Marc Pomerleau is a certified translator and university lecturer. After earning a bachelor’s degree in Latin American studies and a graduate diploma in translation from McGill University, he obtained a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in translation studies from Université de Montreal. His research focuses on language issues in the Iberian Peninsula and Latin America, most notably on Romance languages, minority languages, the history of translation and the relationship between language, power and politics. A lecturer at Université de Montréal and Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières (UQTR), he teaches translation, editing, translation theory and introductory classes to foreign languages and cultures. His working languages are French, English, Spanish, Portuguese and Catalan, and he has studied a dozen other languages, including Arabic, Creole, Galician and Italian.

Mark Hachem is an actor, director, YouTuber and social media influencer, who merges his love of culture and language with the world of entertainment, to bring laughter, inspire, and bring people together from around the world and celebrate diversity.

Antoine Clerc-Renaud is an editor, author and video game journalist. He focuses on the history of this medium. He has written–and co-written–five books on this subject.

With her teaching motto “Pour apprendre à parler, il faut parler !” (“To learn how to talk, you have to talk!”) Léa is an advocate of experiential learning. She holds a Master’s degree from la Sorbonne university in Linguistics and she has taught more than 5000 hours of online lessons since her debut in 2013. Léa recently formed a team of linguists and developers and together they launched the Staircase, “A Home for Language Learners” with language courses and tutors available for French and Spanish lessons. A linguist at heart, she will be with us at LangFest for sharing her latest academic research.

Lori Lucas is originally from Chicago where she was exposed to Yiddish and studied French. She lived for many years in Brussels, Belgium where she taught AP/IB English literature and composition at the International School of Brussels before moving to Boulder, Colorado where she now resides and teaches Jewish-American Fiction and Shakespeare at the University of Colorado. Lori has a passion for art, travel, language and literature. Her volume poetry entitled Chiaroscuro is in its 4th printing.

Dr Kai L. Chan is a Distinguished Fellow at INSEAD. Previously he was a special adviser to the UAE federal government on competitiveness and statistics, where he focused on that country’s positioning on global performance indices. Prior to his stint in the UAE, Dr Chan served as an associate and the in-house economist for a consumer finance merchant banking firm in Manhattan. Before that, he worked in the Singapore office of a global management consulting firm. Chan’s expertise/research cover education, income distribution, migration, government & policy, and performance measurement. He is the creator of the Power Language Index, Gender Progress Index, and Intelligence Capital Index. Dr Chan holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Toronto and PhD from Princeton University. Kai grew up in Toronto, Canada, but currently resides in Montreal. He speaks English, French, Cantonese, Mandarin and German, and is currently learning Russian.

Tetsu Yung was raised in a multilingual/multicultural setting, which allowed him to be exposed to 5 languages by the age of 6 and 10 languages by the age of 20. Today, Tetsu is fluent in English, French, Japanese, Mandarin and Spanish. However, as the father of 3 children, aged 7, 5 and 2, Tetsu’s mission now is not to learn more languages, but to raise his kids to become multilingual just like himself. He is the author of the eBook “Pampers to Polyglots: 7 ideas for raising multilinguals like me”.

James Corl is a language loving, polyglot teenager. Starting with Italian when he was 12, he has since gone on to learn French (B2), Spanish (B2), and Chinese (A2), in addition to his native English. James is a tireless advocate of greater understanding between the international language learning community and academia, believing that both have unique perspectives that can help all learners throughout the world. He became the first (and only) student to present at the New York State Association of Foreign Language Teachers’ (NYSAFLT) Annual Conference in 2017, where he gave a presentation titled “Say Goodbye to Shy: A Student’s Perspective in the Classroom”, which outlined his independent language learning alongside his learning in the traditional classroom. He has also written articles for some of the most prestigious blogs in language learning, such as Fluent in 3 Months, I Will Teach You A Language, and more.

I’ve taught linguistics at various universities and published a number of academic papers on the vocabulary of French. I then moved on to IT (Information Science) in which I also published four books on operating systems. Lately I have come back to linguistics and the teaching of French, English and Spanish.

Vladis Lim, born in Moscow, Russia, has had a tendency, since his teenage years, to acquire notions of new foreign languages through his numerous international encounters and passion for world’s cinema, music and cuisine. Settling in Montreal in 2013, he has been a journalist for a Francophone African media outlet since 2015. An engineering school graduate in France, with additional training in economics and sociology, he is interested in international relations and economic, political and cultural exchanges between Asian and African countries. He speaks Russian, English, French, German, Spanish, Swahili and Indonesian, and is learning around ten other languages such as Mandarin, Wolof and Tamil.