IMUG Past Events Archive: 2015

 

 

 

2015 Events:

 

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2015 Events Archive

December 10, 2015, 6 - 9 PM

Annual International Potluck & Holiday Bash
Hosted by Adobe Systems

Photos: Coming soon

The IMUG holiday bash always features unusual food and good conversation, including discussions of language technology, business, travel, life across cultures, and more.

Dr. Ken Lunde and the Adobe globalization team have once again graciously offered to host our event at Café Adobe, and will supply the drinks including soda, wine and spirits.* IMUG will supply free pizza. You needn't bring a thing, but we always look forward to the fantastic variety of ethnic dishes the less culinarily-challenged among us can muster up for this annual food-fest. That always takes things to a higher level.

You needn't prepare or buy more than 3 to 4 portions worth, and in fact you needn't bring anything at all. Come as you are, with or without a potluck contribution, but do come prepared to eat!

*Please drink responsibly, and choose a designated driver or take alternate transportation if necessary.

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November 19, 2015, 7-9 PM
(Networking 6:30-7:00 PM, and after the event as time allows)

The Global Content Experience
Hosted by Adobe Systems

Photos: http://www.meetup.com/IMUG-Silicon-Valley/photos/26562790/ new page

Customer experience increasingly comes down to content. The confluence of e-marketing practices now embedded in mainstream marketing management includes PPC, SEO, social/paid social, blogging, syndication, e-mail automation, landing pages, funnel design, and more. CMOs seek to free these activities from organizational silos, bringing them into an orchestrated program that bolsters the virality of content, achieves optimal ROI, and meets the full potential of the content experience. Meanwhile, hypermobility among companies and consumers has raised expectations for branding and message consistency across countries, languages, and cultures.

Global companies must extend online presence to dozens of local languages. Content programs must follow. This talk unravels the ramifications of content-based marketing and global customer experience, drawing on data from 2,407 prominent websites, 100 online languages, and 195 countries, from CSA Research.

 

Ben Sargent is a Content Globalization Strategist and a member of the executive team at Common Sense Advisory. He has worked in the language services industry since 1989, serving in operations, consulting, and marketing roles at companies such as Lionbridge, iXL, Bowne Global Solutions, and International Communications. He also helped to found and manage several venture-funded high-tech start-ups.

In his work at Common Sense Advisory, Ben’s primary focus areas are website globalization, translation management systems, and content management technologies. He also consults for Global 1000 brands and global technology vendors.

Ben has written articles and white papers on multilingual publishing and been a regular speaker at conferences and seminars in Asia, Europe, and the Americas. He has lived in France, and has recently traveled to China, Canada, and Western Europe. Ben has formally studied French, and earned a degree in Music Theory and Composition in 1983.

 

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October 15, 2015, 7-9 PM
(Networking 6:30-7:00 PM, and after the event as time allows)

Understanding Multilingual Tweets
Hosted by Google

Photos: http://www.meetup.com/IMUG-Silicon-Valley/photos/26483620/ new page

Video: https://youtu.be/ioGk2AwGgtY new page

Building upon their recent IMUG talk on globalizing Twitter — which will be repeated at the SF Globalization Meetup ten days before this event — this time Alolita Sharma and James Koval will delve deeper into internationalization.

Twitter is one of the world’s favorite open social networking platforms. Twitter conversations reflect the latest news, global trends, events as well as local discussions. Real time conversations take place on Twitter as tweets in several languages.

In this talk, we will cover ‘twitter-text’, which is heavily used by Twitter to understand tweets in several languages. twitter-text is an open source library which defines and recognizes URLs, @mentions, #hashtags and a lot more for Unicode languages.

Alolita Sharma is a senior engineering manager at Twitter, heading the company's internationalization, localization, NLP engineering. Alolita believes the web has to be fully “language enabled” to reach every human on the planet. Alolita has been working with and promoting open source software for more than two decades. She is on the board of the Software Freedom Law Center and is a past board member of the Open Source Initiative. She holds bachelor's and master's degrees in computer science. Alolita speaks internationally on multilingual web, language technologies, open source, women in technology and building successful developer communities. She can be reached on Twitter @alolita.

James Koval is an internationalization engineer at Twitter. He is a core contributor for twitter-text. James can be reached on Twitter @jakl.

 

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September 17, 2015, 7-9 PM
(Networking 6:30-7:00 PM, and after the event as time allows)

What Recruiters Want & Applicants Need to Succeed in Localization Careers
Hosted by LinkedIn

Photos: http://www.meetup.com/IMUG-Silicon-Valley/photos/26416719/ new page

Video: https://youtu.be/rlR-B0w-CRk new page

Adam Wooten giving an IMUG talk on localization careersWhat do client-side companies and LSPs tell us are the most desired skills they seek in job candidates? Do recruiters and hiring managers look for the same skills posted in their job descriptions? Are there any mismatches? Are companies setting appropriate standards to hire the employees they really want? What are the holes a job applicant will most want to fill in his or her resume?

Learn from current research about the localization industry's most sought-after hard skills and soft skills. Employers and recruiters will learn what to expect from applicants to be competitive. All participants will learn what skills we need to be competitive the next time we apply for a new position in localization management or engineering and - if we don't already have such skills - how and where we can obtain them.

Adam Wooten is co-founder and CEO of AccuLing, and Assistant Professor of Translation & Localization Management at the Middlebury Institute for International Studies at Monterey.

 

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August 20, 2015, 7-9 PM
(Networking 6:30-7:00 PM, and after the event as time allows)

Internationalization at Startups
Hosted by Box

Photos: http://www.meetup.com/IMUG-Silicon-Valley/photos/26370634/ new page

Video: https://youtu.be/tLI__ECnBeo new page

IMUG Internationalization at Startups panelStartups are not small versions of big companies. Growth is usually the tipping point to decide to launch internationally. However, startups face unique business and technical challenges.

In this discussion, representatives from different areas in the internationalization process will discuss best practices for a  successful international launch.

Panelists:
• Claudia Galván (moderator), Senior Director, ABI.Local
• Tex Texin, Chief Globalization Architect, XenCraft
• Igor Afanasyev, Director of Localization, Evernote
• Jamie Cox, Project Management Lead, Gengo (now with Welocalize)

 

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July 15, 2015, 7-9 PM
(Networking 6:30-7:00 PM, and after the event as time allows)

Globalizing Twitter
Hosted by Groupon

Photos: http://www.meetup.com/IMUG-Silicon-Valley/photos/26270214/ new page

Video: coming soon!

Alolita Sharma and her Twitter teamTwitter is one of the world’s favorite open social networking platforms. Twitter conversations reflect the latest global trends, news, and events, as well as local and personal discussions. Real time conversations occur in different languages, so enabling a great multilingual user experience is key. In this talk, I will walk through language technologies and processes that help us at Twitter build a small world after all.

Alolita Sharma is senior engineering manager at Twitter, heading the company's internationalization, localization, NLP engineering. Alolita believes the web has to be fully “language enabled” to reach every human on the planet. Alolita has been working with and promoting open source software for more than two decades. She is on the board of the Software Freedom Law Center and is a past board member of the Open Source Initiative.

She holds Bachelors and Masters degrees in Computer Science. Alolita speaks internationally on multilingual web, language technologies, open source, women in technology and building successful developer communities. She can be reached on Twitter @alolita.

 

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June 18, 2015, 7-9 PM
(Networking 6:30-7:00 PM, and after the event as time allows)

Bridge for Out of Eden Walk: 21,000 Miles of Social Media in Translation
Hosted by Facebook

Video: https://youtu.be/ymYXtO6Qs2Q new page

Summary: https://medium.com/meedan-labs/21-000-miles-of-translating-social-media-9b8be45bc323 new page

Slides: http://www.slideshare.net/edbice/20150615-bridge-for-ooewfinal new page

Photos: http://www.meetup.com/IMUG-Silicon-Valley/photos/26219442/ new page

Ed Bice at IMUGBridge is a web and mobile platform the Meedan Labs team is building to aggregate, curate, and translate a living archeology of a geo-bounded social media landscape that mirrors Paul Salopek’s Out of Eden Walk, a 7 year, 21,000 mile walk around the world, sponsored by National Geographic.

In the next seven years, the percentage of people using the internet who are not speaking ‘top ten’ languages is projected to rise from 18% to 35%, and with many social media sites the potential to access content across languages is limited to poor, dead-end, machine translations of the content. Bridge for OOEW will provide a unique digital artifact - human translated views into the social media landscape sampled at 100 mile waypoints on Paul’s slow ambulatory trace of the path of human migration from Africa, across Asia and through to Tierra del Fuego.

Members of Meedan’s team have been working to create a more cross-lingual internet since 2006, pioneering new approaches to social translation in projects like Speak2Tweet (the Egyptian Revolution translated voice message project) and Bird’s Nest: Ai Weiwei English. Across all of our work we design and build tools to help create a more accessible, inclusive, and connected digital landscape. 

Ed Bice is the founder of Meedan.org, a non-profit working on tools for journalists, and Meedan Labs, a start-up working on crowdsourced social media translation software. Ed has a degree in philosophy from Carleton College and was a residential architect before founding Meedan. Ed holds a US patent for hybrid human plus machine online translation (HDNLT). 

 

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May 21, 2015, 7-9 PM
(Networking 6:30-7:00 PM, and after the event as time allows)

Source Han Sans & Noto Sans CJK: The World's First Open Source Pan-CJK Typeface Families
Hosted by Adobe

Video: https://my.adobeconnect.com/p9j5loxf5oj/ new page

Slides: http://blogs.adobe.com/CCJKType/files/2015/05/imug-05212015-lunde.pdf (PDF) new page

Photos: http://www.meetup.com/IMUG-Silicon-Valley/photos/26141033/ new page

There is nothing extraordinarily new about pan-CJK fonts, which are designed to serve multiple East Asian languages and regions using a single font resource, and whose development simply requires a lot of coordination and resources. What is extraordinary about Source Han Sans and the Google-branded Noto Sans CJK is that they represent the world's first open source pan-CJK typeface families.

Offered in a broad range of weights, these typeface families serve the needs of the East Asian community, and also come with the right price tag: free. This presentation will detail what went into the development of Source Han Sans and Noto Sans CJK, including some of the pitfalls that were encountered along the way, along with the reasons behind the various deployment formats in which they are offered.

Dr. Ken Lunde has worked at Adobe Systems for over twenty-three years, and is a Senior Computer Scientist specializing in CJKV Type Development, meaning that he develops East Asian fonts, along with the specifications on which they are based. He is also the author of "CJKV Information Processing," Second Edition, which was published by O'Reilly Media at the end of 2008. 

 

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April 16, 2015, 7-9 PM
(Networking 6:30-7:00 PM, and after the event as time allows)

The Future of Global Online Marketing: Localization Workflow and Optimization
Hosted by Google

Photos: http://www.meetup.com/IMUG-Silicon-Valley/photos/26108699/ new page

Lior Libman IMUG talkMultinational online marketing requires a fine balance between content and workflow optimization. Successful international companies strive to accelerate translation of online marketing into multiple versions of each language to test, revise and retest in order to determine the most effective translation and localization for their target audience. Scalability becomes a challenge as the number of iterations in each language increase as a multiple to the number of target markets. As such, the iterative nature of content optimization must be paired with efficient and streamlined workflow to be sustainable over time.

In this presentation, we discuss our approach to helping our customers overcome these challenges. Our company, One Hour Translation, provides clients with hassle-free, end-to-end solutions to quickly and reliably translate, host, manipulate and advertise web content. Through our global network of professional translators, we empower multinational marketing experts by ensuring that the right message is reaching the right audience.

Lior Libman is a co-founder and president of One Hour Translation. Lior holds a Ph.D. in Neuroscience and an MBA. As part of One Hour Translation global expansion, Lior recently moved to the US to head One Hour Translation US operations.

 

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Rebecca Petras, Andrew Bredenkamp, Alolita Sharma, Scott Able, and the silent auction at the IMUG special evening with Translators without BordersMarch 26, 2015, 7-10 PM
(Networking 6:30-7:00 PM, and after the event as time allows)

Special IMUG Event: an Evening with Translators without Borders
Hosted by PayPal

Photos: http://www.meetup.com/IMUG-Silicon-Valley/photos/26009250/ new page

Don't miss this opportunity to learn more about the translation and localization industry's leading humanitarian organization!

Translators without Borders board members, advisors, and staff from around the world will join us once again for this special evening, including Program Director Rebecca Petras (Amsterdam), board chairman Andrew Bredenkamp (Acrolinx, Switzerland), plus board members Renato Beninatto (Moravia, Brno, CR), Val Swisher (Content Rules), Salvo Giammarresi (PayPal), Iris Orriss (Facebook), Donna Parrish (Multilingual), and others.

Master of Ceremonies:
Scott Abel, "The Content Wrangler"

Speakers:

  • Andrew Bredenkamp, Chairman of the Board, Translators without Borders, and Chairman and Founder, Acrolinx,
  • Alolita Sharma, senior i18n, L10n, & NLP engineering manager at Twitter, previously with Wikimedia, and board member of the Software Freedom Law Center, the Open Source Initiative, and the Commons Initiative,
  • Paul Warambo, translator, Translators without Borders Kenya, via special video link,
  • and others we hope to confirm soon!

Hors d'oeuvres, beer and wine will be served.*  The evening will also feature a silent auction for several items, including an Xbox One, a FitBit, a Sonoma vacation, advertising, conference passes, and more, donated by Common Sense Advisory, Don Plumley, Val and Greg Swisher, Diane Wagner, Tim and Rebecca Petras, Welocalize, Multilingual Computing, and the Localization Institute.

The entrance fee of $10 for members and non-members will be donated to Translators without Borders. You can RSVP for yourself and any guests via Meetup with a debit card, credit card, or PayPal account.  Credit cards, cash, and checks will also be accepted at the event, and donation receipts will be available from Translators without Borders upon request.

Many thanks to:
Salvo Giammarresi and PayPal for hosting, and
Renato Beninatto and Moravia IT for sponsoring the drinks!*

This is a fundraiser for the language industry's charity. Additional donations are welcome! Translators without Borders is a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt nonprofit organization.

*Please drink responsibly, and arrange alternate transportation if necessary.

 

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March 19, 2015, 7-9 PM
(Networking 6:30-7:00 PM, and after the talk as time allows)

Google Translate & Crowdsourcing (v2)
Hosted by Google

Photos: http://www.meetup.com/IMUG-Silicon-Valley/photos/26009400/