Jianjing Zhang
Project Manager
Jianjing Zhang is the PM of ROAR. During college, she attended a Chinese culture club, which sparked her insight into spreading culture. This experience led her to the field of localization. Therefore, after graduating from UMass Amherst with a bachelor’s degree in Linguistics and Chinese, she chose to continue her linguistic journey. Jianjing is now a second year TLM student at MIIS. She is passionate about learning new things, and she is currently learning Japanese. In her spare time, she enjoys playing games, dancing, and cooking. At ROAR, she and her team are excited to share amazing insights and interviews about localization.
Aaron Long
Podcast Producer
Aaron is an overly optimistic and energetic lover of learning and connecting with people. He enjoys working with technology and may or may not have tried to be a YouTuber in the past. A creative at heart, he likes to make digital media and is known to try his hand at writing a story or two.
At MIIS, he seeks to develop his language skills (primarily in Japanese but in German as well) alongside his project management capabilities as he prepares to seek careers in the tech side of localization. He’s always down to chat, especially if you want comic book recommendations, so shoot him a message on Teams!
Rachel Li
Podcast Host
Rachel’s journey began in the vibrant China Great Bay area, where she connected local start-ups with international investors as an interpreter. Since then, she has donned many hats in the language industry—linguist, LQA, PM, and so much more she would try on. She’s pursuing a dual Master’s degree in Conference Interpretation and Localization Management at MIIS.
Rachel loves to explore innovative tools that turbocharge workflows for everyone. She values building meaningful conversations between parties of different interests. She is the interpreter who embraces AI for terminology management and the hopeful tech girl who cherishes human transcreation and has strong opinions about questionable MT subtitles on streaming platforms (looking at you Amazon Prime 👀).
As the host of ROAR Podcast, Rachel aspires to bring in different voices and interesting souls in the localization industry, and together with the audience, dive deep into the past, presence, and future of localization. She will also mention that she makes a mean harvest bowl salad with homemade hummus at least once in the podcast.
Lyra Yuan
Markeing Specialist
Lyra is a second-year TLM student. As a language lover, she experienced many roles related to languages: from interpreter to machine translation linguist, from subtitle translator to localization project coordinator, and now she is preparing for her career in the L10N industry. Just like her ISFP personality, she often acts like a little artist: she enjoys playing the guitar, listening to Indie music, keeping a whimsy diary, and walking on foggy beaches, which gives her a lot of inspirations. As the marketing specialist in the ROAR team, she is eager to leverage her creativity to bring the voices of localization to wider audience.
Kayla Gade
Web Specialist
Kayla is passionate about combining her love of science and language within the localization field. After completing her undergraduate degree in Spanish Translation/Interpretation and Public Health, she spent 5 years teaching English in Japan through the Japan Exchange and Teaching (JET) Program before coming to MIIS to study her Master’s in Translation and Localization Management. In her free time, she enjoys going to the beach, trying new foods, and exploring.
