Maria Schnell

Maria joined SDL in 2006 and is currently leading Language Services production, this includes 1,400 Translators as well as 400 Technical and Supply Chain specialists across 30+ locations world-wide.

In their day-to-day, her team is focused on delivering robust, predictable quality output in an increasingly granular number of target languages within rapidly decreasing timelines across the full portfolio of SDL’s customers. At the same time, all in-house and in-country specialists have been, and continue to be, core to augmenting the traditional localization roles within a machine-enabled world and thus enable our customers to get closer to their local target groups by offering experiences relevant to their end customers, wherever they are.

Maria plays a pivotal role in driving both the day-to-day as well as the transformation towards a data-driven, machine-first, human-centered localization process by building industry leading excellence that delivers tangible value to the customer. She also actively drives SDL’s Campus initiative, partnering with the academic world to grow and nurture localization talent world-wide.

Being a studied translator graduating from the Universities of Heidelberg and Lisbon, her career started in market research in 2002. She gathered first localization experience as a project manager in SDL’s Stuttgart office. In 2010 she took on her first leadership role leading the German operational and commercial teams. In 2015 she moved to an operational role, leading production teams in Europe. After that, she was promoted to leading global production in 2016. She was appointed to the Executive team in her current role in 2018.