Carla DiFranco

Carla DiFranco is currently a Program Manager at Microsoft in Windows International, where she works on developing localization tools and process improvements. Her professional background varies from freelance and in-house translator (German to English), project manager at a translation agency, and localization engineer, responsible for translation memory management and recycling technologies. She is able to apply her hands-on experience in the translation and localization industry in the classroom, where she focuses on improving students' technical knowledge and offering an insight into the industry.

Paulo de Oliveira

Paulo de Oliveira is originally from Brazil and has almost 20 years experience in the software localization business, having worked for major corporations in several countries, including Brazil, Germany, Italy and the US for the last 10 years. He holds a BS degree in Computer Science from the Brazilian Catholic University of Campinas (Puccamp). Currently Paulo is responsible for the localization of Windows Server products at Microsoft, where he leads an experienced team of localization professionals. Paulo has helped major corporations bring their products into the international markets by deploying solid and successful localization strategies. Some of these corporations include Yahoo!, IBM, Microsoft, SAP, Siebel and Compaq. Paulo is passionate about this business and how it exposes its professionals to multi-cultural working environments and challenges.

Miguel Á. Ramos

Ramos has over 25 years of immersed hands-on and management experience, serving in various roles for companies such as J.D. Edwards, Lucent and Lionbridge, working on software, documentation, on-line help and WWW localization in all of its aspects, including analysis of requirements and functions, technical design, linguistic and cultural implications, development, verification and validation. He has as well an extensive cross-cultural background through wide travel abroad, comprising the Far East, in order to establish, document and communicate locale-specific product requirements, define global product features, enhance local usability, and train and lead distributed internationalization, localization and testing teams. Ramos holds a degree in computer science from Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Madrid, and certifications in Machine Translation from Weidner Communications Corporation, Solutions Development Discipline -Enterprise Development & Deployment from Microsoft and Project Management & Team Development from J.D. Edwards. In addition to English, he is also fluent in Spanish and Italian.

Instructors are subject to change.