, marketing research transcription, court and conference interpreting, and translation industry management. He has a good command of English and French and has participated in important IT, website, software, economic, financial, accounting, stock exchange, and insurance translation projects where terminology management is key to quality communication. André Désiré has developed good collaboration and team working skills, and the ability to work under pressure to comply with deadlines and deliver quality work.

Debbie Anderson runs the Script Encoding Initiative in the Department of Linguistics at UC Berkeley, which was established in 2002. She is also chair of the Unicode Script Ad Hoc, which reviews all new proposals for scripts and characters (except emoji and CJK ideographs). Debbie holds a PhD in Indo-European studies from UCLA.

Aimee Ansari has over 20 years of experience in leadership positions in large humanitarian and development organizations. She has worked in several humanitarian crises from the Tajik civil war to the earthquake in Haiti, the conflicts in the Balkans to the Syrian refugee crisis and the conflict in South Sudan. Prior to joining Translators without Borders in 2016, Aimee worked with Care, Oxfam, Save the Children and the United Nations.

Tawanda Nhire Nelson Antonio was born in Chimoio, Mozambique. He is an official, sworn Portuguese<>English translator and interpreter and the district technical coordinator of education at World Vision. Tawanda is the founder and director of Translab International, a company dedicated to translation and interpretation in Mozambique and the diaspora since 2015. He has an MS in business management from the Business School of Universidade Santo Tomás de Moçambique and an honors degree in teaching English and Portuguese from the Universidade Pedagógica de Moçambique.

Abel Aregawi is a highly skilled project manager with four years of experience working in different sectors. He has exceptional planning, organizational, and leadership skills, focused on leading project stakeholders to meet or exceed aggressive timelines. Abel is a multi-hyphenate project manager in the translation industry, concentrating on strategy and operations, innovation, and technology. He leads cross-functional teams using a systems-based and people-centric approach to solve complex problems. In addition, Abel works in collaborations that aim to create more livable documents by leading a successful team of more than 100 translators and language specialists.

Anuoluwapo Aremu is a linguist with four years of experience in African language innovation, advocacy, facilitation, research, and technology. He created Yooba Lingo, the first African indigenous language crossword board game, to aid in the learning of the Yorùbá language and to also present African languages to modern engagements. Recently his works have spanned across the Nigerian Pidgin, Nigerian English, Hausa and Yoruba languages. Anuoluwapo completed his bachelor’s degree in linguistics and African studies at the University of Lagos. He is a member of Association of Computational Linguistics and a terminology intern at Translators Without Borders. Anuoluwapo is interested in localization, text annotations, automatic speech recognition, machine translation, question answering, and other interesting natural language processing tasks.

Ouafa Benterki is the CEO and founder of MTY Intelligent Software, the first Algerian women-led technology startup that specializes in artificial intelligence and natural language processing. Since 2019, she has been the first Arab/African woman named Microsoft regional director, a title that Microsoft awards every year to the top 100 IT professionals in the world. Ouafa is considered an emerging leader in technology by TechWomen, an Initiative of the US Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. She has been a member of the Advisory Experts Council at the Arab International Investors Forum, president and founder of the Machine Translation Association in Algeria, a member of the MIT regional accelerated program dedicated to developing the Algerian entrepreneurship ecosystem, and pioneering machine translation research in Algeria.

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.

Fasil Bogale is an Ethiopian humanitarian development worker, freelance translator, and a volunteer Amharic language associate with CLEAR Global/Translators without Borders. He is experienced in project management, education, and communications.

Ralph Bonaduce is the president of Akorbi’s business process outsourcing services division. The division provides translations, interpretation, and transcription services, as well as inbound, outbound, and back-office support in more than 170 languages. In order to support a highly diversified global clientele, Ralph has developed strategies, specifically for Africa, to identify and develop language resources to meet their growing demand.

Johan Botha is at the forefront of language service development and innovation in Africa. Folio Online’s long-standing relationships with some of the world’s biggest brands provide a unique understanding of the challenges faced by translators in Africa and abroad. His position as director of Folio Online and Folio InterTel, together with his pioneering approach to technology, puts him at the cutting edge of a remarkable economic force, namely the expansion of multinational corporations into the African market.

Born in the UK and educated at Oxford, Tim Brookes moved to Vermont in 1980 and founded the Endangered Alphabets Project in 2013 as a federal nonprofit. Nowadays everyone knows that many of the world’s languages are in danger of dying out, but there is almost no recognition that more than 85% of the world’s scripts are also threatened. When a culture is forced to abandon its traditional writing, its entire written record — literature, sacred texts, personal correspondence, legal documents, histories — becomes incomprehensible within two generations, and with it the culture’s sense of history, purpose, dignity, and identity is lost. The Endangered Alphabets Project is the only organization in the world working to discover, research, and document minority scripts, and then supporting efforts to revitalize these scripts, and thereby their languages and their cultures of origin.

Hermann Camara is a French-speaking Anglicist and has four consecutive years of graduate studies in English-speaking universities. For the past 14 years, he has been offering linguistic proofreading, terminology database development, conference interpreting, and professional translation services in both English and French. Hermann’s translation projects and interpretation missions aim for a high level of accuracy, faithfulness to the spirit, letter, style, and nuances of the original. He also has a very good knowledge of the economic, financial, legal, and agro-industrial fields, having offered more than a decade of translation and writing/editing services to institutions, organizations, and companies operating in these different sectors. Hermann currently works as a consultant terminologist at the African Court on Human and People’s Rights, an organization of the African Union.

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

Allen Che has a wealth of experience in the field of software globalization and localization and is currently serving as a senior technical program manager at VMware. With over 15 years of experience, he is very familiar with the various challenges and opportunities associated with localizing software for different markets and languages. In addition, his technical background gives him a unique perspective on how to optimize localization workflows and leverage data analytics to improve localization quality and efficiency.

Stephan Cocron is localization program director at Salesforce, where he works both as the localization business manager to a key product group and a key localization team lead in charge of process optimization, technology onboarding, and localization business strategy.

Trained as a translator and interpreter, and passionate about languages since his childhood, Tenkeu Daline is a freelancer whose love for culture has brought him closer to localization. His experience with intercultural communication and working in a multicultural context makes him an energetic, flexible, imaginative, creative, reliable, committed, selfless, and passionate team player. Tenkeu has excellent communication skills and can adapt to different situations. He possesses both theoretical and practical knowledge as a translator-interpreter.

Luca De Biase is a journalist, writer, and director at Imminent, Translated’s Research Center. Previously, he was director at Media Ecology Research network for Reimagine Europa, head of the innovation section at Il Sole 24 Ore, professor of knowledge management at the University of Pisa, and digital citizenship at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia. His recent books include Armonie future (Rubettino, 2021), Il lavoro del futuro (Codice, 2018), and Homo pluralis (Codice, 2015). Luca was a member of the Mission Assembly for Climate-Neutral and Smart Cities at the European Commission and chair of the Working Group on the phenomenon of hate speech online established by the Italian government. He was cofounder of the ItaliaStartup Association. Luca earned the 2011 Moebius Award in Lugano and a 2011 Lovie Award in London for La Vita Nòva, a pioneering bimonthly review for tablets. In 2016, his work was honored by the Media Ecology Association with the James W. Carey Award for Outstanding Media Ecology Journalism.

Soren Eberhardt is a global site manager for Microsoft 365 web direct sales. He has been working in the field of internationalization and localization for over 25 years, both on the vendor and client sides, in different roles from translator to localization engineer and program manager. Products that Soren has worked on include Windows, Skype, and Microsoft Teams. He has taught localization classes at the University of Washington and City University of New York, and classes on computer-assisted translation (CAT) tools at NYU and Montclair State University. Soren also helped release the first massive open online courses for localization at edX. The language with the fewest speakers he has ever localized a product for is Inuktitut.

Frédérique Froment-Kelleghan is the lead of transforming talent at Welocalize. With over 20 years of experience in the localization industry, she started her career as a freelance translator. Frédérique has been working with Welocalize since 2014, covering many different positions from talent manager for French to launch success manager in India. In her current role, she focuses on developing and delivering learning programs suited to the localization industry in different geographies and for many different service types.

Habiba Garba is a translator and journalist. She has been working with Translators without Borders for over a year in Kanuri language support, translating thousands of words.

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).

As Google’s first director of supplier diversity and sustainability, Chris Genteel leads efforts to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion, and environmental sustainability through Google’s buying. In his 11-year tenure, he has led programs and partnerships driving over $500 million in direct economic impact for black, indigenous and people of color, women, and LGBTQ entrepreneurs while driving bottom-line and user trust outcomes. As director of business inclusion, Chris created Google’s Supplier Diversity Program, Grow with Google Digital Coaches, and Accelerate with Google. He also spearheaded Connect, Google’s internal volunteer platform, which has enabled 7,000 employees to engage in diversity projects globally.

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

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

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

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

Kalebu Gwalugano is a software engineer, machine learning engineer, and founder of Neurotech, an African startup that is building layer-one infrastructure for developers to easily build industry-ready natural language processing solutions for African languages. He is also an open source contributor, maintaining over eight open source libraries. One library that Kalebu works with is Pyswahili, a Swahili version of the Python programming language that aims to reduce barriers for Swahili speakers to get started with Python programming.

Asmelash Teka Hadgu is the cofounder and CTO of Lesan, a company whose mission is to democratize access to the web for millions of people. At Lesan, he has built state-of-the-art machine translation systems to and from Tigrinya, Amharic, and English. Asmelash’s PhD research is in the area of machine learning where he designed algorithms that leverage the social web for applications in scholarly communication, crisis communication, and natural language processing for low resource languages.

Linda Stéphanie Prisca Hien,, an English to French professional translator native of Burkina Faso, is passionate about languages and books, and has a keen interest in human rights and personal development. Since October 2021 she has been the Ouagadougou LocLunch ambassador. Linda holds a BA in English literature and civilization from the Mouloud Mammeri University (Algeria) and a master’s degree in translation from the Pan-African University-ASTI (Cameroon). She has been working as a freelance English to French translator/interpreter/localizer, and, for the past three years, a West African voiceover artist. Linda is currently working as a part-time translation consultant for the University of Georgia and is the bilingual executive project assistant at Davycas International, a nongovernmental organization. She is a mentee from the Beluga mentoring program, and the cofounder and CEO of the Language, Education and Services Center (CLES), a platform that promotes eLearning of foreign and local languages and language service providers in Africa.

Sarah Hickey is curious by nature and a linguist at heart. As Nimdzi Insights’ vice president of research, she analyzes the language services market from all angles and leads the research for Nimdzi’s global market studies, such as the Nimdzi 100 and the Nimdzi Interpreting Index. Her research further focuses on virtual interpreting technology. Sarah’s experience as a translator and conference interpreter allows her to have a unique view of the industry. Her background in journalism has always led her down the path of critical thinking and objective reporting.

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

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

Mohomodou Houssouba grew up in Gao, northeastern Mali. He studied languages and literature, trained as an English teacher at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Bamako, and later attended creative writing workshops for his English MA at Illinois State University where he also earned a PhD in English studies with a focus on the teaching of African-American and Diaspora studies. Since 2005, Mohomodou has been leading the Songhay language localization and content production project. The result is a platform (www.songhay.org), which gathers a wide array of online resources for the speakers and learners of the different varieties of the Songhay language. As writer and researcher, he engages the modernization of Songhay through its active use in writing, translation, art, and digital creativity. Mohomodou is the secretary of the Songhay Cross-Border Language Commission of the African Academy of Languages of the African Union.

Sheriff Issaka is a PhD student at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he conducts state-of-the-art research at the Misinformation, AI & Responsible Society (MARS) Lab. His work focuses on critical areas in Natural Language Processing (NLP), including bias and fairness, low-resource languages, and multimodal models for enhanced language understanding.

As founder and lead researcher of the African Languages Lab (All Lab), Sheriff spearheads a global collaborative project that is revolutionizing NLP for African languages. This initiative creates comprehensive roadmaps, innovative methodologies, and open-source resources to democratize AI for underrepresented languages, addressing a critical gap in current language technologies.

Ricky Kalu has worked in media and localization for the past 15 years and is currently the managing director at Kalu Media, a media localization company. He is passionate about Africa and has a great vision of creating access to professional localization services for major and minor African dialects. Ricky continues to work as a creative in his world and manages two other sister companies, Mother Tongue Communications, a digital localization company, and Freq’ncy Audio, a commercial audio company.

Abigail Kazembe is the localization manager for Kalu Media, a translation and media localization company with a focus on African languages, commercial and corporate translation, voiceovers, and dubbing. She been in the translation industry for more than six years.

Arturs Krastiņš started his professional career in 2015 at the State Language Centre of Latvia as a terminologist with specialization in technical terminology, such as transport, manufacturing, metrology, and medicine. Since 2016, he has been a part of the development team of the Latvian National Terminology Portal as the department head of terminology and legal translation. Arturs is responsible for the cooperation between Latvia and the EU in legal translation and terminology, as well as planning and implementing the state language policy regarding language resources and technologies.

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.

Mulumba Luwatula is a deputy head of investments in the mining, manufacturing, and agribusiness practice at the Industrial Development Corporation (IDC) in Lusaka, Zambia. A technologist at heart, he has over 20 years of experience in the development and delivery of technology-driven solutions, having worked in several markets including Liberia, Sierra Leone, South Africa, the United States, and Zambia. In addition to being the cohost of Scale Up Africa, a podcast on building resilient African entrepreneurs and businesses, Mulumba provides mentorship and advice to startup founders and teams.

Ahmed Maawy is a seasoned technologist with over a decade of experience growing and leading technology products across the African continent. Prior to X-Team, his work spanned from vice president of engineering at Streamlytics to leading engineering at Griffin Kenya (an InsureTech Company) as the chief technology officer, to working for innovative and disruptive startups like EveryLayer Broadband, Ushahidi, and one of Time’s Magazine 50 most genius companies, BRCK, the only company in East Africa that designs its own complete hardware and software stack. Most recently Ahmed was at the Al Jazeera Media Network, working on both digital and broadcast technical integrations. He was a part of the team that launched Al Jazeera’s streaming service AJ+ and was heavily involved in the organization’s media archive artificial intelligence projects.

Theo Marube has been with Tamarind Language Services since 2009 and is a UN-certified translator. He has overseen the company’s growth into one of the leading players in the localization industry in (African) East Africa and beyond.

Claudia Mirza is the CEO and cofounder of Akorbi. She has led the company’s evolution from a language translation company to a global provider of multilingual business solutions. What started as a home-based business in 2003 has flourished under Claudia’s leadership into an international company with approximately 600 employees. Prior to founding Akorbi, Claudia held managerial roles at GENUITY (formerly GTE Internetworking) US, where she worked on multiple enterprise process improvement, project management and optimization programs. She holds a business management degree from Cotecnova, Cartago, Colombia; is a graduate of the Tuck-WBENC Executive Education Program; has a management certificate from the Southern Methodist University Cox Executive Education Program; and holds a bachelor’s of science degree in business administration from the DeVry Institute of Technology.

Baratang Miya is a tech founder and a software developer with proven experience in building tech startups, incubators, coworking spaces, and designing software in test-driven environments. She is the founder of Girlhype Coders, the first African coding school for women and girls, and the Founder of Buza App, an online platform aiming to teach digital skills in native languages. Baratang has worked tirelessly to mobilize governments, corporations, and civil society to invest in women and girls’ digital and technology skills education. She has been named among 50 People Who Made the Internet a Better Place award by Mozilla.

Gabriela Morales is the founder of Rosario Traducciones y Servicios S.A., an innovative localization company based in Rosario, Argentina, specializing in Latin American languages. In 1995, Gabriela was in charge of deploying the Lazoski, Beninatto & Associados branch in Argentina — the first translation company in the region. After a series of mergers and acquisitions, she managed the South American Spanish operations of LMI and Berlitz in Argentina and Chile. Gabriela served on the GALA Board from 2008 to 2009, and as an active member, she has represented the association at different events around Latin America. She is also a founding member and first President of Translated in Argentina, the leading non-profit association of language service companies. Gabriela has been in charge of the Program Committee of CLINT, TinA’s flagship event, now planning its fourth edition.

Susan Morgan is a global account director with Lionbridge and is passionate about language and culture. She has worked in the localization industry for more than a decade, primarily for language service providers managing global clientele. Susan holds a bachelor’s degree in social work and a master’s in business administration. She is a thought partner in the world of localization and uses her naturally curious and inquisitive nature to build solutions for the most complex business needs.

Binta Moustapha is a Nigerian social entrepreneur and community activist specializing in information technology and innovation for good. She has a degree in science education from the University of Calabar in Nigeria, and worked as a teacher and administrator in several institutions before focusing on social entrepreneurship around new technologies and youth programs. Dynamic and deeply committed to human development, Binta has created and led several initiatives for the benefit of girls and women, notably to promote their participation in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Very active in new technologies, she has organized and facilitated many innovation-oriented events (hackathons) for different audiences including HACKATHON Hausa which aims to encourage the development of solutions for indigenous languages spoken within the West African subregion.

Norbert Mporoto is a Tanzanian author, linguist, and poet. He composes poems of all kinds and writes novels and short stories. Norbert also writes articles on several contemporary issues. He is skilled in the preparation of business plans, project proposals, memorandums for companies, educational research and reports. Currently, Norbert is working at Digital Divide Data as a linguist.

An award-winning entrepreneur, Sylvia Mukasa is the founder and CEO of GlobalX Investments Ltd/GlobalX Innovation Labs. GlobalX feeds into the innovation pipeline by closing the skills, funding, and digital transformation gaps with a focus on emerging technologies. Sylvia has also served as the country cofounder and chapter lead in Kenya for Women in Tech Africa, the largest female technology-focused group in Africa, was the 2018 winner of the United Nation’s EQUALS in Tech Award, leadership category, and a 2014 TechWomen Fellow. TechWomen empowers, connects, and supports the next generation of women leaders in STEM from Africa, Central and South Asia, and the Middle East. Sylvia is an equity, diversity, and inclusion advocate with a passion for gender, responsible technology, and racial equity. She is also a member of the Global Leadership Academy, the Gender Alliance, GIZ/ITCILO’s Leading with Artificial Intelligence Lab, and a BMW Foundation Herbert Quandt responsible leader.

Mpara Faith Muwar is an MBA candidate at Lagos Business School and cofounder of New Generation Technologies, an educational technology business, where she has served as product manager and sales representative. During this time, she initiated the ICT4KIDS program which introduces children between the ages 5-18 to computing and engineering principles. Faith holds a bachelor’s degree in computer engineering from the University of Buea.

Ady Namaran Coulibaly is the operations manager of Bolingo Consult, a language services company that is committed to providing seamless translation and localization services for African languages. She is inspired and driven by the desire to see the language service sector in Africa thrive and become recognized within the global language sector. Ady considers herself an advocate for African indigenous languages and is the co-founder of the annual African Languages Conference (AFLC). Ady has been featured in the Nimdzi 2021 Localization Influencers Watchlist and was featured in Multilingual Media’s list of 52 Women Driving the Language Services Industry in 2022.

Filip Němec studied philology at Charles University in Prague, which is where he first entered the translation world translating short stories from Hindi into Czech. He joined the Memsource team in 2017 where he now works as customer success manager, helping clients optimize their workflows through automations and integrations.

Ugorji Nnanna has worked in African localization for about a decade, engaging with stakeholders, linguists, and localization teams across the continent and beyond. He leads operations at Babelos, Ltd., a language service provider working out of Lagos, Nigeria, providing translation and localization services primarily for African languages as well as cultural consulting for the Africa locale. Born and raised in Nigeria, Ugorji is well versed in the region’s peculiarities, and knows first-hand the interconnectedness between language/communications and evolution in Africa.

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

Vuyokazi Ntliziywana is an accomplished linguist fluent in Xhosa, Tsonga, and English with over nine years experience as a Xhosa and Tsonga translator. She provides efficient, accurate, and highly professional translation services including transcreation, translation, proofreading, editing, machine translation post editing, transcription, and subtitling. Vuyokazi’s subject matter expertise is in medical, marketing, religious, legal, tourism, advertising, financial, education, and more. She is also a language manager at GoTranparent.

Judith Obonyo is the director of content services, at the Digital Divide Data, Nairobi office. She received her undergraduate in education, with a major in economics and business studies, and is currently pursuing an MBA in project management. In August 2019, Judith cowrote a paper for the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions World Congress in Athens, Greece, under the Women, Information, and Libraries special interest group on youth, with a focus on the girl child. She has over ten years in project and people management, five years of experience in impact sourcing, and is passionate about socioeconomic empowerment.

Perez Ogayo is a master’s student at Carnegie Mellon University in the Language Technologies Institute where she is focusing on low resource natural language processing (NLP). Her interests in NLP are machine translation, speech synthesis and recognition, and NLP for endangered languages. Perez is a researcher at Masakhane working on Luo, Kiswahili, and Suba.

Alp Öktem is a computational linguist specializing in speech technology, machine translation, and prosody, and working with minority and marginalized languages. In 2019, he received his PhD from Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona. Alp is a cofounder of the nonprofit knowledge cooperative, Col·lectivaT. Currently, he works for CLEAR Global creating linguistic resources and tools for under-resourced languages.

Nicoli Potgieter helps language service providers strategically grow their business, manage risk, or find data-driven solutions through personalized consultancy and custom research.

Tochi Precious is a teacher, entrepreneur, linguist, and project manager. She’s the founder and operations coordinator of Smarter Languages Hub, a language services company. Tochi is also cofounder and program coordinator of Igbo Wikimedians User Group, a Wikimedia Foundation affiliate which promotes free knowledge sharing in Igbo language using the different Wikimedia platforms and Wikipedian in Residence at the Moleskine Foundation. She’s a master student at Rome Business School, and one of the nine African women selected for the Wiki in Africa, 2021 Wiki Loves Women focus group.

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.

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.

Andraz Repar is a researcher at Jozef Stefan Institute, focusing on language technologies for the Slovenian language. He is involved in various EU and national language technology projects, such as FedTerm, Curlicat, and Elexis.

Steve Richardson is an associate professor of computer science at Brigham Young University and currently serves as the president of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas (AMTA). He has been an active participant in the research and development of machine translation (MT) for more than four decades, working as manager of MT and translation systems at the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for ten years, as principal researcher and manager of the MT group at Microsoft Research for 17 years, and as senior programmer and manager of natural language processing groups at IBM for 11 years, including at the TJ Watson Research Center.

Vera Richards has spent over 20 years in various positions within the localization industry. With a passion for removing language and cultural barriers, she has worked on the client side and for the past 11 years on the language service provider side, always keeping the target global audiences at the forefront of her mind. Vera embraces the constant evolution of the localization process and sees it as an enriching and exciting challenge. In her current role as a vice president of localization at Akorbi, she focuses on matching talented individuals with new technologies fulfilling the growing global market needs.

For more than 20 years Jon Ritzdorf has been immersed in localization; starting as a translator, transitioning into engineering, and ultimately moving into strategy where he has remained for over a decade. As a former senior solutions architect, he currently crafts globalization strategies for companies ranging from Fortune 100 to start-ups and unicorns. Outside of his full-time job, Jon is also an adjunct professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies and the University of Maryland where he strives to uplift the next generation of professionals in language technology, solutions development, and the business side of the translation industry. In 2012, he received an award in “Teaching Excellence.”

Gabriele Sauberer is an entrepreneur and innovator with focus on global issues. Born in Vienna, Austria, she has an educational background in linguistics and international management. Gabriele is a pioneer in quality and innovation in the language industry. She has held positions as director of the International Network for Terminology (TermNet), managing partner of the private company TermNet Business GmbH, founder and director of TermNet Americas in Canada, cofounder and international partner of the Language Industry Certification System of Austrian Standards International, and president of the European Certification and Qualification Association.

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.

As chief executive officer of the Government of Canada’s Translation Bureau, Lucie Séguin oversees the translation, interpretation, and terminology services that the Bureau provides to departments, agencies, and Parliament in Canada’s official languages of English and French, indigenous and foreign languages, and signed languages. She ensures that the Bureau’s professionals leverage the latest technological breakthroughs — including artificial intelligence — and possess the knowledge and skills required to effectively deliver quality linguistic services, now and in the future. Lucie holds a bachelor’s degree in education, a master of public administration, and a Chartered Professional Accountants Canada certification.

Kathleen Siminyu is an AI researcher focused on natural language processing (NLP) for African Languages. She works at Mozilla Foundation as a machine learning fellow to support the development of a Kiswahili common voice dataset and to build speech transcription models for end use cases in the agricultural and financial domains. In her NLP research, Kathleen has previously worked on speech transcription for Luhya languages and contributed to machine translation for Kenyan languages as part of Masakhane. Before joining Mozilla, Kathleen was regional coordinator of AI4D Africa, where she worked with multilingual and AI communities in Africa to run various programs.

Sharon Tabraham is the driving force behind ST Communications. Starting her life in Zimbabwe, and spending most of her adult life in South Africa, she appreciates the diversity of culture and languages. This, partnered with her background in sales, her naturally strong leadership, and high focus on delivery helped her grow ST Communications into the reputable agency it is today. It gives Sharon great pride to have been a part of some of the largest localization projects in Africa bringing IT, social media, mobile phones, medical devices, and so on into Africa.

John Tinsley is an entrepreneur, technologist, and machine translation expert. He holds a degree in applied computational linguistics, and received a PhD in machine translation from Dublin City University in 2009. Following that, John cofounded Iconic Translation Machines, an award-winning language technology software business which pioneered the commercial deployment of neural machine translation technology. He grew the business for almost a decade before selling it to RWS in 2020. Most recently, John was the vice president for artificial intelligence product and marketing at Language Weaver. He has consulted for the European Commission on technology research initiatives, and he is also a regular public speaker on topics related to language, translation, and business.

Luc van Kemenade is a linguist and localization specialist from the Netherlands, now based out of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. He is passionate about languages and intercultural communication; he creates high-quality content in Dutch and English, and provides localization management services for global companies and organizations, including end-to-end multilingual strategies to ensure quality and consistency. With his experience working in, and personal connection to African countries, Luc believes it is high time for the language industry to act on the African promise (ever heard the phrase “the next billion users”?), and is dedicated to support companies and African linguistic communities in their localization efforts.

Kirti Vashee is a language technology evangelist at Translated who was formerly an independent consultant focusing on machine translation (MT) and translation technology. He has been associated with several MT developers including Language Weaver, SDL, Systran, and Asia Online. Kirti has long-term experience in the MT technology arena and several software companies including Lotus, OTG, Legato, and EMC. He is the moderator of the LinkedIn Automated Language Translation (MT) group with over 8,000 members, and is also a former board member of American Machine Translation Association. Kirti is active on Twitter and is the editor and chief contributor to a respected blog that focuses on MT, AI and translation automation, and industry-related issues.

Artūrs Vasiļevskis is the head of language technology solutions at Tilde, a leading European language technology innovator and service provider that strives to bridge the gap between language barriers through translation, localization, intelligent virtual assistants, and custom machine translation (MT). He has more than 15 years of international experience overseeing all aspects of MT product development and sales. Artūrs fosters large scale machine translation projects and helps translators, language service providers, public administrations, and even multinational organizations across the globe to advance their operations in today’s multilingual digital world.

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

Erji Wang is the senior localization program manager at VMware. His main focuses are on new product localization planning, customer feedback, and operation data analytics. Erji joined VMware in 2014, moved to the US in 2016, and loves hiking and cooking.

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.

Paul Warambo is a seasoned translator, localization expert, translation project manager, and trainer with over ten years of experience in the language service industry. He is the Swahili language lead at CLEAR Global, is very knowledgeable of the African language landscape, and understands the language diversity of the African continent. Paul is passionate about the power of language in facilitating global communication and the opportunities presented by the linguistic diversity of the global south. Coming from multilingual and multicultural contexts, he has a wealth of experience in breaking the language barrier through translation and localization.

David Wishon specializes in global talent acquisition leadership — building, supporting, and empowering high performing talent teams. He takes good to great by designing and implementing impactful talent, recruiting, and sourcing capabilities. Leveraging recruiting best practices with a focus on talent branding, talent analytics, technology and tools, process redesign, and diverse talent strategies.

Ami Christelle Zami is a teacher, educational consultant, conference interpreter, and translator. She holds bachelor degrees in English and education sciences, and a master’s degree in conference interpreting. Ami Christelle is a language facilitator and has worked with various organizations in several countries. She is the Accra LocLunch co-ambassador and is passionate about issues related to translation and localization.