Meet the 3di team — over 80 years of combined experience in technical communication and localization

"A very unique and specialist team of technical linguists and localization specialists"

Our clients over the years have described the team at 3di as "one of the best secrets in the industry". Well, we thought we should change that a little and give you a first-hand insight into our team's experience and knowledge.

Paul Ballard, Managing Director

Paul established 3di in 2002 to combine his two areas of professional passion: his belief in the value of well-designed technical information and his commitment to making it easier to deliver multi-lingual versions of products to new markets.
After completing his degree in Urban and Regional Planning (of all things) in 1990, he spent 4 years selling and project managing with Rank Xerox before finding his spiritual home in a small but well-established technical authoring and translation company, TMS. Here he was first introduced to the Information Mapping methodology, and he has been an evangelist ever since. Over seven years, as TMS grew, so did Paul's experience: selling, resourcing and project-managing technical communication projects for large organisations across Europe. When the TMS team succumbed to the bursting of the dot.com bubble in 2001, Paul resolved to establish and build 3di around a team of experts, designing and consistently delivering successful projects for customers who needed and valued effective technical communication and product localization. Seven years on … so far, so good.

Visit our YouTube channel to watch a short video of Paul describing our technical authoring and localization services.

Clive Lewis, Localization Business Development Manager

Clive has over twenty years experience in sales, development and delivery of outsourced services to private and public sector customers in the UK and overseas. His career highlights include the set up, development, and directorship of the technical translation and localization business, Kudos, in the mid nineties. During Clive's seven year tenure the business grew and developed into a major UK provider of localization services with a diverse client base that included software vendors, information content providers, and medical instrument manufacturers. More recently, Clive has been leading on business development for Capita Resourcing - part of Capita Group plc, the UK's leading outsourcing company. His responsibilities here have been consulting, developing and selling people development solutions for customers within the UK public sector. Clive brings a wealth of experience in client relationship development along with extensive knowledge of outsourcing in general, and localization/translation in particular.

Maan Mati, Head of Localization Operations

Maan started his localization career in 1989 with Lotus Development (now part of IBM). He is well-known in the industry and respected as an expert with extensive experience as a client and vendor of localization services. Maan has worked across all disciplines of localization projects, including as a QA engineer, senior software engineer, program manager, project manager and operations manager. His expertise and ability to deliver have taken Maan to Ireland (Lotus, SDL, Lionbridge and McAfee), the USA (Mendez and BGS), Belgium (Jonkers), Spain (Tek Translation) and finally to the UK, working for 3di. Maan was a founder member of Clockworks International, which was recognised as one of the fastest growing and most successful technical localization service providers in Ireland, if not the world.

Steve Reynolds, Head of Consulting

In 1991 Steve graduated from the first UK postgraduate course in technical communication. He then joined a team of technical authors at Andersen Consulting's software development centre in France, and later he was promoted to lead that team. Other Andersen projects, in France and the USA, gave him opportunities to develop his interests in other facets of technical communication, such as user interface design, multimedia training development, localization, web development and knowledge management. After leaving Andersen, Steve worked throughout Europe as a freelance technical author, developing documentation and various forms of online user assistance for a wide range of organisations.
At 3di, Steve's time is split between managing documentation projects, offering consultancy to our customers, and tracking the developments and trends in technical communication.

Rob Sexstone, Head of Localization Technology

Rob graduated in Computational Linguistics at the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST), and he began his career as a translator, localizer and test engineer for Alpnet Inc in the early '90s. In the late '90s Rob joined Kudos Information's localization division as a senior engineer, and he progressed from a QA lead role to being responsible for technical pre-sales for content development, web content management and software localization solutions. Rob, who teamed up with 3di in 2003, is passionate about language technology. His particular interests are translation automation (MT and CAT), quality assurance (linguistic and technical) and the software tools that support these processes.

Bryan Lade, Operations and Marketing Manager

Bryan graduated in Electronics and Electrical Engineering from the University of Hertfordshire and started his career at British Aerospace as a systems engineer. Moving to RS Components in 1995, he successfully undertook several roles including: product manager, e-commerce marketing manager and latterly as the company's content manager. In this last role, he managed a team of 40 responsible for developing the company's product information and documentation. With this team Bryan oversaw the successful implementation of a new content management system that radically improved the company's paper and online catalogues for 120,000 products. Overall, he has a wealth of experience in delivering successful technical communication solutions across SME and corporate organisations. Bryan joined 3di in 2009 to manage our sustained growth through strategic sales and marketing initiatives.

Daljit Hanspal, Senior Localization Engineer

Daljit graduated in Computing from the University of Luton and began his career as a junior localization engineer for SDL Ltd in 1996. In the late '90s Daljit joined Lionbridge UK Ltd (formerly MTL, Berlitz and Bowne Global Solutions) in the localization and e-learning division as a senior localization engineer. In this role, he provided production support for high-profile translation projects and developed core translation technology to support and improve production processes, especially for NETg and Motorola. In June 2006 Daljit joined the client side of the business with NETg International. He provided their localization partners worldwide with detailed technical support for e-learning content development, and he provided consultancy on how to improve localization processes. In June 2007 Daljit joined 3di as our Senior Localization Engineer.

Sarah Williams, Senior Project Manager

Sarah graduated from the Durham University with a first-class degree in Modern Languages and completed postgraduate training in technical translation at Kent University in 1997. A linguist by nature, she began her career as a translator for a specialist medical/pharmaceutical translation and writing company based in London. Sarah joined Parity Solutions in 2000 as a project manager, delivering translation and software localization projects for a wide variety of clients such as Oxford Instruments, Air Products, De La Rue and Gartner. Sarah joined the 3di team in 2005 as Senior Project Manager. This combination of hands-on translation skills and extensive project management experience has given her the ability to select the most appropriate translators and technologies for any given project and get the very best out of them. Many of our clients have come to rely on Sarah's efficient and responsive project management skills, which have earned her a well-deserved reputation for delivering high-quality work within challenging timeframes.