Speakers’ Biographies
Igor Afanasyev
Smartcat
Vi Bui
Business Development Manager, Plunet
Vi Bui is a Business Development Manager at Plunet in Berlin. In this role, she is not only responsible for customer acquisition and account management, but also for carrying out requirement analyses and software consulting. Vi also makes effective use of her intercultural expertise and foreign language skills at many international events. Her degree in International Business Studies, focusing on East Asia, and placements abroad in Canada, Sweden, China, Singapore, and Vietnam, have perfectly prepared her for this position. In her free time, she loves adventurous backpacking as well as relaxing baking at home.
Steve Chu | 朱浩文
President, Treehouse Strategy
Founder and Executive Director, Glocalization Organization of Asia Pacific
Steve Chu has more than 20 years of diversified management experience in general management, sales, marketing, and operations. Through Treehouse Strategy, Steve and his associate as well as partners have helped their clients develop their sales and marketing strategies, develop new customers, expand into new markets, streamline operations, as well as implement business and technology solutions.
Serge Gladkoff
CEO, Logrus Global
Serge Gladkoff has been engaged in the localization industry for more than 27 years, first as a deputy director for a software distribution company, then as a localization manager of the Moscow office of Borland International, then for 23 years as the President and co-owner of the Logrus International Corporation, now for more than 4 years as CEO of Logrus Global, an LSP and software development company. Serge has been a speaker on many events and served GALA elected Board member for 2009-2012, and 2014-2015 term. Serge is the founder of the world largest professional community in localization industry, the Localization Professional group on LinkedIn with more than 35000 members, and is the technical leader of ASTM WK54884 holistic quality evaluation standard.
Shelley Halaba
Sales Specialist, Qwerty Works
Shelley is an industry young gun who jumped in the language service world fresh of the University of the Philippines – Visayas with a major in Communications and Media Studies. She has been working with QwertyWorks, the pioneer language service provider in the Philippines which has been operating for 18 years now.
In almost 7 years, she has experience working with different role from Project Management, Vendor Management, Account Management and acts as a back-up Linguist for Philippine local languages. Currently a Sales Specialist for Qwertyworks coordinating with partners across the globe helping them reach South East Asian market.
She is eagerly and continuously learning, navigating through the Language Industry sphere advancing the just cause to bridge different global markets through language.
Sophie Halbeisen
Director of Business Development, Plunet
Sophie Halbeisen is the Director of Business Development at the Plunet office in New York. She is responsible for new customer acquisition and account management in North and South America. Sophie uses her expertise daily, advising existing and prospective Plunet customers on process automation and optimization. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Business Management and Master’s degree in Finance; and has more than 10 years of professional experience in B2B sales, marketing, and consulting in the USA and Germany. Outside of Plunet, Sophie is involved in volunteer work, loves traveling, and has a great passion for the city of New York.
Allan Hall
Xillio
Mark Hjerpe
Intento
Mark Hjerpe is VP of Revenue, Americas at Intento. He has an extensive 20+ year experience in driving growth for localization technology companies. Hjerpe has played a pioneering role in the expansion of the global language services and technology industry. He has lived, worked, and led teams in Latin America, Asia, and Europe, developing best practices in translation management and streamlining multilingual workflows for global corporations. Prior to joining Intento, Mark’s previous roles included serving as Chief Revenue Officer at Lingotek, and executive team member and Vice President of Global Sales and Marketing at RWS Life Sciences.
Gerry Kelly
Gerry Kelly joined Interpreter Intelligence in 2018 and quickly made an impact on the business. As the first professional sales director for the company, Gerry’s initial focus was developing relationships with customers to understand their needs and expectations from the product, service and support teams. In addition to bringing feedback to the rest of the team, he spends his time researching, and talking to potential buyers needing language services while keeping tabs on what’s happening in the industry. Gerry hails from Dublin, Ireland, where he studied business at Rathmines Tech, and received a degree from the Dublin Institute of Technology.
Istvan Lengyel
István Lengyel is the founder of BeLazy (www.belazy.cat), the project management automation company that makes continuous localization efficient across the entire supply chain, and also works as technology consultant for Nimdzi Insights (www.nimdzi.com). Previously, he was one of the founders of Kilgray, the makers of memoQ, but also worked as a translator, and at an LSP. He holds several degrees in economics and translation, including a PhD in translation studies. He is passionate about technology being a platform to align interests.
Max Morkovkin
Customer Success Manager, Smartcat
Maxim is an experienced translator, blogger and public speaker. He has a BS degree in Chinese language and an MS degree in business administration. Max is active in the field of translation automation tools and focused on building relationships between Smartcat and Chinese LSPs.
Yumiko Metsugi
Japan branch manager, XTM
Yumiko Metsugi represents XTM International in Japan and is an XTM specialist. With more than a decade of experience in the translation industry, she has a vast knowledge of computer-assisted translation tools and translation management systems. She understands the complex issues multinational enterprises face when localizing content, and can recommend creative solutions to overcome them.
Yuka Nakasone
Globalization and Localization Director, Intento, Inc.
Yuka Nakasone is passionate about language, culture and technology, and is happy working in globalization and localization where these elements meet each other. With nearly 25 years of experience in the industry, she has held various leadership roles, most recently as globalization and localization director at Intento, Inc., an artificial intelligence solution company with an innovative machine translation curation platform in Berkeley, California. Yuka is known as one of the Dragons at LocWorld’s Process Innovation Challenge, where she is an advocate for driving innovation in the industry.
Robert Rogge
Zingword
Robert Rogge is the CEO of Zingword and has 13 years of experience in the industry as an LSP owner, a marketer, and a product developer. Zingword is a cross-platform staffing system for translations that helps anyone find and staff quality, validated translators across the globe quickly.
Jean-Luc Saillard
Head of Customer Success, Smartcat
Jean-Luc Saillard is the Director of Customer Success of Smartcat. He has over 20 years of management experience in the translation business having founded his own company before joining Smartcat. His passion for technology has led him to be an early adopter of translation tools from the DOS based TM tools to the latest workflow and MT applications. He now also acts as an evangelist for Smartcat.
Grant Straker
Grant Straker
Gita Timofejeva
Localization Consultant, Lokalise
A language services industry professional; 14 years in the business in project and account management roles, now localization consultant.
There is no exact title we have defined yet, but the live demo will be about – “Integrating localization with a design and prototyping tool”.
John Weisgerber
Senior Solutions Architect, XTM
John Weisgerber is a battle-scarred veteran of countless localization campaigns. For over 20 years he has earned first-hand experience in almost every role possible: freelance translator, localization project manager for both translation service providers and global enterprises such as HP, operations manager, and machine translation developer. In recent years, John has leveraged this knowledge to build world-class translation management technology as a solutions architect with leading translation management systems like XTM.
Marcin Woyna-Orlewicz
Business Development Manager, Wordbee
Marcin has been active in the language industry for 13 years, as a translator, interpreter and seller of technologies supporting translation and localization processes. In 2019 he joined the Wordbee team as a Business Development Manager.
He graduated from the English Philology Department of the Jagiellonian University in Kraków holding a Master’s Degree in English literature and then completed postgraduate studies in Business Administration.
He is passionate about the language industry and the evolution of technologies which help reduce workload and automate linguistic projects.
Christine Xaysakda | 翁诗琪
Graduated from UCLA and ISEE Paris Business School, Christine has built her business development career in technical industries between France and USA. Following her American experience, she decided to work with LBS Suite as their International Account Manager. With her multicultural background, she is passionate about languages and cultures. She speaks fluently Mandarin, Cantonese, English and French.
Chunliang Zhang (Mr) | 张春良
Founding Partner & Senior Vice President, NiuTrans Co.
Associate Professor, Northeastern University, China
Chunliang Zhang is a NiuTrans founding partner, and the senior vice president of NiuTrans for operations of overseas markets and language service industries. He is also an associate professor in Northeastern University China working on translation technology.
Lena Zhou | 周冰靓
Product Manager, Tmxmall
Lena Zhou is a product manager at Tmxmall. As a translation and localization professional, Lena is the key contributor in promoting best practices in product design and release process. She works closely with sales and development teams and ensures that every release meets user requirements and on time. She also provides translation technology training for many universities and enterprises.
周冰靓
上海一者信息科技有限公司产品经理，主要负责公司产品设计，协助IT人员进行产品研发与升级，推动需求落地。通晓各类翻译技术工具，曾为多所高校和企业提供翻译技术培训。
Anastasia Ponomareva
Intento
Anastasia Ponomareva is a Head of AI Solutions at Intento. She brings technical expertise to Intento global corporate clients across many industries, helping them leverage the full capabilities of machine translation. Prior to joining Intento, Anastasia held a number of managing localization roles at leading companies such as Yandex and Zurich Insurance Group. An expert at both advanced machine translation solutions and localization practices, Anastasia is always focused on creating the maximum value and ROI for every client.
Konrad Chmielewski
XTRF
Bryan Forrester
Boostlingo/Lingolet
Dieter Runge
Boostlingo
Marina Ilari
Terra Translations
Lucrecia Jarab
Translation Back Office
Sara Maria Hasbun
Meridian Linguistics
Sara Maria Hasbun is the founder of Meridian Linguistics, a Hong Kong-based consultancy offering linguistic services (language data, linguistic annotation, and linguistic analysis) to technology companies.
Chrysostomos Psaroudakis
Creative People
Giulio Monaco
Ablio
Olivier Debeugny
Lingua Custodia
Rodrigo Cristina
t’works
Bruce McLaughlin
Sinogie
Diego Cresceri
Creative Words
Gilbert Segura
Voxabot
John Di Rico
Wordfast
Jure Dernovsek
memoQ
There are challenges but there are also solutions and Jure will help you find them. Studied German language and computer science, equipped with that is now providing linguistic and business services for 10+ years now. First started as a translator for 3 languages but now speaking your language and will help you get the most out of memoQ.
To balance the techy business life he likes to spend time with his family, sports, playing guitar and photography.