Supervisory Board

Will Burgett
Intel

A major mantra at Intel is efficiency: Do more with less; Do it faster; Do it better; Do it in a scalable fashion. Automation is the key means of achieving localization and translation efficiencies. However, each company or institution reaches a limit on how much they can do this on their own.

The TAUS Data Association offers a collaborative community that builds synergy around localization processes and translation automation.

Sharing language data allows members to enhance or build translation memories, do advanced leveraging, train machine translation systems, reach new or expanded markets, increase global revenue, establish standards in industry-sector languages and terminology, develop new L10N methods, processes and technology through collaborative R&D.

TDA has the potential to build collective value on a level playing field as other collaborative community efforts have done for their domains and industries.

Melissa Biggs
Sun Microsystems

One of the key strategies and basis of the business model at Sun Microsystems Inc. is to interact, assist in building, enable, and contribute to communities. Sun is eager to work within TDA to build out a framework for optimizing language data and possibly for incubating new language technologies. Sun is aligned with, and enthusiastic about, the TDA initiative. It is an exciting trend in increasing productivity and expanding in-language content offerings through sharing/ exchanging language data.

Melissa Biggs is Sr. Business Manager for the Globalization group (internationalization and localization) at Sun Microsystems, Inc. Her background in localization extends over 15 years, with management responsibiities for localization business strategies, finance, product acquisitions, program management, corporate globalization standards and operations within Sun's Globalization organization. The Globalization team at Sun is responsible for internationalization enabling, localization engineering and testing, translation and program management, and localization technology management. The team manages localized contents --- from engineering and testing, through translation --- for Sun's hardware and software products, web offerings, training, and support materials in up to 30 languages. Melissa drives Sun's machine translation framework and advanced translation technology initiatives. Her localization scope spans projects in both engineering and marketing. Melissa has also held management positions at both startups and larger corporations, including Xerox , Gould Imaging and Graphics, and Envos. Melissa is a graduate of Bucknell University.

Chris Wendt
Microsoft

The principal objective for my work in the TDA supervisory board is to get the language data service operational within the shortest time possible, and in a form that entices data owners to contribute their language assets with confidence, making the reciprocal nature of this initiative a reality. I am bringing a deep understanding of the effects of language data in large volumes through my work in the machine translation team, as well as experience sharing data in Microsoft's ongoing TM publishing effort. It is important that a community-directed language data sharing organization comes to fruition, and I'll give my time and energy to help bringing this to life.

Chris Wendt graduated as Diplom-Informatiker from the University of Hamburg, Germany, and subsequently spent most of his career in several globalization-related positions at Microsoft's headquarters in Redmond, Washington, including Windows, Internet Explorer and MSN. He is the Group Program Manager for the Machine Translation (MT) team in Microsoft Research, responsible for applications of MT across Microsoft, including the Microsoft Translator web service, as well as language quality considerations for the MT engine itself.

Paula Shannon
Lionbridge

The world is grappling with three megatrends that impact our clients, our professional, and even our personal lives: Ubiquity, Mobility and Immediacy. Each of these has a unique twist when we look at our world of language and advanced language technology and form the foundation for much of what we are exploring at Lionbridge and across the TAUS community.

Access to all content in all languages, when and where we want it will drive real-time translation technologies, advanced MT, and will put a premium on the availability of content over the quality of content. When one considers that of all the content on the web, less than 1% of this is available in Arabic, for example, who is to decide whether language standards trumps access? The "good enough revolution" powered by advanced language technology - a potent combination.

Francis Tsang
Adobe Systems

Available soon.

Jessica Roland
EMC

EMC is excited to be collaborating with such a distinguished group of peer companies within the TDA structure, to pool our translation data in order to better serve our global customers. We believe that shared data from the TDA next-generation, Web-based platform will help us reduce the cost of translation, accelerate our entry to new language markets, and speed our productive use of the latest translation technologies.

Jessica Roland manages the International Product Operations group for EMC's Content Management and Archiving division. Her team is responsible for all aspects of 300+ localized product releases per year. Jessica’s focus over 11+ years with the company has been on innovations in the areas of international product management, globalization technology partnerships, global product architecture and localization process automation. The latter, especially, drew her to TAUS and to becoming a founding member of the TAUS Data Association.

Valarie Gilbert
Cisco Systems

Cisco continues to have a strong focus on translation techniques and in particular machine translation (MT). Recognizing industry direction, we want to play a key role in forward looking technologies, standards and best practices. Within Cisco, my team has sole responsibility for MT and we believe leveraging TDA assets will allow us to support a wider range of organizations throughout the company. As a member of the TDA Board, I'm hoping to influence both the direction and awareness of MT technologies in the industry and across Cisco.