Language Industry Hires at Wordbee, Go T&T, Iconic, and Donnelley

Florida-based translation company Go Transportation & Translation (Go T&T) has announced the appointment of Daniel Schley as its new Chief Operations Officer (COO).

Schley, who brings 15 years of experience in executive coaching as well as managing startups and fast-growing companies in the managed care industry, will be reporting directly to CEO Greg Engleman.

As COO, Schley will provide operational leadership direction, business strategies and performance improvement initiatives for Go T&T. “I especially focus on developing a great culture to thrive in,” he told Slator.

“We’re putting Dan’s phenomenal coaching and team-building skills to good use,” Engelman said in a media statement.

At this point, Schley said he sees the language service industry as “a very high-touch industry” where a very good partnership between a language service provider (LSP) and language specialists is needed to provide “phenomenal” service.

Prior to joining Go T&T, Schley managed his own executive coaching firm, Consulting & Coaching. He also previously worked for One Call Care Management as VP for Consulting & Business Development.

“GO T&T fits right in the experience of my previous companies and my personal leadership skills and vision,” he said.

Mark Shriner — Wordbee

Wordbee’s new Sales Director for North America, Mark Shriner, will be responsible for developing the market and growing its client base in the US and Canada.

Headquartered in Soleuvre, Luxembourg, the cloud translation management technologies provider has offices in Spain, the UK, and Vietnam.

“As Wordbee is committed to growth in North America, the timing was right with my relocation back to Seattle,” he said.

Shriner lived in Asia for more than a decade, working for various language service and technology providers in Japan, Hong Kong, Korea, and Singapore.

“This is the third time I’ve returned to Seattle after living abroad. It’s never easy, but it’s also never boring. There is a fair amount of reverse-culture shock because things have changed and so have I,” he shared about moving back to the US. “But all in all, it’s a very positive experience for me and my family as we were all exposed to new things and forced onto an accelerated learning curve so as to get our ‘sea legs’ as soon as possible.”

The language services industry has changed as much, with technology now making it easier for buyers to source directly from freelancers rather than from LSPs.

Shriner, however, sees the situation in a different light. He said LSPs are actually referring SaaS providers like Wordbee to their larger enterprise clients that are looking for help in managing their localization efforts or integrating a TMS or a CMS.

“The role of the LSP goes beyond just sourcing from freelancers. It includes negotiations, project management, quality control and management, invoicing etc. Oftentimes, enterprise clients don’t want to, or don’t have the resources to, manage those aspects of localization,” he explained.

As such, he sees both an exponential increase in translation demand and computing but also in machine translation power and accuracy.

He continued: “I see more sophisticated requirements from clients around their quality requirements. So when it comes to content such as UGC on social media sites, where perfect grammar or a word-for-word translation might not be needed, there is a massive growth and opportunity in the use of MT. However, when it comes to legal, investment banking, or marketing content, you will always either need a human expert and or a very reliable editor.”

Raj Nath Patel — Iconic Translation Machines

Moving from Mumbai to Dublin is a journey in itself for Raj Nath Patel, Iconic Translation Machines’ new Machine Translation Scientist.

Transitioning from his role as Natural Language Processing (NLP) researcher at the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (CDAC) in India to developing high-quality customized MT engines in Ireland is an even bigger journey.

“I was intrigued by the opportunity to move outside the lab to try and solve some real-world MT challenges,” he said.

Patel, who has a Master’s Degree in Computer Science from the University of Allahabad in Uttar Pradesh in India, said his expertise is in neural and statistical machine translation, transliteration, language modeling, and translation quality evaluation and estimation. Prior to joining Iconic, he said he “had been mainly developing MT systems in the lab on standard data sets.”

He also said he is excited to be working with Iconic’s team of MT experts whose focus is on real-world commercial MT issues.

“My aim is to incorporate innovative language-specific processing techniques into our architecture to achieve state-of-the-art translation quality,” he observed.

His take on neural machine translation though is cautious. “Although neural machine translation (NMT) has the capability to greatly improve the fluency of MT output, particularly for complex language pairs, NMT engines can produce peculiar errors which can be difficult to predict and resolve. There is still a lot of work to do,” he said.

So far, he said he finds Dublin a “nice city to live and work in” and a place where “there’s still a lot to explore.”

Rana Das — Iconic Translation Machines

Iconic Translation Machine’s new Technical Lead Rana Das is not new to Ireland — the Calcutta native moved to Ireland 17 years ago — but he is new to the world of machine translation.

Before taking up the job at Iconic, he has worked in a variety of senior software engineering, developer and technical roles in India, the UK, and Ireland at Dalet/ANN systems, Digisoft.tv, Globoforce, Tweak, Minds+Machines, and H&R Block. He holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Mechanical Engineering from North Eastern Hill University in Shilong, India.

“I’m very excited to have the opportunity to work with an evolving technology and to be part of a great team who can really make a difference. I hope to contribute to machine translation becoming a mainstream technology that eventually eliminates the restrictions of language barriers. Finally, it’s also great to be part of an evolving success story at Iconic,” he said.

A software engineer, Das leads the design and development of a scalable architecture at Iconic to support a fast-growing customer base and reports directly to CEO John Tinsley.

“Working in software development means there are always new things to learn and new developments to take note of,” he said, adding that he is excited to be taking his first steps in MT.

Das shared that he is fond of road trips and thus would love to spend weeks on Road 66 or maybe climb Mount Kilimanjaro. His stint in MT is like another road trip, one that he is eager to experience.

Gabriele De Carli – Iconic Translation Machines

Gabriele De Carli joined Iconic Translation Machines from Asset Data in Italy where he worked as software architect developer.

At Iconic, his main task as a Software Engineer is to improve the company’s cloud infrastructure and develop new services for customers. He is responsible for all of the software production phases from the analysis to development, testing, and maintenance. He reports to Iconic Technical Lead Rana Das.

Moving from Rome to Dublin, De Carli said he has not experienced any culture shock. “Dublin is such a beautiful city and so far I really enjoy living here. I also can’t wait to leave the city behind and visit the Irish countryside, which I hear is amazing,” he said.

He added, “I’ve never worked abroad before so having the opportunity to move to Ireland to work with a diverse team of technical experts and solve challenging technology problems was very attractive to me. It’s proving to be an excellent fit so far.”

Janis Shea — Donnelley Language Solutions

Janis Shea joined Donnelley Language Solutions as Sales Manager, Life Sciences, in July 2017.

Based in Los Angeles and reporting to the Sales Director of the Americas, Anna Gargiulo, she has extensive experience in selling enterprise localization solutions to life sciences companies, and especially to medical device companies.

“Donnelley Language Solutions is looking to me to grow their life science business across the US, with a strong focus on medical device, an area I have focused on for the past 10 years,” she told Slator. “Despite a lot of activity in the life science vertical, it is still a very open market with plenty of room to help our clients meet their global goals.”

Shea joined Donnelley from Amplexor (the Foreign Exchange unit, which was acquired by Amplexor’s predecessor Euroscript), where she was VP of Business Development for the past five years. She was Business Development Director at LUZ, and had stints at other well-known LSPs, including 12 years with Lionbridge and SDL.

“Yes, I have been in this industry longer than I care to admit. People make fun of me because I don’t want to leave it,” she shared. “Since I was a little kid, languages and culture have fascinated me and I have had a knack for learning languages.”

Shea is bilingual in English and German and holds a BA German Language, Literature and Culture from the University of California.

As far as challenges in the industry are concerned, she believes it is on the precipice of some major change, “especially as M&A activity is on the rise.”

“Companies being sold or broken up, (and this) is having a big influence in our industry. Translation technology is becoming more and more necessary as globalization becomes the norm. Machine translation is establishing itself as a powerful tool for communications professionals, including in the life sciences field,” she said.