Published on 01.09.2021
Anna N. Schlegel is Vice-President of Product, International Markets, and Globalization at ProCore Technologies. Over the past 30 years, Anna has led globalization teams at many of the top technology companies in the Silicon Valley, including Cisco, VeriSign, VMware, Xerox, and NetApp. Her work has been published on Forbes, Fortune, Gala-Global, Multilingual, and many more industry forums. Schlegel was awarded as Most Impactful Woman in Technology by Analytics Insight 2020, Schlegel was awarded as Top Business Woman to admire in 2021, by CIO LOOK. Additional awards, and publications can be found at www.trulyglobalbusiness.com where she exposes her award winning book Truly Global. You can follow Schlegel on Twitter or Instagram @annapapallona
We are very excited about your presentations at the ATA conference. Will you tell us more about your experience in the translation and localization industry?
30 years in it! I co-founded Women in Localization, and have been both as a General Manager on the vendor side as well as the Corporate side in the Silicon Valley in California. In my presentation, I will talk about the changes, risks, wins, and learnings about my experience for the past 3 decades.
Will you give us a summary of your sessions “From Translator to Top Innovator” and “An Evolving Globalization Industry: A Conversation about Challenges and Solutions”?
In the session from “Translator to Top Innovator,” I will explore my career trajectory and the role of language in the success of a global product. By taking a look at the different language-related roles inside an enterprise, I will outline what groups a linguist can manage inside a corporation and the many jobs a linguist can lead–from all forms of translation to training deep artificial intelligence. This session will aim to inspire translators to become leaders in the translation and localization space. For my presentation “An Evolving Globalization Industry: A Conversation about Challenges and solutions,” I will discuss which methodologies and content strategies are necessary to launch hundreds of products, campaigns, and programs to reach over 140 countries. As the current head of globalization strategy at NetApp with over 10 years of experience in globalization, Edith Bendermacher has contemplated and successfully devised solutions to this very question. As vice president of Global Portfolio at NetApp, I interviewed Ms. Bendermacher about her team, the challenges facing the industry, and how they achieved best team recognition by Think Global Forum in 2019.
You currently work on localization and content strategy. What do you like most about the type of work that you do?
Seeing it all come together, from authoring to how products and technology move around the globe. If you can end up managing all teams, you have a winning combination that will propel the companies at the global stage, and be able to increase the international revenue in spades.
What inspired you to present at the ATA conference, and what is the most important takeaway from your presentations that you will want for attendees?
I was invited and it is a dream come true! The most important takeaway is that if I did it, starting as the owner of a translation company, so can you. You can offer a lot to major corporations wishing to go global. It is often not well understood, especially when they are at their beginning stages. You can help them organize it all, and make the company very successful.