CAPSTAN - Key Persons
Adrien joined cApStAn in July 2017 as a translation technologist and has studied translation in Brussels and Leuven where he chose to follow a master in translation technology with a focus on CAT tools use, subtitling and terminology. Having tinkered with computers since his childhood, Adrien self-taught himself how to service computers both hardware and software wise and is also a keen Linux user. Adrien speaks French, English, Dutch and a bit of German and Japanese. Adrien also work at the RTBF (Belgium public television) where he subtitles the network programs for deaf and hard of hearing persons.
Andrea is one of cApStAn's founders. He was exposed to a multicultural environment from early on, living and studying in Canada, Italy, Australia, Greece and Belgium. He earned a degree in business engineering from the Solvay Business School, Brussels, in 1981, did a stint with a major multinational (Procter & Gamble) but switched to self-employment in 1987, as a freelance translator and speaker. In 1999 he participated in the first cycle of PISA as an Italian verifier, and quickly acquired a taste for the development of linguistic quality assurance procedures. In 2000 he joined Steve Dept to found and co-direct cApStAn. Andrea supervises financial operations and R&D efforts for the group.
Anna was born and raised in Latvia. In 2012, she moved to Belgium for her Erasmus studies and internship, and since then never left the heart of Europe. Anna graduated from Vidzeme University in Latvia (BA in Political Science) and KU Leuven in Belgium (MA in European Studies). As someone with a boundless curiosity and willingness to learn and explore, she had a chance to work in a wide range of professional roles at international institutions and corporations (AIESEC, European Youth Press, Abbott, European Commission, Permanent Representation of Malta to the EU, Kantar Public, to name a few) as well as to contribute to various companies/media organizations as a freelance journalist and a translator/reviewer. In March 2023, she joined cApStAn as a Project Manager. She speaks Latvian, English, Russian and Dutch, and has a passive knowledge of French and Polish.
Job Titles:
- Business Development Manager
Born and brought up in the "City of Joy", Kolkata, India, Anubhav started his academical career in Finance & Account but eventually found joy in Sales & Marketing. To realize his dreams, he moved to Lille, France in 2017 to pursue Masters' in Management with a specialization in Marketing. His professional stint started as a Global Sales Manager in Belgium, where he continued to rub shoulders with people from different cultures and countries. Anubhav himself can speak various Indian languages, English, plus a little bit of French and Dutch. He joined Capstan in 2023 as a Business Development and Marketing Manager to handle translation projects and marketing communications. He believes success is a result of hard-work and good luck. When not working, Anubhav is found cooking or playing call of duty.
Aurélie was born and raised in France. After graduating in translation of English and German at the University of Grenoble in France, she spent several years as an in-house translator based in Luxembourg, Ireland and, from 2008, Belgium, working at translation agencies and a public research centre. She later embarked on a freelance career, and started to perform translation work for cApStAn. In 2021, she joined Capstan Translate project management team and is now taking care of translation projects for a range of international organisations and universities.
Devasmita Ghosh joined cApStAn in September 2017 and now leads the new business development and marketing efforts in the organisation. Born in Kolkata - India, Devasmita completed her MBA in Marketing and has worked in the IT and media sectors in various client-facing roles. Prior to joining cApStAn, she was managing the sales team at one of CNBC India's digital advertising division. She has worked with some of the top global companies and media agencies to help them plan their online advertising campaigns in India. Devasmita speaks fluent English and various Indian languages and hopes to be fluent in French and Dutch one day!
Job Titles:
- Senior Project Manager, Cross - Cultural Survey Translation and Adaptation
Eli holds a Belgian MA equivalence for a degree in Cultural Anthropology and has continued her professional development in the field of cross-cultural survey translation and localization, and Total Survey Error framework. Since 2000, Eli has participated in numerous cApStAn linguistic quality assurance operations. She is the lead project manager for linguistic quality assurance and control operations in large-scale surveys including OECD/PISA, OECD/TALIS and the European Social Survey.
Emel was born in Turkey and has lived in many different multicultural cities around Europe. She studied American Culture and Literature at Hacettepe University in Ankara, and completed her Masters in Luxemburg, in the field of Learning and Communication in Multilingual and Multicultural Contexts. Emel has worked as a freelance translator and as a language tutor, including for Campus Europea. Furthermore, she was employed as a Content Specialist for a leading video gaming company in Paris. She joined the cApStAn team in July 2015, where she assists with projects such as PISA, PIRLS and TALIS. Emel speaks Turkish, English, French and Dutch.
Job Titles:
- Project Manager and Senior Translator
Eva is French and Belgian. She was born in Brussels but grew up in the South of France. She studied in Nîmes, Aix-en-Provence and Liverpool before coming back to Brussels to do a Master's degree in Multidisciplinary Translation. She combined her passion for literature with language skills and specialized in literary translation. After graduating magna cum laude in July 2015, she started to work at cApStAn as an internal translator. Since then, she has been involved in managing a growing number of projects such as PISA 2018, PIAAC Cycle 2, various OECD translation projects and projects with IPSOS MORI. She speaks French, English and Italian.
Grace DeLee grew up in the United States. She studied Japanese and Linguistics at the University of Massachusetts before going on to get a Master's Degree in Translation at SOAS University of London. Prior to joining cApStAn in 2018 she worked as a senior translator for UZABASE Inc., a top financial media start-up in Tokyo.
Fields in which cApStAn has developed expertise in preparing multilingual and multicultural data collection and assessment instruments
Jan was born in Leuven, Belgium and holds a Master in Law. He joined cApStAn in 2019, after a career as legal consultant, financial planner, credit manager, treasury manager, finance director and corporate treasurer, ending up as consultant. Jan's activity spanned across a broad range of businesses in Belgium, France, Switzerland and the USA. Meanwhile Jan, who speaks Dutch, French and English, worked as a translator and remained in contact with cApStAn. He started with cApStAn as Finance and HR officer, and became CEO in June 2021.
Josiane was born in France and raised in Greece in a multilingual and multicultural environment. She studied in Strasbourg and obtained her Master's Degree in Translation in Montpellier. She has lived in France, Greece and Belgium and worked as a translator, a teacher and a project manager. In 2013 she joined cApStAn as a verifier and started working as a Project manager in 2015 on large-scale surveys and questionnaires like PISA, TALIS, ESS, SHARE-HCAP, Flash-Eurobarometer surveys, etc.
Laura Wäyrynen has a Master's Degree in German and Spanish translation from University of Turku (Finland). Prior to joining cApStAn she worked as a Translation Project Manager in AAC Global, as a UI Localization Design Engineer at Nokia and as a self-employed language consultant and translator. Since early 2015, she has worked as the Operations Director in the cApStAn office in Philadelphia, USA.
Job Titles:
- Assistant Project Manager
Liruo grew up in Nanjing, China, and holds a bachelor's degree in Spanish Language and Literature, along with a master's in…
Job Titles:
- Lead Translation Technologist
- Linguist, Lead Translation Technologist
Manuel is a Galician translator and linguist by education and a self-taught language engineer and polyglot. He works as a translation technologist, specializing in terminology management, localization engineering, CAT tool consultancy and QA automation. He drives cApStAn's R&D effort, dedicated to researching ways to optimize cApStAn's processes and developing verification-oriented prototypes (QA checker, a TM lookup engine, etc.).
Morgane grew up in a multicultural household. Her mother is Belgian and her father is Togolese. Seing both cultures and hearing differents languages in the everyday life created in her an interest in learning new languages and news ways to communicate. Passionate about audiovisuals, she studied at the Université Libre de Bruxelles and did a master in translation technology with a focus on CAT tools use, subtiltling and terminology. She speaks French, English, Spanish and is always trying to learn new things. She is currently focused on learning Arabic and Japanese.
Musab Hayatli grew up in Syria and studied English and Linguistics in Damascus, Syria, and Oxford, England. Musab is a certified translator, and a member of the Institute of Translation & Interpreting in the UK. He joined cApStAn in 2011 after a stint as a senior translator and language consultant in Good Harbor Consulting in the UAE, and prior to that, he was the Arabic Editor of Forced Migration Review, an Oxford University journal. Musab is the driving force behind cApStAn's expansion plans in the Americas.
Nela, a Montenegro native, moved to Belgium in 2011, embracing a multicultural life at SHAPE. After studying Translation in Montenegro, she earned a Master's in Multilingual Mediation and Communication from VUB in Belgium. Nela interned at cApStAn during her MA and joined full-time in 2022 as Assistant Project Manager and Business Development Manager. In 2021, she briefly worked as a translator for a political party in Montenegro. Fluent in South Slavic languages and English, she's actively improving her French and Spanish.
Job Titles:
- Senior Project Manager, External Human Resources Director
Born in Italy, Roberta graduated from the Translation and Interpretation School of Milan. In 1992, her passion for multiculturalism brought her to Brussels, the very heart of Europe. She worked as a Senior Italian Language Specialist in a translation company, then continued as a freelance translator, instructor and verifier. In 2010, she joined cApStAn as a Project Manager. She has coordinated a number of projects (IEA/TIMSS, IEA/PIRLS, ICILS, ESENER2, EU-MIDIS II, PISA assessment materials). Since November 2016, she has been Director of cApStAn's External Human Resources (EHR, also known as ‘vendors'). She speaks Italian, English, French, Dutch, German and Spanish.
Job Titles:
- Accounts and Office Management Lead
Savita Gauchan is from Nepal. She served as a general administrator in a consultancy firm in Kathmandu. In 2001, she relocated to Germany, where she learned German and earned a degree as a commercial clerk. Following her move to Belgium in 2006, she continued her career, working as a commercial administrator for seven years in a subsidiary of a German enterprise. Since June 1, 2015, she has been a part of cApStAn, overseeing finance and office management.
Stefanos is half British, half Greek and was born and grew up in Thessaloniki, Greece. After studying (perhaps not surprisingly) translation and foreign languages at the Ionian University, he completed an internship in Germany, as a translation project manager in the engineering field. He then pursued a Master's degree in Computational Linguistics at the University of Tübingen, and after shortly training as a translator specialized in automotive engineering, he returned to project management, this time in the life sciences field. He joined cApStAn in October 2023 as a Senior Project Manager. He is fluent in Greek, English, German and has a smattering of Italian.
Steve is one of cApStAn's founders. He received his education in English, Dutch, French and German but he is essentially an autodidact and a field practitioner. In 1998, Steve was sought out to organise the translation verification of PISA 2000 instruments and, since cApStAn's creation in 2000, Steve has supervised linguistic quality assurance in PISA and in over 35 international surveys and polls. His translatability assessment methodology is applied in small and large multilingual projects in both the private and the public sector. Steve is the driving force behind cApStAn's adaptive strategy.
Tanya was born and raised in Ukraine. She has two degrees, in Finance and in Pedagogy. After all, her love to Ukrainian and languages in general made a great input in her choice of her current professional path. In 2006, she started working for cApStAn as a verifier for the Ukrainian survey materials. In 2022, she joined cApStAn as a full-time employee. She speaks Ukrainian, English, Russian, Czech and tries her luck in learning French.
Valentina Nardo grew up in Italy and became a proofreader for different publishing companies at a very early age. While studying to earn her masters in Music, she was an editor for liMes, the leading journal of geopolitics in Italy. In Philadelphia, she was a language instructor at Temple University for eight years. There she also earned her masters in TESOL, primarily researching second language acquisition and lexicalization patterns of bilingual speakers. Valentina also likes programming and sometimes freelances as a database architect.