Speakers: | Henry Dotterer — Moderator | An MIT-engineer-turned-translator, Henry founded ProZ.com in 2000. He also coaches youth ice hockey. Henry lives in Syracuse, New York, USA. | Kirti Vashee | Kirti Vashee is VP of Enterprise Translation sales for Asia Online. He is a seasoned IT sales and marketing executive and statistical machine translation (SMT) enthusiast who was previously responsible for the worldwide business development strategy at Language Weaver.
He has long-term software industry experience (EMC, Legato, Dow Jones, Lotus) and has been involved in building and managing sales and support operations in Europe and Asia for several software companies.
He is the moderator of the Automated Language Translation group with ovber 4,000 members in LinkedIn and is active on Twitter (@kvashee) and the blogosphere on MT (kv-emptypages.blogspot.com) and translation related issues. He received his formal education in South Africa, India and the United States. | Attila Piróth | Attila is an ATA-certified English to Hungarian translator, who holds a PhD in physics, and specializes in scientific and technical fields. He is a regular conference speaker who also mentors career-starting translators, putting special emphasis on the intelligent use of diverse tools. | Mirko Plitt | Mirko Plitt is Senior Manager, Language Technologies, in the localization department of Autodesk, the leading maker of CAD software best known for its AutoCAD product family.
In 2001, Mirko led one of the industry’s first deployments of customer-facing raw machine translation, to translate Autodesk’s vast product support knowledge base. He later oversaw the introduction of a company-wide authoring, publishing and translation management system used by hundreds of technical writers, localization engineers and translators. Mirko was then responsible for the integration of machine translation into Autodesk’s translation productivity environment, allegedly the industry’s largest production instance of the open-source Moses system. In this context he organized several rigorous productivity and usability tests which led to unprecedented findings on the real usefulness of machine translation.
Mirko has presented at numerous localization and machine translation events in Europe, the USA and Asia. Most recently, he also organized the first Swiss Translation Unconference, which brought together translators and representatives from industry, government, international organizations, tool makers, education and research. | Donald A. DePalma | Don DePalma has more than 30 years of experience in the fields of technology, language services, and market research. As the company’s original founder, he is responsible for launching and developing the preeminent market research firm in the language services sector. He initiated Common Sense Advisory’s coverage of localization maturity, enterprise language processing, business-driven globalization, practical machine translation, return on investment for localization, and multicultural domestic marketing.
As the company's chief strategist, Don serves as an incubator for new ideas and projects that support the organization's vision and growth. He drives strategic decisions affecting the future direction of the research and consulting services. And, he is involved in shaping the strategies of many of the world's largest technology firms and the industry's most influential language services providers via large scale consulting projects.
Prior to founding Common Sense Advisory, he co-founded Interbase Software, served as vice president of corporate strategy at translation technology supplier Idiom Technologies, and was one of the first analysts at Forrester Research, where he consulted to senior management at Global 2000 companies. While at Forrester, Don launched the firm's coverage of various sectors, including content management, application development for strategic internet systems, digital marketing technologies and customer relationship management, ethnic marketing, knowledge management, and business globalization. He lectures, writes, and is frequently quoted on the topics of online marketing, content management, multicultural marketing, localization, return on investment, and website globalization. His book, Business without Borders, is widely used at university and business training courses.
Don holds a PhD in Linguistics from Brown University with specializations in generative grammar, computational linguistics, and the historical phonology of Slavic languages. He has also studied at Moscow State University and Moscow Linguistic University in Russia, Univerzita Karlova in the Czech Republic, and ELISA in Costa Rica. As a linguist, Don studied a range of Indo-European languages and has visited 40 countries. | Jiri Stejskal | Dr. Jiri Stejskal is the President & CEO of CETRA Language Solutions. Headquartered in Philadelphia and with an office in Washington, CETRA serves the U.S. Federal Government and corporate clients around the world. Jiri is the immediate past President of the American Translators Association and the current Vice President of the International Federation of Translators (Fédération Internationale des Traducteurs, or FIT). |
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