Florian Faes is the Managing Director of Slator, the leading source of research and analysis for the global translation, localization, and language technology industry. Slator’s Advisory practice is a trusted partner to clients looking for independent analysis. Headquartered in Zurich, Slator has a presence in Asia, Europe, and the US.

Inés de la Iglesia is a globally-minded language professional with 7 years of experience in content strategy, translation management, and editorial projects.

She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Translation and Interpreting (EN-FR-IT>ES) and a Master’s degree in Editing. Inés started her career as an in-house editor at a publishing house in Spain, where she honed her editing skills.

In 2020, she moved to Switzerland and joined an HR tech company as a Translation Coordinator. There, she built the translation department from scratch, supporting operations in 29 languages across 77 countries. In her current role as Content and Translation Manager, she continues to drive the company’s internationalization efforts, leveraging her expertise in content creation and localization processes.

Richard Pineger MSc ISTC is the Technical Publications Service Manager at Atlas Copco Group. Described as a polymath, Richard’s interests range from climate science to improvised comedy. With a career spanning 30 years, he started as a technical writer and has worked across various industries, from banking to heavy machinery.

Richard has been tracking the development of artificial intelligence since coding an artificial neural network based on the human olfactory bulb in 1991 as part of his Master of Science qualification. More recently, he has been working within his organization, tracking and training teams as the large language model (LLM) revolution developed. Richard’s main focus is on optimizing the use of off-the-shelf tools within the organization and the content available to them. He has been collaborating with LanguageWire on their AI journey over the last few years.

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.

Alex has 10+ years experience in the Translation and Localization industry, primarily in pre-sales functions (bid management and consultancy), with roles such as Solution Architect, Team Lead – Bid Management, Project and Production Manager.

Ricardo Rei is a senior research scientist at Unbabel, specializing in machine translation and large language models (LLMs). He completed his Ph.D. in April, which has been a collaborative effort between Unbabel, INESC-ID/Tecnico, and CMU University. His doctoral research has been centered on machine translation evaluation, and he is the main developer behind the COMET evaluation framework, which has become the industry standard metric for assessing machine translation quality. With a keen interest in advancing the capabilities of multilingual LLMs, he has been at the forefront of research and development in this domain. When not immersed in research, Ricardo enjoys maintaining an active lifestyle, often found at the gym or riding the waves while surfing—a passion he has pursued since the age of nine.

Nuno Miguel Guerreiro is a senior research scientist at Unbabel while completing his PhD at Técnico Lisboa. His research is broad, spanning topics such as machine translation evaluation, hallucination/critical error detection, and large language model development. At Unbabel, he is a lead developer of various state-of-the-art solutions, such as xCOMET and Tower models. Moreover, he is also experienced in training multilingual LLMs from scratch, having contributed to projects such as CroissantLLM and EuroLLM.

Maria Stasimioti is a PhD candidate at Ionian University, Greece, focusing her research on Machine Translation, Post-Editing, and Cognitive Studies. With over a decade of experience in the language industry, she has worked as a Translator, Project Manager, and AI Program Manager. Maria has taught Translation Technology at Ionian University and contributed to the EU-funded TraMOOC project, advancing multilingual access to online education. Since 2022, she has been a Research Analyst at Slator, analyzing localization trends and innovations in language technology.

Gabriel Fairman is a thought leader and entrepreneur specializing in localization and business process automation. He has navigated Bureau Works from a Boutique Translation Agency to a Global Localization Platform/Translation Management System. A speaker of six languages, Gabriel grew up speaking American English, Brazilian Portuguese, and Argentinian Spanish. He then picked up a bit of French, Italian, and Mandarin. Gabriel writes about the first-hand experience of a business leader, entrepreneur, father, and human being. He loves to play the guitar, cook, play tennis, and be in nature in any way or shape.

Anuja Dhawan is the Co-founder of Dubverse, an AI-driven platform revolutionizing video and audio localization backed by Kalaari Capital. Under her leadership, Dubverse has scaled to over 2 million users globally and is now deploying AI voice solutions with enterprises, with a mission to break language barriers on the internet.

Lucas Campa is the co-founder of toby, an AI simultaneous speech interpreter enabling multilingual work. He graduated from Columbia University and has previous experience in product and growth at Amazon, NASA, Merge, and the Office of Reid Hoffman.

Florian Faes is the Managing Director of Slator, the leading source of research and analysis for the global translation, localization, and language technology industry. Slator’s Advisory practice is a trusted partner to clients looking for independent analysis. Headquartered in Zurich, Slator has a presence in Asia, Europe, and the US.

Rong Yan is HeyGen’s Chief Technology Officer. He brings the company’s technological mission of making visual storytelling accessible to everyone to life with nearly 20 years of engineering leadership experience from companies including IBM, Facebook, Square, Snap, and HubSpot.

Most recently, Rong was the VP of Engineering at HubSpot where he led the Data Intelligence and Automation product line and spearheaded the development of an intelligent CRM platform using data and AI. He was also the Director of Engineering turned Senior Director of Engineering at Snap, where he led a product engineering team of over 250 engineers across six locations, responsible for developing, optimizing, and maintaining core Snapchat features, including Camera, Messaging, Stories, Discover, Memories, and Identity.

He holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from Tsinghua University and a PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University.

Fardad Zabetian is a visionary entrepreneur and the founder and CEO of KUDO, a company revolutionizing language accessibility to connect people and businesses without boundaries. With a track record of founding two of America’s fastest-growing companies, Fardad has led expansions into Europe and Asia, solidifying his presence as a global business leader. Known for tackling complex projects, he played a pivotal role in the 2012 redesign of the United Nations’ meeting facilities, including the iconic General Assembly Hall in New York. His expertise has also supported major international gatherings, including the IMF/World Bank Annual Meetings and key European institutions.

At KUDO, Fardad is taking multilingual meetings and events beyond physical borders, empowering real-time communication across languages and geographies. Passionate about supporting new entrepreneurs, Fardad actively advises early-stage founders and has invested in over 20 startups as an angel investor, sharing his insights and experience to fuel the next wave of innovation and opportunities.

Claudio Fantinuoli’s background is in conference interpreting after earning a PhD in Applied Linguistics, as well as a Habilitation in Interpreting Studies. His academic experience includes teaching roles at the University of Innsbruck, the Postgraduate Center of the University of Vienna, and the Karlshochschule International University. Claudio ventured into the fields of Natural Language Processing during his time at Eurac Research and as the founder of InterpretBank, a CAI tool for professional interpreters.

His journey continues with a position as an associate professor at the University of Mainz, a role as Chief Technology Officer at KUDO, and as a consultant for international institutions, including the European Parliament and national governments, for language technologies.

Rocío Txabarriaga is a localization operations and content strategy specialist with experience in senior executive and consulting roles in the language services and publishing industries spanning more than two decades. She currently lends her expertise at Slator as Senior Research Analyst and Editor, and is an Adjunct Professor of French Translation and Interpreting at Montclair State University.

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.