SlatorCon Zurich 2023 October 4th

Andrew is the Commercial Director at Slator responsible for product development and pricing, online ad and research sales, and event sponsorships.

Prior to co-founding Slator, Andrew has worked in the media, internet and finance industries including managing media businesses for Thomson Reuters, Fairfax Media and The Economist Group. He has an MBA in Finance and Investments from The George Washington University in Washington DC and has been based in Asia for over 25 years.

Florian Faes is the Managing Director of Slator. Based in Zurich, Florian spent almost a decade in Asia before co-founding Slator in 2015. Slator is the leading source of news and research for the global translation, localization, and language technology industry. Slator‘s Advisory practice provides independent industry analysis, sell- and buy-side M&A, and custom market research.

Ian joined RWS Group as CEO in July 2021. He has a wealth of experience in leading large, multinational service organisations, and a strong track record of delivering growth – both organically and through acquisitions. Ian also has extensive experience in developing strategy and leading technology-enabled business transformations.

He has held Chief Executive, Board and Senior Executive roles in both UK listed and private equity backed businesses. Previously Ian was CEO of V.Group, a world leading ship management and marine support services business and, prior to that, he was CEO of Exova Group plc a leading player in the testing and inspection industry. Ian’s early career included leadership roles at Accenture, Centrica plc and Compass Group plc. Beyond RWS Group, Ian is a Non-Executive Director of Serco Group plc and a Director of Roegate Consulting Ltd.

Ian holds a BSc (Hons) in Economics and Statistics from University College London and an MBA from INSEAD.

10-min Briefing title: What can Generative AI do for you?

Diego Bartolome is the founder of sintetic.ai, a start-up focusing on generative AI solutions. Prior to that, in 2006, he founded tauyou language technology, which provided machine translation solutions and was acquired by TransPerfect. In between, he has held leadership positions at TransPerfect (Director of AI), Microsoft (Senior Program Manager), and Language I/O (CTO).

10-min Briefing title: Life in the FAST (Free Advert-supported Streaming TV) lane

Josh Pine brings more than 25 years of experience leading domestic and global business operations and sales for leading Media & Entertainment companies. Currently serving as Chief Revenue Officer at XL8 Inc., he previously served as Vice President of Business Development and Global Digital Distribution for Sony Pictures, where he built and launched a digital distribution platform for the company that aggregated more than 25 independent content label partners. He has also held senior roles at Sony Corporation, Technicolor, Alliance Entertainment, and Whip Media. Josh has an extensive track record of overseeing digital media localization, sales, licensing, distribution, and supply chain management on a global level and building trusted relationships with partners and clients.

Josh is a recognized leader in entertainment globalization, named as one of the industry’s 100 most influential professionals by the Entertainment Globalization Association and appointed as co-chair of the Digital Entertainment Group’s localization committee.

Short bio to be published.

Sheila Castilho is an Assistant Professor in SALIS at Dublin City University, specializing in machine translation and translation technologies. She earned her Linguistics and Education degree from UNIOESTE in Brazil, followed by a joint Master’s degree in NLP from the University of Wolverhampton and the University of Algarve. She completed her PhD at Dublin City University in 2016. She worked as an Irish Research Council Research Fellow at the Adapt Centre on the DELA Project, which involved testing sentence-level metrics for document-level machine translation evaluation and establishing best practices. She has also served on the programme committees of various MT and NLP conferences and reviewed articles for esteemed journals.

Sheila has actively contributed to various EU projects. Her research output includes over 50 publications, covering topics on translation technology, post-editing of MT, user evaluation of MT, and translators’ perception of MT, and MT evaluation. She has co-edited the book ‘Translation Quality Assessment: From Principles to Practice’. Her research interests revolve around context-aware MT, machine and human translation evaluation, usability, translation technologies, and LLM for translation.

Céline is VP of Success at DeepL, a German AI company on a mission to enable frictionless communication through best-in-class AI-powered translation and writing assistance. She is responsible for helping customers see the value in their investment with DeepL.

She has spent the last decade in London, England, and San Francisco, California building and leading commercial teams at early-stage tech startups and public companies.

André Bastié, originally from France, pursued his studies at Dublin City University. Encountering the challenges of transcription for academic research there, he founded and now leads Happy Scribe, a language service platform that provides transcription, subtitles and foreign subtitles with both AI and human capabilities.

Jan Cizmar hated the complicated localization processes in his previous jobs, so he founded Tolgee – an Open-source Localization Platform that simplifies the localization process for software development companies. Tolgee currently focuses on the autonomous translation of web applications by providing the necessary context to their very own machine translation service.

Florian Faes is the Managing Director of Slator. Based in Zurich, Florian spent almost a decade in Asia before co-founding Slator in 2015. Slator is the leading source of news and research for the global translation, localization, and language technology industry. Slator‘s Advisory practice provides independent industry analysis, sell- and buy-side M&A, and custom market research.

After studies in marketing Gion Linder worked as a consultant for different new media projects in the eighties and nineties. He worked as a content-manager for a publisher, as a product-manager for a cable-company and as a project-manager for a mobile carrier. In 2007 joined SWISS TXT, a company of the national public broadcaster, where he strongly increased the number of services for television and third-party entities in all national languages. Meanwhile he is a member of the management board. Gion Linder is also chairman of the EBU Access Services Experts Group.

Roeland Hofkens combines over 20 years of experience in multilingual content management with extensive software engineering skills and a strong background in artificial intelligence to deliver innovative products and solutions for LanguageWire. He was one of the founders of enterprise content management specialist Amplexor in Belgium. Afterwards he continued his journey in multilingual ECM as the CTO of systems integrator Westernacher in Germany. Roeland’s main focus is on building a scalable, state-of-the art language processing platform by applying deep learning and analytics to all kinds of NLP services and workflow automation tasks.

As Head of Content at Busch Vacuum Solutions, Dr Fabian Fahlbusch and his team are responsible for the group’s global content. This ranges from webpages, flyers and catalogs to corporate communications and instruction manuals. Translation-oriented content from a single source is his mission. He has therefore introduced content automation and a customized machine translation tool trained on the company’s existing translations and terminology. One of his latest projects is the implementation of AI for text creation and to power a chatbot on the corporate website.

Fabian studied German and Romance philology as well as business administration in Mainz and Dijon. Following his doctorate on the development, effect and use of company names, he joined Busch Vacuum Solutions, one of the largest suppliers of vacuum pumps, blowers and compressors worldwide.

With nearly 20 years professional experience (over 10 years specialising in ServiceNow Solution Design and Architecture), Alex is a self-motivated and experienced IT professional with proven knowledge over an expansive career.

Recognized for Design, Architecture and Custom Build solutions for a portfolio of Clients maximizing their ServiceNow investments, a leader in global consultation, coordinating international teams and global ServiceNow projects, Alex has established a vast amount of experience in multiple industry verticals.

Built on a background in Technical knowledge, Service Delivery and an experienced Service Management consultant with most recent position being that of Director of Globalization Deployment. Currently focusing on sharing this knowledge and experiences to empower our Customers and Implementation Partners with their multi-lingual / multi-national and non-English Solution Designs and Implementations as the leading SME in this area of the platform.

Anna is a language services industry professional with expertise in project management, management and quality systems, and a special interest in the life sciences sector. Starting her career in data annotation in Sydney, she then gained 10 years’ experience in London and Madrid with major LSPs before joining Slator as a research contributor. Anna is today Slator’s Head of Research. She holds a B.A. (Hons) in Linguistics from the University of Sydney.

10-min Briefing title: Enhance Margins and Scale Effortlessly with AcudocX

Dylan J Hartmann has carved out a noteworthy career in Thai-to-English translation, becoming a go-to expert in the clinical trial, mining, and literary sectors. His career took a significant turn after the last coup d’état in Thailand, when he moved to Brisbane, Australia with his family, and passed the NAATI-certified Thai to English translator exam.

Identifying glaring inefficiencies in the certified translation processes led to the founding of AcudocX, a startup enabling the streamlined delivery of certified translation services for a range of stakeholders including freelancers, LSPs and migration agencies.

Dylan, an endurance sports enthusiast with two marathon completions and a passionate cyclist, balances his professional life with quality family time, also enjoying skateboarding with his daughters and family board games!

10-min Briefing title: AI Dubbing: The future of localization

Rask AI is a comprehensive solution designed for content creators, and enterprises seeking to localize their videos instantly. It bridges the gap, enabling them to resonate with global audiences across 130+ languages.

As Chief Product Officer at Rask AI, Anton spearheads the product development strategy, ensuring that the tool delivers innovative and efficient solutions tailored to meet the evolving needs of content creators worldwide.

Anton has made significant appearances at numerous conferences, notably delivering a presentation on “AI Dubbing: the Future of Localization” at the Slator Conference. He has also taken the stage for pitches, securing 1st place in the AI track at the renowned APAC exhibition Gitex Global and winning 1st place at the Emerge Challenge 2021.

Before joining Rask AI, Anton held the position of CEO at the AI startup CopyMonkey, which specializes in content creation for e-commerce. He also contributed significantly as a Product Owner at Kaspersky.

Nour is a lawyer by education and an entrepreneur by practice. She is the Founder & CEO of Tarjama that houses different businesses such as Tarjama Enterprise, Ureed.com, TarjamaMS, and AdvanceML. She’s currently managing the hyper-growth of the company in 8 markets and leading a team of over 300 colleagues.

Nour is an advocate for women empowerment and started Tarjama on the premise of empowering women with economic opportunities whenever they don’t have immediate access to full-time jobs and office work. She invested her time and effort over the past decade in perfecting a system for women to access opportunities from their homes through Tarjama from the comfort of their homes while maintaining the highest quality and ethical standards in the work we do for our clients.

During her time with Tarjama, she realized the importance of providing this model at scale. That’s why Ureed.com was invented to provide access to clients and work opportunities for linguists and content creators across the region. She managed to grow the platform today into more than 17,000 freelancers and continue to do so.

Nour grew up in Amman, Jordan but never missed an opportunity to travel the world and get exposure to global cultures and businesses. She holds a degree from Al Ahliyya Amman University in Law and currently enrolled in Singularity University for Hi-Po entrepreneurs.

Blanca Pinero is the Director of the Language and Documentation Services Division of WTO since July 2022. Prior to this role, she held managerial positions in several UN agencies in the areas of Languages Technologies and Documentation Management, including the International Maritime Organization. A translator by background, she has long experience in international organizations, including IMO, WIPO and at UN Headquarters.

Beatriz Verdasco has over 15 years’ experience in global content and localization and has spent the last 10 years leading and transforming multidisciplinary global teams that drive growth by bringing digital products to international audiences. She leads localization and global readiness at Trendyol Group, the largest eCommerce company in Turkey and the most valuable private internet company in the EMEA region. Bea is passionate about the combined power of technology and languages to create authentic, inclusive experiences for people across cultures and geographical borders.

Andrew is the Commercial Director at Slator responsible for product development and pricing, online ad and research sales, and event sponsorships.

Prior to co-founding Slator, Andrew has worked in the media, internet and finance industries including managing media businesses for Thomson Reuters, Fairfax Media and The Economist Group. He has an MBA in Finance and Investments from The George Washington University in Washington DC and has been based in Asia for over 25 years.

Markus joined Mayfair in 2021 and is a senior member of the investment team. He is responsible for originating and executing new investments and for supporting our portfolio companies to deliver on their growth strategies.

Prior to Mayfair, Markus was an Investor at L-GAM and Volpi Capital where he focused on technology and tech-enabled services businesses. In his time, he has acquired, supported, and exited a number of businesses across Europe. Previously, Markus was a management consultant with Bain & Company in their London, Johannesburg, and San Francisco offices, focused on advising clients in private equity and technology.

Markus holds an MSc in Finance & Accounting from the London School of Economics and a German ‘Diplom’ in Management from the Catholic University of Eichstaett-Ingolstadt in Germany.

Fernando Chueca is a Managing Director and Partner with Carlyle Europe Technology Partners, focusing on buyouts, growth capital and strategic minority investments throughout Europe in the technology, telecommunications, software and business services sectors. Mr. Chueca is based in London.

Since joining Carlyle in 2001, Mr. Chueca has advised on 11 major investments and nine completed realizations across Europe.

Prior to joining Carlyle, Mr. Chueca worked for the strategic venture arm of J.P. Morgan, focusing on investments in the financial services space.

Mr. Chueca holds an MSc in electrical engineering from Universidad Politecnica de Madrid, Spain and is a member of the board of Phrase, Calastone and 1E, and was formerly on the boards of Livingstone Technologies, Itconic, Expereo, Graze, ITRS Group, Arsys Internet, Bigmouthmedia and FRS Global.

Esther spent several years in France and Luxembourg for work and study, and has since returned to her native London. She has a strong languages background, having studied for degrees in French & Linguistics and Translation & Interpreting. She went on to pursue a career in the Language Services industry, where she gained PM, technology and management experience before joining the Slator team.

Andrew is the Commercial Director at Slator responsible for product development and pricing, online ad and research sales, and event sponsorships.

Prior to co-founding Slator, Andrew has worked in the media, internet and finance industries including managing media businesses for Thomson Reuters, Fairfax Media and The Economist Group. He has an MBA in Finance and Investments from The George Washington University in Washington DC and has been based in Asia for over 25 years.