Audiovisual Translation in the Age of AI: A GALA Academy Program for Localization Professionals

Cristina is a localization expert with nearly 20 years of experience in the industry and a Master’s in Translation. She began her career as a Project Manager in 2006, later expanding her expertise as a freelance translator in the audiovisual and publishing sectors.
In early 2022, Cristina joined Voiseed as Voice Manager, where she was in charge of client relations, product demos, and workflow optimization, earning her promotion to Chief Operating Officer in 2024. As COO, she aligns market demands with product innovation, oversees client onboarding, and collaborates with technology teams to tailor solutions to client needs.
Cristina's strategic mindset and hands-on leadership drive operational excellence and support Voiseed’s growth in the evolving localization and technology landscape.

Ralph grew up in the Netherlands and now lives in Dublin, Ireland. He started his career as a Dutch localization specialist at EA Games in Germany. He later moved to Dublin, Ireland to join the team of in-house software localization engineers at Microsoft, where he played a key role in localizing the popular Windows XP operating system into Dutch. Following his departure from Microsoft, he spent some time working as a freelance translator, before joining Yahoo! as a cross-market lead editor for multilingual search engine advertising campaigns. After a brief stint at eBay, he became an Account Manager for a local search engine in Berlin. 

Back in Dublin, he has been with Dell Technologies for the past 11 years, where he established the video localization program for product launches on Dell.com, which has since been extended and adapted to fit the needs of many other teams. As part of his job, he developed a patent in the area of video localization, which was granted by the US Patent Office in 2019. Ralph currently holds a consultant position within the Dell Global Translation Team, where he focuses on enhancing the company's capabilities in the areas of localization and accessibility of video, interactive media and SEO.

At Welocalize, our team expertly manages international multimedia projects, ensuring culturally nuanced and technically adept delivery from concept to completion. With a specialization in multimedia localization, my role involves orchestrating the design and execution of workflows tailored to the diverse needs of eLearning, video, and audio content. 

Simona Lavagnini is a founding partner of the LGV Avvocati law firm in Milan, specializing in intellectual property. Admitted at the Supreme Court, she deals with consultancy in litigation and non-litigation matters for national and international clients, with particular focus on copyright, new technologies, trademarks, patents, design, unfair competition. Simona holds a PhD in industrial law and taught copyright and advertising law from 2011 to 2021 at the University of Pavia, Italy. In 2023 she was elected President of the Italian Group of AIPPI, after serving many years in the Executive Committee and as Secretary. She is a regular speaker to events as well as contributor for law reviews and books. In 2023 she was also appointed as a member of the Milan Bar Antitrust and IP Committee. In 2024 and 2025 she received the Managing IP award as Italy Practitioner of the Year (Law Firms). Since years she is constantly ranked in Chambers Europe and Global, Italy, Band 1: Intellectual Property: Copyrights; in Legal 500 as leading partner in IP, Italy.

Volker Steinbiss is the Managing Director of AppTek GmbH. His substantial experience in human language technology goes back to the late 1980’s when he helped pioneering large-vocabulary continuous-speech recognition at Philips Research. In the 90s, he was instrumental in Philips creating three worldwide first speech recognition products: name dialling on the handheld cell phone SPARK; the professional 20,000 word continuous-speech radiology dictation system SP6000; and the Philips mixed-initiative telephone-network based train inquiry system. Mr. Steinbiss next became interested in statistical machine translation in the 1990’s, and later with speech translation. As a staff member of RWTH Aachen University, he managed a project within the 200+MEUR French-German Quaero program (2008-2013). With his company Accipio Projects GmbH, he was the coordinator of the speech translation project EU-BRIDGE (2012-2015), at the time the largest EU-funded integrated project in human language technology. Mr. Steinbiss holds a degree in mathematics and a PhD from Göttingen University, and was a scholarship holder of the German National Merit Foundation and of the French Governmen

I'm Mark, and I'm Head of Technology at Comtec, a localisation company where I help a team of brilliant humans (and their clients) get the most from the latest tech advancements.