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.

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.

Iris Orriss is the Vice President of Global Experience at Meta. She oversees several departments with an international and user experience focus; among those are Internationalization, International Marketing, and Global Response, the latter is a team that ensures a unified approach to international elections and other critical international events across Meta’s platforms. Her work mainly focuses on making Meta products successful outside of North America. She has been with Facebook/Meta since early 2013 and is passionate about eliminating language and cultural barriers in the digital world.

She is a member of the board at the Unicode Consortium and prior to joining Facebook, Iris was a director at Microsoft working on product internationalization and development processes in the enterprise and language technology divisions. She is a native of Germany, speaks four languages, and was educated at Freie Universität Berlin.

Bryan Murphy is the CEO of Smartling, a translation and localization software company servicing hundreds of global companies. He was formerly the vice president of vertical markets at eBay, and CEO and Cofounder of WHI, a software-as-a-service company, acquired by eBay in 2012. Bryan has also served as CEO of Breather and president of digital for Serta Simmons. He serves as a director for JEGS.com and Playpower. Bryan is also an advisor for Starboard Capital Partners and is a former director of Neighborly and PartsSource.

As Vinted’s Content Design and Localization Director, Martina Pancot oversees localization, transcreation, and content creation efforts in 19 languages. She established and matured the content design and localization function, managing various content types, including UI, customer support, legal, and marketing. Previously at Klook Travel Technology, Martina led the standardization of product onboarding and content creation, harnessing AI technologies to ensure all products are available in all languages at the moment of publishing.

David Parry-Jones is the CRO of DeepL, an AI company transforming global communications through the world’s most accurate machine translation. He brings a breadth of expertise in enterprise software and cloud technologies, having held senior positions at Microsoft, VMware and Twilio. David has spent over 20 years in scaling and guiding global tech companies through major transformations. David puts people at the center of his work and values customer centricity as well as company culture. By focusing on building, motivating and retaining strong teams, he enables organizations to become high-performing businesses.

Joy is a product marketing manager at DeepL, an AI company that is pushing the boundaries of global communication through advanced machine learning technology. With over a decade of experience in strategic marketing, Joy thrives at the intersection of product, marketing, and sales, crafting narratives and go-to-market strategies that connects businesses to their customers while driving exponential growth. More recently, Joy has played a pivotal role in refining DeepL’s value proposition for businesses, bringing more clarity to DeepL as a strategic tool for forward-thinking companies to stay ahead of the innovation curve while driving ROI.

Chloe has nearly 20 years’ experience in the translation industry, from in-house linguist to project and operations management at various top LSPs before working as an independent consultant for 3 years advising on operational models, best-fit strategies and financial forecasting. Chloe joined Clarivate in 2021 to centralise translation operations, drive cost-savings and improve efficiencies; bringing in translation industry best practices and expertise to enhance data quality and intelligence in IP and STEM content in over 40 language pairs. Chloe blends internally and externally developed NMT, ML and AI technologies to optimise processes and outcomes, minimise waste and maximise returns to internal and external customers.

Chloe fosters an environment of open communication, humour, hard work and trust to enable her team to succeed by exploring ideas, focusing on continuous improvement and putting the end customer experience and need at the forefront of everything we do.

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.

Richard Parnell is General Manager of Linguamatics Language, the Language Solutions division of IQVIA. With a background in neuroscience, Richard has worked in clinical research for the past twenty five years, both within the pharmaceutical industry, as well as service providers such as IQVIA. Richard has led IQVIA businesses in Scandinavia and South East Asia, prior to returning to his home country, United Kingdom.

Richard has been leading the development of IQVIA’s language solution division from its conception in 2018, with a focus on delivering innovative healthcare and life sciences language solutions, designed to seamlessly align to our vertical’s unique requirements, based on innovation, automation, simplicity and cost efficiency, through industry-leading AI & translation solutions.

Dr. Parnia Bahar has over 8 years of extensive expertise in human language technologies, machine learning, machine translation, and speech recognition systems. Prior to her role as a machine learning scientist at AppTek, she pursued her Ph.D. and served as a research assistant at RWTH Aachen University, Germany. She is renowned as an author, co-author, and reviewer of papers at prestigious international conferences.

Dr. Bahar excels in crafting and refining AI-based models tailored to clients’ needs across multiple languages. Systems developed with her cooperation always performed in shared tasks among the best systems. Throughout her career, she has made significant contributions to different R&D projects, sharing her knowledge through lectures, technical presentations, and mentorship of students at universities, workshops, and conferences

As the Senior Vice President of Innovation at Deluxe, Rich Welsh leads the development and implementation of next generation technologies and workflows for mastering, distribution, and localization services for studios, OTT platforms, and content creators worldwide. With over 20 years of experience in movie and television post production, Rich has a proven track record of delivering cutting-edge solutions for the media industry.

Rich is also the Executive Vice President at SMPTE, the global society of media professionals, technologists, and engineers. In this role, he oversees the strategic direction and operations of the organization, and fosters collaboration and education among its members. Rich is a recognized thought leader and speaker on topics such as cloud based mastering, digital cinema, and immersive media. He holds a Doctor of Technology (HC) and a Bachelor of Science with Honors in Media Technology from Southampton Solent University.

Heitor Luiz Gomes de Castro is the Lead Global Localization Architect for the Empresa Brasil de Comunicação (EBC).  He oversees the EBC’s localization and engineering efforts for its public radio and television broadcasting channels, government channels, public communications and new agencies. EBC serves as the head of the RNCP (National Network of Public Communication) facilitating partnerships for the implementation and operation of radio and TV stations nationwide. He has been with the EBC since 2007.

Heitor holds a degree in Telecommunications Engineering from the Instituto Nacional de Telecomunicações (Inatel) and an MBA from the Fundação Getulio Vargas (FGV).

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.

Xue is the co-founder and CEO of Byrdhouse AI , a company dedicated to helping people who speak different languages build deeper trust and connections through AI-powered real-time speech translation. Xue’s background spans linguistic mediation and technology innovation. She has been founding and leading the development of global communication-related software products for the past decade at tech companies and startups.

Previously, she was an interpreter for the Department of Public Health in San Francisco, assisting with orientation programs for refugees and asylees. She started her career at the Walt Disney Company and was on the opening team for Shanghai Disney Resort. She loves music and occasionally creates Karaoke apps to indulge her passion for singing.

Karolina Sjöberg Jabbar is a specialist physician and Ph.D. in Biomedicine, with postdoctoral research experience from the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.

Working as a doctor, Karolina quickly realized that communication is her most important tool. She saw how language barriers can be a matter of life and death, especially in emergencies. To address this problem, together with her husband, Shahid – Ph.D. in AI with previous experience as CTO of social impact startups – she developed Mabel AI. This AI-based app and platform enables real-time communication across language barriers in healthcare. All data and AI processes happen locally on the device, which makes Mabel uniquely compatible with patient confidentiality. This also means that Mabel can be used in off-line mode – such as on flights, at sea, and even in bomb shelters. The voice-to-voice translation ensures that both parts can simply speak freely in their own languages – another important aspect of Karolina’s and Mabel’s vision of making medical translation accessible anytime, anywhere and to anyone.

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.

Florian is the Managing Director of Slator and host of the SlatorPod podcast. Based in Zurich, Florian Faes spent almost a decade in Asia before launching Slator in 2015. Slator is the most up-to-date source of news and analysis covering language services and technology and works as a distributed team based in Asia, Europe, and the US.