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| Merle D. Tenney
International and Linguistic Product Management
Merle@MerleTenney.com +1 408 318-0843 Skype: merletenney SUMMARY
• Manager, designer, and developer of software and services for the international marketplace.
• Solid understanding of functional and linguistic requirements and enabling technologies for diverse languages and cultures.
• Developed linguistically sophisticated tools for readers, writers, and translators in major European and Asian languages.
• Led internationalization and localization of platforms and applications on Windows, Macintosh, and Palm to schedule and budget.
• Knowledgeable of world languages and writing systems; proficient in Spanish and French; lived in Europe and Latin America; worked extensively in Asia.
• Able to manage execution of myriad production details without losing sight of big picture.
• Genuine, principled people person who values contributions of others and leads by example.
• Creative, far-sighted, open-minded, adaptive, energetic, resourceful, persuasive, supportive.
• Committed to looking after the best interests of the company and its customers.
• Committed to setting realistic expectations and then doing whatever it takes to meet them.
• Committed to making the technologies that are changing our world fully available to users around the world.
EXPERIENCE
Chief Technology Officer and Co-Founder MyRoar, Inc. Sunnyvale, California 2009 - 2010
Provided technology leadership for question answering-based enterprise search solution and underlying natural language processing (NLP) components. Developed product roadmap and led product management of early milestones. Developed presentation, website, and due diligence materials and pitched to potential investors. Vetted and selected advisors and professional team, including corporate attorney, banker, recruiter, and graphic designer.
• Recruited amazing development team, including four PhDs, all working for sweat equity. • Introduced professional software development tools and processes, including software development life cycle (SDLC), software configuration management (SCM), bug and feature triage, and team collaboration tools. Director of Product Marketing, Linguistic Products ABBYY USA Milpitas, California
2008-2009
Led product requirements definition and product marketing in North America and Far East for Lingvo electronic dictionaries and future linguistic products. Researched total addressable market (TAM), served available market (SAM), market segments, and competition, and developed regional market requirements document (MRD). Researched and developed content licensing opportunities with American dictionary publishers. Led product marketing, go-to-market, public relations, and viral marketing activities. • Opened promising new developer markets with Lingvo Engine and Lingvo Server products. • Enabled adaptation of Lingvo dictionaries to American markets with definition of English and Spanish dialect requirements and development of dialect assessment tool. • Introduced Lingvo consumer product to higher ed market through successful email and web promotion to Russian foreign language students. Translation Technology Advisor
Monster Venture Partners Bellevue, Washington
2007 - 2008
Provide consulting to Monster Venture Partners and MVP portfolio and incubation companies on natural language processing (NLP) technologies, in particular, machine translation (MT) and computer-aided translation (CAT). Perform due diligence of and manage relationships with technology partners.
• Encapsulated current language coverage and future development priorities of MT providers through detailed data analysis of 83 MT language pairs and 200 leading world languages.
• Provided qualitative assessment of rule-based machine translation (RBMT) and statistical machine translation (SMT) providers with competitive analysis of seven MT systems against eight representative language pairs.
• Created in-depth backgrounder on use of crowdsourcing methods with translation, including community translation frameworks and projects in content translation and software localization.
Internationalization Program Manager, Consultant
Yahoo! Sunnyvale, California
2007 Managed virtual team to add internationalization and Unicode support to PHP 5.3. Added locale-based internationalization support via International Components for Unicode (ICU). Implemented Unicode support by testing and debugging existing PHP multibyte string functions with UTF-8 and by adding new string functions designed to work correctly with grapheme clusters.
• Recruited, vetted, and managed world-class development and test teams in America and Asia.
• Managed and contributed to specification writing, test case development, and developer documentation of enhanced international PHP functionality.
• Contributed to PHP open source codebase and additions to PHP Extension Community Library (PECL) in collaboration with Zend and Live Nation developers.
Senior Program Manager, Natural Language Group Microsoft Redmond, Washington
2006–2007
Led design and development of writing assistance functions for Microsoft Office products across multiple user languages. Introduced framework for diverse reference content, coupled with powerful reference integration and application accessibility, as technology focus area. Provided initial specification of English as a Second Language (ESL) reference support in Office.
• Laid groundwork for cross-company coordination of international and linguistic functional development, based on comprehensive, user-oriented typology of text tools.
• Architected Rich Reference framework for extending, integrating, and navigating diverse lexical resources developed by Microsoft and independent dictionary publishers.
• Assured selection of most suitable ESL dictionary provider through detailed qualitative and quantitative evaluation of five leading English learners’ dictionaries. • Supported transition of natural language processing (NLP) framework from monolithic API to more serviceable component APIs as Program Manager for Lexical Services Platform.
International Product Manager
AppVector San Jose, California 2002–2005
Led design and development of dynamic text service framework for key software products on multiple platforms. Developed initial modules for traditional and innovative text services.
• Supported host application integration through active and passive interface mechanisms.
• Enabled integration with framework through plug-in APIs for general text services (exploration, inputting, editing, formatting, and rewriting).
Senior Manager, International Development Palm
Sunnyvale, California 2000–2002
Managed all aspects of international development for Palm OS system software and Palm Desktop application software (Windows and Macintosh clients). Provided platform support for all markets and devices, both Palm-branded and Palm Powered (OEM) products.
• Guaranteed timely, effective coordination among Palm international stakeholders by establishing and directing cross-functional International Management Team (comprised of product management, product engineering, project management, SQA, and localization managers).
• Established relationships with Asian partners to develop product feature specifications, user interface localizations, and reference terminologies and managed their execution on schedule and within budget.
• Opened Palm market to China and Taiwan through design and development of Simplified and Traditional Chinese versions of Palm OS.
• Facilitated licensee OS extensions for new locales by revamping Palm OS locale system, with independent language and country controls, additional locale-sensitive data types, and licensee-customizable locale source data.
• Developed technical plan for transitioning Palm OS character support from legacy encodings to Unicode encoding standard (UTF-8), while preserving backward compatibility for legacy applications and data sets.
International Technology Evangelist Apple Computer Cupertino, California 1996–2000
Gathered and championed developer requirements for Mac OS internationalization, localization, text, and font technologies. Explained and promoted international Mac OS technologies to worldwide Macintosh developer community. Organized and presented developer briefings and workshops around the world and sessions of Apple Worldwide Developers Conference.
• Led roll-out of new Mac OS and Mac OS X international technologies—input methods, text services, Unicode, legacy character encodings, fonts, text layout, locales, and localization—including extensive remote management of regional roll-outs.
• Extended developer outreach efforts worldwide by managing Asian and European Developer Relations teams in content and logistical preparations for local technology briefings and workshops.
• Provided comprehensive set of multilingual Mac OS releases to developers for compatibility testing by way of multilingual developer DVD series for legacy and contemporary OS releases (beta and GM).
• Presented Apple’s Unicode transition story in professional venues, including International Unicode Conference papers and featured article in Multilingual Computing & Technology.
International Engineering Manager Claris (now FileMaker) Santa Clara, California
1991–1996 Supervised internationalization of all Claris applications and supported tight-schedule worldwide localization of applications into over 25 languages. Led design and implementation of text services and general international functionality (sorting, casing, date and time formats, number and currency formats, page dimensions, etc.) in Claris applications.
• Effectively managed domestic and international teams to internationalize and localize Claris products for world markets—over 400 world-ready SKUs in over 25 languages.
• Saved Claris over $500K per year by renegotiating contract with linguistics technology vendor to go from per-unit royalty to blanket royalty for licensed technologies.
• Put teeth into licensing contract for spelling, thesaurus, and hyphenation technologies by writing binding, linguistically based feature definitions and performance specifications—first such contractual specifications in industry.
• Guaranteed quality of spelling checking solution by developing innovative multilingual test suites and protocols to measure quality of spelling recognition and correction functions.
Linguistic Development Director Microlytics Pittsford, New York
1990–1991
Managed development of OEM language products for major European languages, including spelling checkers, thesauruses, and multilingual word and phrase dictionaries. Assembled multilingual textual and lexical databases for product development and quality assurance.
• Added professionalism to product development through institution of dictionary editing protocols, editing tools, and quality controls.
• Validated competitive readiness of products by developing test methodologies and testing against competitive products.
• Managed to budget in selecting and contracting with linguistic database providers.
• Addressed special needs of national markets with specification and development of dialectal spelling checkers for English, Spanish, French, and Portuguese.
Vice President, Development, and Founder Lexpertise Linguistic Software Vaumarcus, Switzerland 1988–1990 Managed American and European versions of MacProof and PC Proof, early grammar and style checkers for writers working in their native language. Managed French-native and German-native versions of Bilingual MacProof and Bilingual PC Proof, seminal language interference checkers for writers using English as a Second Language. Managed development teams on two continents; developed market requirements documents (MRDs) and functional specifications documents (FSDs). • Delivered accelerated ramp-up of American and European product lines. In first year:
- Added products for IBM PC platform alongside initial Macintosh products;
- Created second language product line, new to Lexpertise, first in industry;
- Developed and launched eight retail products, after starting with two;
- Invented tag-in-place error correction mode, similar to wavy underline editing mode later implemented in Microsoft Word.
• Provided executive leadership as Board Member of Lexpertise Linguistic Software and as Vice President and Board Member of American affiliate, Lexpertise USA.
Product Manager, Translation and Writing Tools Automated Language Processing Systems Provo, Utah and Cortaillod, Switzerland 1982–1988
As Product Manager of the Translation Support System, a multilevel interactive language translation system, responsible for product design, as well as marketing and sales support. Launched Writing Products Division and served as its Product Manager. Also performed linguistic research, linguistic development, and dictionary development for writing and proofing products. As Director of Terminology, in Switzerland, acquired rights and supervised conversion of electronic versions of print dictionaries for use with translation products.
• Design and management of significant innovations in computer-aided translation:
- World’s first Translation Memory system for recycling edited sentence translations;
- Text-based terminology discovery tools and integrated dictionary editor;
- First automated multi-target terminology translation system (AutoTerm).
• Design and development of significant innovations in writing and proofing tools:
- First proofing product for Macintosh (MacProof), fully integrated with MacWrite;
- Advanced editing system for ESL reader accommodation and translation pre-editing, developed under contract for IBM;
- First test specification and test corpus to measure linguistic QA of proofing tools.
EDUCATION
Brigham Young University. Mathematics major; Linguistics and Spanish minors, Honors.
PUBLICATIONS
Presented and published papers on topics related to writing tools, translation tools, applied linguistics, and software internationalization. Forums include Linguistic Society of America, International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Localization World, ASLIB Conference on Translating and the Computer, American Translators Association, International Unicode Conference, and Multilingual Computing & Technology.
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