Our Instructors
TCLoc instructors are all professionals or academics in fields related to technical communication and localization. Like our students, they come from all over the world and add to TCloc’s international dynamic. Bringing to the program their experience in the industry today, TCLoc instructors provide current and essential instruction to our students.
Localization
Alex Zekakis holds a BSc in Information Management from the International Hellenic University.
..He was first a localization project manager on the service provider side. He then moved into different roles, initially leading production teams and then focusing on delivering strategic solutions. Throughout this time, he has always had an active presence in localization-related conferences around the globe, where he delivered engaging presentations and continually addresses advanced industry topics. Alex now holds the role of European solutions architect manager at XTM International where he leads a remote team that is primarily focused on supporting presales activities.
Documentation
Jordan Stanchev is a project lead (PMP) of IT projects for user assistance and information architecture for SAP’s DITA CMS infrastructure.
..He is a part of the team that takes care of organizing, producing, and hosting one of the largest product documentation bases in the world. He is also a trainer in technical writing, information architecture, and DITA XML. Jordan has made his career in the field of technical communication for the last 20 years. He started off as a Java developer, next became a technical writer, and then a senior technical writer.
Usability and UX Design
Kirk St.Amant is the Eunice C. Williamson Chair in Technical Communication and a member of the Center for Biomedical Engineering and Rehabilitation Science (CBERS) at Louisiana Tech University (USA).
..He is also an adjunct professor of technical communication with the University of Limerick in Ireland and a guest professor of usability studies with Southeast University in China. He researches how cognitive processes affect the usability of technologies in health and medical contexts and in online education. Kirk is a research fellow and an affiliated faculty member with the TCLoc program.
Content Strategy
Hilary Marsh is the president and chief strategist of Content Company, a content and digital strategy consultancy.
..She helps associations, nonprofit organizations, and corporations get better results from their content by improving their practices for content creation, governance, management, and promotions. Hilary has been a leading content strategy practitioner, mentor, and professor since 1999. She developed and taught the first graduate-level content strategy courses for Kent State University. She has been published, quoted, and had her work cited in major industry publications. She is a frequent speaker at national and international conferences.
Information 4.0
Ray Gallon is a co-founder of The Transformation Society, a research and consulting company.
..He has over 40 years of experience as a communicator — first as an award-winning radio producer and journalist, then in the technical content industry. He has always been interested in the connection between technology and culture and has put his broad experience to good use with companies of all sizes. Ray was the director of the Society for Technical Communications (STC) and president of STC France. He is a university lecturer and a keynote speaker for events throughout the world. He has contributed articles and chapters to many books and periodicals and is the editor of Language of Technical Communication (XML Press).
Natural Language Processing
Director of AI and MT Solutions at Smartling, Alex Yanishevsky has been in the localization industry for over 20 years in a variety of roles.
..He has written numerous articles for industry journals and presented at industry conferences. Alex’s areas of expertise include machine translation, data mining, computational linguistics and TMS/CAT tools. He earned a Ph.D. in Slavic Literature from Brown University.
Project Management
Tatiana Ryabinina brings to the TCLoc program a practice-based approach to teaching informed by her interdisciplinary experience in localization.
..She is a co-founder and director at a management consultancy that helps growing businesses develop and implement international expansion and localization strategies, and adapt their processes, brand communications, digital and physical products, and marketing activities to reach customers worldwide. Having joined the University of Strasbourg as a lecturer in 2021, Tatiana teaches several courses in communication and management, and provides pedagogical support. She has a master’s in linguistics and an Executive MBA.
Software Localization
Achim has a degree in electronic engineering and is co-founder of PASS Engineering, the company that initially developed the software localization tool Passolo before it was acquired by SDL back in 2007.
..As a software developer he managed teams working on medical analyzer software. With now more than 20 years of experience in the localization industry he is now working as a solution consultant in RWS/SDL supporting clients in optimizing software localization and translation workflows.
Machine Translation
Guylaine Mylward works as a solutions architect for Alpha CRC, a language services provider based in Cambridge, UK.
..She has spent all of her professional life in the localization industry and has held a variety of roles since first being recruited as a project assistant in 1997. Guylaine has always followed a hands-on approach and is keen to share her experience and knowledge of all the various facets of localization, from project management and workflows to translation technology. She hopes to help students put theory into practice and give them a taste of the day-to-day aspects of a career in localization.
Simplified Technical English
Since 2006, Shumin Chen has been working as a consultant in industries worldwide, such as
..aerospace and defense, banking, consumer products, healthcare, IT, and medical and fitness equipment. She has helped many companies with their documentation needs and is widely regarded as a leading expert in ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English training, aviation documentation, and multilingual documentation. Shumin now heads the ASD-STE100 training arm of Shufrans TechDocs, a full-service technical documentation provider. She continues to focus on the practical implementation of international standards to facilitate the efficient creation and management of multilingual documentation.
Project Management
John Di Rico began translating in 2005 and specializes in legal, financial, and marketing translation from French to English.
..He currently works as the Director of Business Development for Wordbee.com and runs two translation companies in France: ApexTra.fr and Trad24.com. He is a sworn translator and interpreter for the French courts (traducteur-interprète assermenté), member of several French translation professional associations (CETIJ, UNETIC, CFTICAAP) and has an MA in Translation and Localization Management from the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey (MIIS).
Plain Language
Candice is an internationally-known plain-language lawyer.
..She is the co-founder and South African representative of Simplified, a training and consultancy firm with offices in London, Johannesburg, and Cape Town. She was previously president of Clarity International, a worldwide association of lawyers who promote the use of plain legal language. Through consultancy, training, and various notable speaking engagements around the world, Candice focuses on making legal and other complex information clear and understandable.
Web Languages and Tools
Mark Nightingale is a specialist in web development, project management, and writing for the web.
..After studying at the University of Bath in the UK, he completed the CAWEB master’s program at the University of Strasbourg in 2014. Since then, he has launched a successful small business, building websites for small- and medium-sized companies and non-profit organisations, and managing larger web projects as a project manager. He also teaches for both the CAWEB and the TCLoc master’s degrees.
Academic Writing
Drew Eisenhauer is Associate Professor at the Institute for Translators and Interpreters for International Relations at the University of Strasbourg, France.
..While working on his PhD in English Language at the University of Maryland, he became interested in the Web and has divided his time ever since between technical communication and academic instruction. While teaching in the Professional Writing Department at the University of Maryland, Drew served as technical writer and software business analyst for the FCC’s Wireless Telecommunications Bureau and later as Senior Technical Writer for the FAAs quality control division in Washington, DC. He has also worked with some web development startups.
Localization
Hélène Bajon is a graduate from Edhec Business School and has worked for several years in the field of translation and localization.
..Within her family-owned translation company, Version Internationale, she worked as a business developer for 3 years, while also being in charge of marketing and digital strategy projects and helping set up a formalized Vendor Management department. As such, she gained a thorough knowledge of the main trends and issues in the industry, valuable experience with regards to client expectations at national and international levels, and understanding of translators’ expectations and challenges.
Visual Communication
A freelance graphic designer with over 10 years of experience, Boris Epp is a polyvalent professional who specializes in Adobe tools.
..He is also a teacher in various classes, dedicating himself to his students by trying to give them the best possible basis for a fresh start in professional life. He likes to share his personal tips and focuses on teaching and implementing effective work methods.
“Exchanging ideas with other professionals in the field and being taught by experts from the industry has been a privilege and a great opportunity.”
Sara Martellini, TCLoc Graduate 2018
“Exchanging ideas with other professionals in the field and being taught by experts from the industry has been a privilege and a great opportunity.”
Sara Martellini, TCLoc Graduate 2018
SEO and Content Marketing
Chris is an international, multilingual SEO expert and the founder of Boulder SEO Marketing, a digital marketing agency in Colorado, USA.
..Chris and his team assist local, national, and international customers with their search engine optimization, social media, and content marketing training and consulting needs. Chris is also an experienced keynote speaker and offers self-paced and non-technical online SEO training worldwide.
Plain Language
Frances started her career in education — writing materials for students with low literacy in English.
..She moved into the corporate sphere in the late 1990s to focus on information design and clear writing. In 2005, Frances co-founded Simplified, a training course that’s helped over 9,000 professionals to transform complicated content into clear and compelling messages. Her permanent roles include Head of Content Strategy (EMEA) at Siegel & Gale, Head of Content at SaaS company Oradian, and Senior Content Strategist at Barclaycard. She’s presented at many conferences, including PLAIN, Clarity, TechComm UK, Content Strategy Applied, CS Forum and ConfabEU.
Web tools and languages
Pablo Ruiz is a senior lecturer at the University of Strasbourg where he teaches language and web technologies.
..His research areas range from natural language processing applications and humanities problems to automatic corpus annotation and language technology evaluation. He has industry experience in text mining and machine translation Thanks to his experiences working and studying in Canada, Germany, France and Spain, he is fluent in five European languages.
Terminology, AI and Natural Language understanding
François Massion is the director of D.O.G. Dokumentation ohne Grenzen GmbH, a company specializing in translation and localization services, and a member of the Advisory Board of the DIT (Deutsches Institut für Terminologie).
..He also has a teaching assignment in the field of Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Understanding at Shanghai Foreign Studies University. Francois Massion’s main professional interests are translation technologies, quality assurance methods, terminology science and terminology modelling for computer applications, semantic and knowledge technologies. Creating and distributing content on a large scale to an international audience has become a very challenging task involving a wide range of technologies and methodologies. He would like to share some of the practical aspects of their implementation with the students.
Terminology Management – Extracurricular
Mark Daniel Childress has a BA from Humboldt State University in California and an MA from Heidelberg University in Germany.
..He joined SAP in Walldorf, Germany, in 1995 as a translator and has been responsible for the company’s terminology management since 1998. He was president of the German Association for Terminology (Deutscher Terminologie-Tag / DTT). Mark has given over 500 lectures and seminars on terminology management to technical writers, translators, and universities. He has written articles on terminology work for publications including MultiLingual and eDITion, the journal of the DTT.
M.T. – Extracurricular
Claudia Wiesinger is a graduate research assistant in the Human and Artificial Intelligence in Translation (HAITrans) research group at the University of Vienna Centre for Translation Studies (ZTW).
..She has also been a PhD student at the University of Vienna since February 2021. Claudia’s research interests include crisis communication and the role of translation, the effects of speech tools on translation, revision and post-editing machine translation (PEMT) tasks, and computer-assisted translation and revision practices. Aside from working in academia, Claudia is also an active member of the language industry. Having worked as an English-to-German in-house translator and reviser in the United Kingdom, Claudia is now a freelance translator who specialises in the translation of websites, marketing texts and product descriptions for the games, betting, business and fashion sectors.
MadCap – Extracurricular
Ken De Wachter is the owner of Flynxo, a small-scale consultancy firm that focuses on multilingual documentation management.
..He runs regular workshops about translation technology, terminology and technical communication. He is a certified trainer of SDL Trados Studio, Memsource and MadCap Flare. His elaborate professional network and hands-on experience with various aspects of multilingual specialized communication provide him with an excellent overview of both practical implementations of academic insights and the interaction between the industry and training institutions.
Intro to Congree – Extracurricular
Julia Barbiera works as a consultant at Congree.
..After studying translation sciences and computational linguistics, she now uses her expertise to support Congree customers in areas such as support, training, and consulting.
Localization – Extracurricular
Andre Hemker is the founder and CEO of Wordbee.
..a language service provider located in Germany. Andre is also an experienced audio engineer and was responsible for building the entire studio at Wordcraft. On October 1, 2020, Andre was appointed the CEO of Wordbee, a major translation technology provider. Andre holds a Master of Arts in Translation and a BA in English from the University of Leipzig.
Localization – Extracurricular
Brahim Aïoun has over 12 years of international experience with global companies and international organizations.
..He holds a MA in International Business and Foreign Languages and focuses his career on the Translation Technology leadership and Account Management of mid-sized to large customers.
Clueso – Extracurricular
Neel is a co-founder of Clueso, a tool that helps companies create stunning videos and documentation for any digital process in minutes using AI. Before Clueso, he built and scaled a digital reading and note-taking app to 40K+ users while in college.
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