Heidi Van Hiel studied Japanese at the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium, and at the Kansai University in Osaka, Japan. After graduating in 1995, she started working at a speech technology company where she was involved in the development of Japanese text-to-speech systems. After seven years of experience in speech technology, Heidi started working for the translation team of Yamagata Europe in 2002, where she was originally involved in general technical support and in the development of tools such as QA Distiller. Since 2010, she has been leading the Tools Development and Machine Translation team of Yamagata Europe.