One of the several managers I’ve had in my career once said that I have an uncanny ability to take a half-formed idea, shape it, come up with a plan and execute it to perfection. Indeed, I thrive on simplifying complex issues, and get a kick out of designing solutions to challenges and overseeing their satisfactory implementation.
I started out in the audiovisual localization industry, not by accident, but out of passion and intent – I even have a PhD in translation and subtitling to prove it. I love languages and translating subtitles came naturally to me, as did teaching subtitling to translation graduates.
Being analytical, I like to bury myself in research, but my result-oriented and energetic nature made me give up a career in academia to join the industry. I was in the UK at the time of the DVD boom, where the centralization of home entertainment localization began, and I was full of ideas: from publishing the first guidelines for the creation of English subtitling templates for multilanguage subtitle production, to beta testing subtitle editors, advising on user experience and functionality, or designing workflows for new types of projects.
I eventually got to manage an SME specializing in multilanguage audiovisual localization for several years until the latter was acquired by Deluxe Entertainment Services Group, where I focused on research again. This time it was on language technologies and their application in subtitling workflows. Machine translation in particular always fascinated me and I was keen to experiment with it in the subtitling domain, which I did both through large-scale EU-funded R&D projects as well as internal initiatives. At Deluxe, I also had the opportunity to get involved in subtitling production at scale, and lead operations and language resources teams across three continents, honing my remote management skills with dispersed and culturally-diverse teams.
After two decades in senior management roles in the languages industry, I now offer my services as an independent consultant, designing and executing bespoke projects on media localization strategy, quality, tools, workflows, and language resource and data management. I am fortunate to be supported by a network of seasoned localization professionals and academics, and can thus conduct extensive research and analysis, undertake large-scale strategic projects and offer complete solutions to localization challenges.