SlatorCon is coming to Slator’s home town. On December 5, 2017, language industry executives, investors, technologists, and buyers will all meet at the gorgeous Atlantis by Giardino Hotel on the foothills of Zurich’s local Uetliberg mountain.

How are large buyers allocating resources between outside LSPs and internal technology solutions? How will neural machine translation impact the industry? What’s new in translation productivity tools? What does it take to buy or sell a language service provider and how is the industry perceived by outside investors? What industries are generating new demand for language services?

Presentations are in a TED-style format, and each presenter will speak for 20 minutes. Following the presentations will be a speakers’ panel, which provides an additional opportunity for participants to engage in the discussion.

SlatorCon Zurich provides ample time for networking with CEOs, founders, senior industry peers, investors and buyers before the event, during the afternoon break, and at our VIP Apéro. SlatorCon Zurich builds on the success of SlatorCon London and New York earlier in 2017.

Confirmed Speakers

Adolfo Hernandez, CEO, SDL

Bio: Adolfo joined SDL as CEO in April 2016. Prior to joining SDL, Adolfo was CEO of Acision, the mobile messaging market leader he helped turn around prior to its merger to Comverse to form Xura, Inc. Before that, he spent four years at Alcatel-Lucent, with his most recent position being Executive Vice President, Global Software Services and Solutions, where he was a member of the Executive Committee, reporting to the Group CEO.

Björn Lifvergren, CEO, BTI Studios

Bio: Björn is the entrepreneur who founded BTI in 1995, and has acted as Chief Executive Officer since. He has over 20 years’ experience in the broadcast industry, from starting out as a video editor and subtitler in 1991 to managing one of Europe’s leading media access and localisation groups – BTI Studios. Björn has also served as a Director of the Board at leading broadcasters Kanal 5 Ltd and Kanal 5 DK Ltd.

Dr. Christoph Bieri, Managing Partner, Kurmann Partners AG

Bio: Christoph is a scientist by training and was CEO of a Biotech-start-up company before joining Kurmann Partners. He brings to the KP team a broad knowledge of biopharmaceutical R&D (including diagnostics) and experience with technology-based start-ups and technology licenses. Christoph won first experience in strategy consulting at The Boston Consulting Group after earning a PhD in Biophysics.

Kurmann Partners has completed the sale of language service provider LUZ Inc. to RWS Group Plc. The transaction value was USD 82.5m. Kurmann Partners managed the whole divestment process as exclusive advisor to the owners of LUZ.

Dr. Germán Basterra, Translation Manager, Nestlé GLOBE

Presentation: “Centralization as an Opportunity: Translation Quality within the Content Lifecycle”

Bio: Dr. Germán Basterra has more than 15 years of experience in the localization industry and leads the Language and Translation Competence Center at Nestlé GLOBE. Born in Bilbao, he studied Social Anthropology in the UK and the US and has a Ph. D. in Sociolinguistics from the University of Marburg.

He participated in the global roll out of the Nestlé GLOBE template starting 2003 in the areas of SAP localization and translation of training materials. A major focus of his work is the integration between language technologies and authoring/training tools within the context of a corporate system landscape.

Samuel Läubli, PhD Candidate in Interactive Machine Translation (University of Zurich)

Bio: Before joining the Machine Translation group at the UZH Institute of Computational Linguistics as a PhD Student in 2016, Samuel Läubli implemented MT systems geared to post-editing as a Senior Computational Linguist at Autodesk, Inc. (2014–2016). He obtained a Master’s degree in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Edinburgh (2014), and a Bachelor’s degree in Computational Linguistics from the University of Zurich (2012). Samuel is CTO at textshuttle.ai, a spin-off specialising in machine translation and opinion mining.

Florian Faes, Co-Founder and Managing Director, Slator

Bio: Based in Zurich, Florian Faes spent over eight years working in Asia, stationed in Singapore, Hong Kong and Shanghai. Before launching Slator in 2015, he was with CLS Communication as Head of Asia and he was part of group management during the trade sale to Lionbridge.