Episode
He Localized Windows, Skype & Teams at Microsoft for 20 Years. Now He's Saving Dying Languages.
- Podcast
- Localization Fireside Chat
- Published
- Mar 31, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 3009
- Processing state
not_requested- Canonical source
- https://localization-fireside-chat.simplecast.com/
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Summary
Soeren Eberhardt spent over 20 years at Microsoft contributing to global launches of Windows, Skype, and Microsoft Teams. Today he's Localization Director at Translation Commons and contributing to the Mayan Languages Preservation Project, using synthetic data generation to build machine translation for Q'eqchi' and other under-resourced languages. In this episode Robin and Soeren cover the full arc: from stumbling into localization via comparative literature, to scaling brand voice across 39 languages, to why AI is only as smart as the people who wield it.