When James Vause invited me to GlobalLink NEXT, I didn’t know what to expect. This was my first time attending. As soon as I arrived at the welcoming reception on Wednesday evening at ART NoMad and the elevators opened onto the rooftop party, any concerns I had about being comfortable evaporated. “Networking” can trigger fears of awkwardly nodding while close colleagues tell stories of people you’ve never met. Instead I was surrounded by both NYC neighbors and visitors excited to be connecting after years apart along with newcomers like me brought into the fold. The excellent view, cocktails and food did not hurt! I also learned more about TransPerfect’s products from those both offering them and using them and filed away ideas for future implementation solutions.
Thursday was Day 1 of the conference. After registration, I was able to select only the items that made sense for me from the store instead of wasteful swag bags. The facilities at Center 415 meant the food and 1 session were set up on the main floor as well, while the keynotes and 2 additional sessions could take place upstairs. I grabbed a quick coffee and breakfast before joining the opening remarks by Matt Hauser, SVP, TransPerfect, followed by a talk on LangOps from Keith Brazil, SVP, TransPerfect and Britta Aagaard, Chief Business Officer, Semantix. Next up, Nate Fong, Regional Director, TransPerfect led a fun conversation with Paul Dyrwal, Director, Product Content & Localization, Ancestry in a case study on localization at scale. Nothing like a(n ongoing) success story to make us thirsty.
Putting translation in context of building global digital experiences helped me understand how my background easily fit in. I was not the only one - our coffee-break conversations included pros working in fields from financial services, to publishing, to healthcare, to retail, to automation, who all filled me in on how these tools apply across industries. Whether you need to scale your DAM or CMS to enable tags in several languages, connect your PIM to translation or ensure your customers can read your website in the language they find most comfortable, I feel like there is a solution to research from TransPerfect.
After coffee, we returned to the generals sessions. First up - Joe Kuefler, Division President, OneLink, TransPerfect walked us through OneLink and its mysterious 1 line of code to enable site translation, then Julien Didier, VP Technology, TransPerfect and Ty Trainer, Senior Manager, MT Strategy & Implementation, TransPerfect announced what’s new with GlobalLink Now, the suite of AI-powered machine translation technology, solutions and services. Julien continued the AI conversation with Diego Bartolome, Head of Research, AI.Now, TransPerfect and included use cases (my favorite!) of where to focus your AI investment.
We broke for lunch - loved the stations to accommodate different tastes - and more conversations with our peers. After lunch, we broke into tracks for Solutions, LifeSci and Retail/Digital, before returning together for a Generative AI discussion with Alex Poulis, Senior Director, AI, TransPerfect, Kyle Gallatin, Software Engineer, Machine Learning Infrastructure, Concetta Balestra, Associate Director of Conversational AI Design, and welcomed back TransPerfect’s Ty Trainer and Diego Bartolome. After the final session, there were cocktails then a change of venue to Spin for ping pong.
Day 2 started similarly, with coffee, breakfast and conversations before the morning sessions began with open remarks from Mark Hagerty, CTO, TransPerfect. Keith Brazil showed us updates to GlobalLink Enterprise - excellent news to someone interested in how to integrate translation into larger-scale projects. Joe Campbell, SVP, TransPerfect focussed on TechOps tool updates and how AI can be incorporated, then Quam Erogbogbo, Director of Localization, Amazon Web Services (AWS) wrapped up the morning sessions with a case study on using AWS in customers’ home language.
After coffee, we broke into sessions again, Friday’s being Financial Services alongside Solutions, and Retail/Digital. I particularly enjoyed the presentations from David Femi, Head of Multicultural Banking & Business Banking Regional Manager, M&T Bank, Tess Mattisson, President & Chief Executive Officer, Zaplox, Tatiana Barrera, Digital Product Manager, Royal Caribbean Group, and Marissa Morrill, Lead Product Manager, PNC. Learning how people from different fields are handling similar issues is always reinforcing and this day was no different from Day 1.
I have connected with some speakers and colleagues at GlobalLink NEXT and would love to continue our conversations as we all seek solutions to integrate our language translation tools into the rest of our MarTech, Content and Product stacks. If I missed any sessions you think I should know about, let me know.