The Localization Institute is excited to offer several interactive seminars and round tables as part of the upcoming Global Toolbox Day at LocWorld56 in Vancouver, Canada, on Monday October 19 2026. These sessions will each take place at the Pinnacle Hotel Harborfront. The Localization Institute offers these seminars and round tables as separate, stand-alone events. Registration for LocWorld Vancouver is not required to attend a Global Toolbox session.
Please Note: Global Toolbox sessions have size limits that cannot be exceeded – register now to reserve your seat!
Full Day Sessions – Lunch Included
GTB1 – Multilingual AI Roundtable
Monday, October 19 from 9:00am – 5:00pm
Registration Fee: $750 – full-day price (lunch included)
Location: Pinnacle Hotel Harbourfront, Vancouver 1133 West Hastings Street, Vancouver, BC V6E 3T3 – Port of Worlds Room
10% discount for 3 or more students from the same company – please contact jill@
Event description: The Convergence of AI-Native Technology, Multilingual Workflows, and Human Expertise
As organizations adopt AI-native technologies, multilingual workflows are becoming a strategic business capability. Decisions about LLMs, machine translation, AI agents, automation, and governance now directly impact quality, efficiency, customer experience, and business outcomes. The tenth edition of this roundtable will bring together technical, language, and business leaders to discuss practical strategies for aligning AI innovation, human expertise, and enterprise goals within multilingual workflows.
Event Schedule:
8:30am-Registration opens – Coffee and Tea service
9:00am-Sessions start
12:00pm-Lunch
1:00pm-Session resumes
3:00pm-Coffee break, light snacks
5:00pm-Session ends
Roundtable Session Agenda:
- Olga Beregovaya, Smartling: Enabling linguists with AI-powered work surfaces
- Marina Pantcheva, RWS: AI benchmarks and evaluation gaps
- John Weisgerber, XTM: Don’t be Gatekeeper, become a Facilitator: frameworks for testing AI and deciding where to adopt it
- Sherriff Issac, African Lab
- Konstantin Savenkov, Intento: From AI Models to Business Outcomes: Meeting Enterprise Requirements in 2026
- John Tinsley – Translated: The Build or Buy Conundrum: navigating the complex decision tree facing enterprises today
- Alon Lavie, Carnegie Mellon University: Advances in Automated Translation Quality Evaluation: AMTA Working Group Outcomes and
WMT 2026 - Bruno Bitter and Mathijs Sonnemans, Blackbird: Orchestration in the Age of MCP
By joining this roundtable, you will:
- Enable innovative localization workflows with AI technologies
- Understand what AI technologies can and cannot do
- Gather insights to apply and manage AI at the enterprise level
- Discuss industry best practices to manage people, AI technologies and data
- Consider future trends in the AI space
- Develop valuable connections with industry peers
This roundtable is for:
- Decision-makers who aim to leverage AI on both strategic and operational levels
- Buyers who want to implement Multilingual AI
- Project Managers tasked with implementing an MT/AI solution
- Vendors who want to leverage MT/AI to meet their clients’ needs
- IT professionals involved in MT/AI implementation
- Content Managers responsible for global content
Roundtable moderator/organizer:
- Peng Wang, The Localization Institute
Advisory board members:
- Alon Lavie, Phrase/CMU
- Olga Beregovaya, Smartling
- Marina Pantcheva, RWS
- Sheriff Mohammed Issaka, African Languages Lab (All Lab)
Speakers:
- John Weisgerber, XTM International
- Konstantin Savenkov, Intento
- John Tinsley, Translated
- Bruno Bitter, Blackbird.io
- Mathijs Sonnemans, Blackbird.io
Please note:
The Round Table’s success depends on people being willing to share information and experiences freely. To encourage that, the sessions are not recorded or republished and no formal minutes or records are kept. Attendees are free to keep their own notes.
Dr. Wang is the author of two books, Machine Learning in Translation and Multilingual Artificial Intelligence. She is an IT analyst and the organizer of the Multilingual AI Roundtable. She specializes in multilingual AI agent system design, AI tool development and testing, and data analytics. She has extensive research experience in the cognitive analysis of machine and human intelligence, corpus linguistics, and the implementation of AI security gates.
Alon Lavie is the VP of AI Research at Phrase, where he leads the development of the company’s AI strategy and manages its AI research team in Pittsburgh and Prague. Concurrently, Alon is an adjunct Consulting Professor at the Language Technologies Institute at CMU, where he has been a member of the faculty for 26 years. Prior to joining Phrase, he was the VP of Language Technologies at Unbabel. Prior to Unbabel, Alon was a senior manager at Amazon, where he led and managed the Amazon Machine Translation R&D group in Pittsburgh. Prior to that, Alon was the co-founder, President and CTO of “Safaba Translation Solutions”, an enterprise MT solutions technology startup, acquired by Amazon. Alon is a well-known expert in MT and translation evaluation, and spearheaded the development of the METEOR and COMET metrics. Other research interests and activities include MT adaptation approaches with and without human feedback, translation Quality Estimation, and methods for multi-engine MT system combination.
Alon served as the President of the International Association for Machine Translation (IAMT) (2013-2015). Prior to that, he was president of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas (AMTA) (2008-2012), and was General Chair of the AMTA 2010 and 2012 conferences. He is also a member of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), where he was president of SIGParse – ACL’s special interest group on parsing (2008-2013). In August 2021, at the 18th biennial Machine Translation Summit conference, Alon was honored to be awarded with the 2021 Makoto Nagao IAMT Award of Honour for his contributions to the field of Machine Translation.
Connect with Alon on LinkedIn.
Olga Beregovaya – Vice President of AI and Machine Translation – Smartling. Olga Beregovaya has over 20 years of experience in Language Technology, NLP, Machine Learning, Global Content Transformation and AI Data development and is passionate about growing businesses through driving change and innovation. Olga started her career in language technology building lexicons and rules for Rule-based machine translation, gradually expanding her expertise into other broader applications of NLP and Machine Learning to enterprise translation workflows. Olga has also served as President of AMTA, currently serves as a Board member of Women in Localization and as an Advisor for Engineering Leadership at California State University, Chico. Olga received her MA, Linguistics/Germanic Studies at UC- Berkeley and MA/BA in Linguistics from St. Petersburg State University.
Marina Pantcheva – Director Linguistic AI Services – RWS. Marina is a linguist and polyglot with experience in academic pursuits as well as management, leadership and innovation. Marina holds a PhD degree in Theoretical Linguistics. Her academic work centered around the exploration of the elementary particles of language within the framework of Nanosyntax. In 2014, Marina transitioned to the world of Localization. For several years, she developed processes and solutions for crowd-based localization, covering technology, BI, linguistic quality, Community management and more. Currently, Marina is heading the Linguistic AI Services Center of Excellence at RWS, dedicating her efforts to the development and implementation of linguistic AI solutions.
Sheriff Issaka – Founder & AI Research Lead – African Languages Lab (All Lab). Sheriff Issaka is a PhD student at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he conducts state-of-the-art research at the Misinformation, AI & Responsible Society (MARS) Lab. His work focuses on critical areas in Natural Language Processing (NLP), including bias and fairness, low-resource languages, and multimodal models for enhanced language understanding.
Also, as founder and lead researcher of the African Languages Lab (All Lab), Sheriff spearheads a global collaborative project that is revolutionizing NLP for African languages. This initiative creates comprehensive roadmaps, innovative methodologies, and open-source resources to democratize AI for underrepresented languages, addressing a critical gap in current language technologies.
Before embarking on his doctoral studies, Sheriff applied his expertise as a data scientist at the Zafar and ICU Data Science Labs. There, he developed cutting-edge predictive models for pancreatic cancer detection and pioneered NLP techniques for HIV phenotyping, demonstrating the powerful real-world applications of AI in healthcare.
Sheriff’s research is driven by a profound commitment to leveraging AI for social impact, with a particular focus on underserved communities. His work aims to enhance the cultural competence of AI systems, improve the accessibility of advanced technologies across diverse populations, and address ethical challenges in AI deployment to ensure that the benefits of AI and NLP are accessible to all, regardless of language or cultural background.
John Weisgerber – Solutions “Xpert” – XTM International. John is a battle-scarred veteran of countless localization campaigns. For over 20 years he has earned first-hand experience in every corner of the industry: freelance translator, project manager for both translation service providers and global enterprises such as HP, independent consultant, operations manager, and machine translation developer. In recent years John has leveraged the breadth and depth of his experience to build world-class translation management technology as a solutions architect with leading translation management systems like XTM Cloud.
Konstantin Savenkov– Founder and CEO – Intento. After receiving a PhD in 2008, Konstantin Savenkov led research and development efforts for online content services, then worked as CTO at Zvooq and as a chief operating officer at Bookmate. In 2016, he contributed his experience in artificial intelligence (AI), technology, and operations to found Intento, Inc., where they build tools to source, evaluate, and use machine translation and other cognitive AI services.
John Tinsley – VP of AI Solutions – Translated. John Tinsley is the VP of AI Solutions at Translated. He’s a computer scientist with more than
15 years experience in the localization industry. Prior to Translated, he founded Iconic Translation Machines, an award-winning language technology software business which pioneered the commercial deployment of Neural Machine Translation technology. John led the business for almost a decade before selling it to RWS in 2020 in one of the largest technology deals in the language industry. He holds a PhD in Computer Science and a degree in Applied Computational Linguistics, and is a regular public speaker on topics related to language, translation, and business.
GTB2 – Bigger, Better, Faster Round Table
When AI Agents Run and Automate, Where do Humans Make the Difference?
Monday, October 19 from 9:00am – 5:00pm
Registration Fee: $750 – full day price (lunch included)
Location: Pinnacle Hotel Harbourfront, Vancouver 1133 West Hastings Street, Vancouver, BC V6E 3T3 – Port of Vancouver Room
10% discount for 3 or more students from the same company – please contact jill@
Session Description:
When AI agents run and automations kick in, where do humans still add value, and how? That’s the question we will explore at this year’s Bigger, Better, Faster roundtable.
A year ago, most teams were still cautious about AI translation. Today many publish raw machine output across most of their content, with little or no post-editing. The fear is gone. What hasn’t arrived is any way to measure what that decision costs, because quality work has always
counted inputs, scores, and volume, not outcomes like revenue or customer delight.
Over the course of the day, we will work through strategy, workflow, quality, judgment, governance, and team design, and ask where the human role in localization is being redrawn now that the caution is gone.
Come ready to share what you’ve tried, learned, and unlearned, and to leave with ideas you can put to work.
Event Schedule:
8:30am Registration opens – Coffee and Tea service
9:00am Sessions start
12:00pm Lunch
1:00pm Session resumes
3:00pm – Coffee break, light snacks
5:00pm – session ends
Target Audience: Everyone
Attendee Experience Level: Beginner to advanced
Round Table Organizers:
- Daniel Goldschmidt
Advisory Board Members:
- Oleksandr Pysaryuk, GitLab
- Antoine Rey, Argos Multilingual
- Christiane Bark, Localization Consultant
Speakers:
- Wayne Bourland, Dell Technologies
- Paula Hunter, Autodesk
- Vladimir Zhdanov, Alibaba
Please note:
The Round Table’s success depends on people being willing to share information and experiences freely. To encourage that, we ask the attendees not to record or republish the session. No formal minutes or records are kept, but attendees are free to keep their own notes.
Daniel Goldschmidt – Collaborator – LocWorld. Daniel is a consultant in software internalization and localization. Prior to that, he served as a senior internationalization project manager at Microsoft in the Cloud and Enterprise Division and led the internationalization team. Before joining Microsoft, Daniel cofounded RIGI Localization Solutions, a venture in the domain of visual localization, and he served as a senior software engineer for the Google internationalization team. He serves as vice-chair of the LocWorld program committee and as a member of the Internationalization and Unicode Conference review committee. Daniel presents frequently at international events. He holds a BS in computer science and mathematics (cum laude) and an MS in computer science, both from the Hebrew University, Jerusalem.
Oleksandr Pysaryuk – Staff Technical Product Manager, Globalization Technology – GitLab. Oleksandr is a localization leader with experience in building and growing successful teams and disciplines focused on internationalization software development, localization and internationalization technical program management, and global product management in sports technology, telecommunications, consumer technology, human capital management, e-commerce, and engineering organizations.
Antoine Rey – SVP, Customer Development – Argos Multilingual. Antoine Rey started his career in localization in 1997 and has held various technical, sales, and management roles in the industry. His main area of focus is to consult, develop, and implement mature operational and business globalization models with clients across various industries. Antoine is a French native and holds a MS in information technology and a BA in international business and communications. He lives in Dublin, Ireland.
Christiane Bark –Localization Consultant. Christiane Bark discovered her passion for localization as a volunteer translator for Plan International and decided to make a career of it. She holds a diploma in translation and has worked in both freelance and in-house roles. Formerly a lead localization manager at Busuu, Christiane took over the content team and implemented a new localization process, bringing the quality of both the source content and translated copy to a whole new level.
Wayne Bourland – Sr. Consultant, Translation Strategy – Dell technologies. Wayne Bourland has nearly 25 years of experience working at Dell. He currently leads the Global Translation Team, responsible for all translation, product internationalization (I18N), and interpretation services across Dell Technologies, serving more than 100 organizations. Leveraging industry-leading technology and process efficiencies to deliver over 1B translated words a year.
Previously Wayne held several roles in Support Content development, helping to bring the KCS methodology to Dell. Prior to that Wayne led tech support teams and helped to establish call centers in India and Panama. Before joining Dell, Wayne spent 10 years in the US Army, 3 years of that time in an overseas assignment in South Korea.
Active in the broader translation industry, Wayne is a member of the TAUS advisory board, the RWS Customer Advisory Council, a former member of the TDA board, and has been published in Multilingual magazine, the Economist, Brand Quarterly, and numerous industry blogs – and along with 11 other industry peers, published the Localization Strategy Playbook!
Paula Hunter – Senior Manager, Localization Program Management – Autodesk. Paula Hunter is a seasoned localization professional with 20 years of experience helping organizations grow and succeed globally by building out successful localization programs that focus on quality, scalability and cost effectiveness. Her experience in managing complex localization projects extends across all business units, including software, technical documentation, websites, marketing collateral, global campaigns and events, and training. She is inspired by opportunities to creatively solve problems and innovate on processes through cross-functional collaboration. She is an active member in the localization industry and is passionate about sharing ideas and connecting great people to do great things.
Vladimir Zhdanov – Senior Content Strategist– Alibaba International Digital Commerce. With a master’s degree in translation, Vladimir has lived and worked in China since 2012. Vladimir learned localization through video games, contributing to major titles such as Genshin Impact. Over eight years at Alibaba Group, Vladimir has focused on automation in localization. Vladimir now applies AI to large-scale multilingual content for AliExpress across dozens of languages, manages knowledge bases and termbases, and designs workflows that place human expertise at critical steps—not just proofreading the output. At the conference, Vladimir brings practical frameworks for scaling quality across languages and actionable playbooks for AI‐human collaboration.
Half-Day Sessions
GTB3 – Spotlight on India
Monday, October 19 from 9:00am – 12:30pm
Registration Fee: $350 – half day price (lunch not included)
Location: Pinnacle Hotel Harbourfront, Vancouver 1133 West Hastings Street, Vancouver, BC V6E 3T3 – Port of Singapore Room
10% discount for 3 or more students from the same company – please contact jill@
One India Strategy won’t work, and AI alone won’t fix it all
India’s real localization problems are segmentation and cultural trust, not just language coverage. AI, while genuinely useful for scaling translation, doesn’t solve either one on its own.
Focus
Most global localization teams treat India as one market. It isn’t. Twenty-two official languages, market behavior that shifts more between Indian states than between European countries, and a translation industry that still measures success by coverage instead of adoption. This session breaks down why the “one India” approach quietly fails, using real case studies, and gives you a practical framework to think about it differently.
Topics
- Why India works better as a collection of distinct markets than one single market, and what that means for how you plan an entry or expansion
- Why translated content can be linguistically correct and still feel culturally foreign to Indian users
- Where AI genuinely helps with Indic-language localization, and where it still falls short and needs a human in the loop
- What measuring localization success in India actually looks like, beyond just language coverage
- Why glossary and terminology management falls apart across Indic languages, and what that costs in consistency
- Why voice matters as much as written text in how people in India actually use and localize products
THIS IS FOR YOU IF:
- You want to know why the Indian localization market is different from everywhere else
- You want to understand what real opportunity looks like if you expanded into India
- You’re exploring what the Indian market could mean for your product or content, even if nothing’s decided yet
- You’re being asked to build or evaluate an India strategy and don’t have a framework for it yet
- Your company is already in India, but something isn’t landing the way you expected
Attendee Experience Level: General localization experience expected; no India-market background needed
Format: Seminar with Group discussion and Q & A with presenters.
Seminar Lead:
- Kavikuil Sarojini, The Localization Institute
Speakers:
- Salvatore Giammarresi, Head of Localization at Airbnb
- Adam Vance, Former VP of Localization and Linguistic QA at GlobalStep
Event Schedule:
8:30am Registration opens – Coffee and Tea service
9:00am Sessions start
10:45am Coffee break
12:30pm Session ends
Kavikuil Sarojini leads multilingual content strategy at Subway and serves as Marketing Coordinator for The Localization Institute. A native Tamil speaker from Chennai, she spent years localizing content for Indian languages at Meta and Apple. This work shaped a belief she’s built her career around: India isn’t one market, it’s many, and treating it as one is where most global brands go wrong.
She’s bringing that thesis to LocWorld56 in Vancouver with her session “One India Strategy Doesn’t Work, and AI Alone Won’t Fix It.” Kavi holds an M.A. in Translation and Localization Management from Middlebury Institute of International Studies, and stays involved in the community through The Localization Institute, Women in Localization Silicon Valley, and LocLunch San Francisco. Connect with Kavi on LinkedIn.
Salvatore “Salvo” Giammarresi – Head of Localization –Airbnb. Salvatore “Salvo” Giammarresi is head of localization at Airbnb. Previously he held leadership roles at several technology companies in Silicon Valley including PayPal and Yahoo. Salvo holds a PhD in applied linguistics from the University of Palermo (Italy), where he later was a visiting professor, teaching localization. He is a published author on the topics of globalization, localization project management, international product management, formulaic sequences, translation studies, and translation memory systems. Salvo enjoys giving back and he currently does this as an executive board member at CLEAR Global, as an advisor to a few startups, and speaking at conferences. He started his professional career as an Italian-English-Italian freelance translator.
Adam Vance – Former VP of Localization and Linguistic QA – Globalstep. With 15+ years of experience leading global teams, strategic partnerships, and cross-functional initiatives, Adam has helped deliver successful products reaching more than 100 million users per platform across global markets and in over 35 languages.
Throughout his career, Adam has led the global release of many successful products across North America, APAC, MENA, Latin America, Europe, and other international markets. From early-stage (0→1) launches to large-scale live services, Adam has contributed to product growth ranging from $250M to over $1B in global revenue.
Adam’s passion lies in driving strong global growth of innovative products and services through international expansion, globalization, localization, and worldwide go-to-market strategy. Adam’s experience spans global product management, business development and language operations for PC, console, mobile, software, games, SaaS, digital products and services.
GTB4 – Global Program Management
Global Program Management: Influencing in the Age of AI
Monday, October 19, from 1:00pm – 5:00pm
Registration Fee: $350 – half-day price
Location: Pinnacle Hotel Harbourfront, Vancouver 1133 West Hastings Street, Vancouver, BC V6E 3T3 – Port of Singapore Room
10% discount for 3 or more students from the same company – please contact jill@
Session Description:
As AI commoditizes technical knowledge, human-centric leadership becomes the primary differentiator for organizational success. Human leadership and influencing skills are even more critical in the age of AI.
While AI excels at processing data, humans must lead by fostering, connecting, motivating, and influencing for change. These uniquely human skills are essential for navigating complex, nuanced situations and ensuring technology aligns with human values, the needs of the customers, and the needs of the business.
This workshop is part of the Global Program Management series. It will teach you a practical, 7-step process of how to influence individuals or teams across and above in your organization as well as outside of it.
Topics to be discussed:
- Navigating corporate dynamics to influence change
- Relationship management – building, diagnosing, managing relationships
- Business alignment – your goals versus their goals
- Exchanging different types of “currencies” – how to give others what they want in exchange for what you need
- Six sources of influence you can build in your professional toolkit
- Six universal truths of influence you can use as influencing techniques
- Simple 4-step approach for how to connect with and persuade others built on all the above
By joining this workshop, you will:
- Learn how to navigate corporate dynamics and build strong networks
- Enhance your understanding of relationship management
- Understand how to align the needs of your team or enterprise to the larger business needs of your stakeholders or clients
- Be able to offer the right “currencies” to give others what they want in exchange for what you need
- Identify six different sources of influence you can build
- Harness the science of persuasion through six universal influencing techniques
- Persuade others using a simple 4-step approach built on all the above
This workshop is for:
- Anyone at any level of organizations on the buyer or supplier side who want to learn how to influence people and teams across the organization, above in the organization as well as outside of their organization.
Event Schedule:
12:30pm Registration Opens
1:00pm – Session starts
3:00pm Coffee break, light snacks
5:00pm Session ends
Round Table Organizer:
- Eva Klaudinyova, The Middlebury Institute of International Studies/The Localization Institute
programs at MediaLocate, then leading localization teams and implementing new globalization, quality and
supplier management strategies in companies like VeriSign, VMware and Apple.
Eva is a co-founder and Secretary of Women in Localization. She is currently the Associate Professor at the Translation and
Localization Management Program at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, imparting
her knowledge and longstanding localization and leadership experience to graduate students. She is also an
instructor at the Localization Institute. She is from Slovakia, speaks multiple languages, and holds MAs in
Foreign Language Teaching and in Translation.
