Who we are

A small team based between Oulu, Helsinki and beyond — building the conference we always wanted to attend.

Dates: February 22–24, 2027
Venue: Rio Live
City: Oulu, Finland
Format: Two days of presentations, panels and meaningful connections

Organizers

Tarja Karjalainen
FOUNDER
Tarja has spent more than a decade shaping how products speak to the world. She has built localization and multilingual content strategies for companies of every scale, from enterprise organizations to fast-moving start-ups and scale-ups. She believes the best international experiences emerge when people, clear processes, and data come together. In 2023, Tarja founded UnlocFinland to build a Nordic localization community, and over the past three years, the UnlocFinland team have brought Nordic and Baltic localization professionals together through hands-on workshops, peer-led sessions, and candid career conversations.
LinkedIn
Danilo Monaco
HEAD OF SALES
Danilo is an experienced sales manager with strong leadership skills and a "politely relentless" drive to get things done. Drawing on deep experience in the localization industry, he combines sharp customer focus with the ability to turn complex issues into practical action. A certified Business Coach, Danilo has worked as a sales consultant and cultural trainer across the language, advertising, and CT industries, and has spent recent years coaching and mentoring entrepreneurs, talents, and managers toward professional excellence.
LinkedIn
Henriikka Helistö
HEAD OF EVENTS
If it takes language, UX and a bit of cultural intuition to make a product feel at home abroad, Henriikka has been doing it for over 25 years. She led UX writing and localization at Polar and managed vendor operations for Oura's globalization team, always with the user in mind. She has just started a new chapter in gaming, joining Fingersoft's QA team. At UnlocFinland, she brings the same hands-on approach to the practical side of things, making sure everything runs smoothly behind the scenes.
LinkedIn

Advisory board

Daniel Goldschmidt
ADVISORY BOARD MEMBER
Daniel Goldschmidt has spent 25+ years helping software speak the languages of the people who use it. He was a senior Software Engineer at Google, led Internationalization for Microsoft's Cloud and Enterprise Division, and co-founded RIGI Localization Solutions. Today he consults, speaks at international events, and teaches computer science and physics to middle and high school students, because he believes investing in the next generation is worth at least as much as investing in the next release.
Melanie Heighway
ADVISORY BOARD MEMBER
Melanie has worked in localisation for more than 20 years, on both the vendor and client side, including Appen, SDL, Cochlear and Invoice2go, before nearly seven years at Atlassian leading product localisation and internationalisation, and now Canva, where she leads the localisation enablement team. Across her career, Melanie's focused on moving localisation out of reactive delivery and into a strategic, scalable product capability. Her guiding question isn't simply how to localise faster, but why we're localising in the first place, and how we should do it.
Francesca Sorrentino
ADVISORY BOARD MEMBER
Francesca is Localization Director at Phrase and manager of the Loc Leaders community. Francesca has been in the localization industry for 17+ years, with experience spanning the video game industry, language service providers, consulting, events, and community management. In her current role, Francesca designs effective localization and multilingual content strategies and processes, while leveraging the latest technology and advocating for knowledge sharing to advance the industry.
Christiane Bark
ADVISORY BOARD MEMBER
Christiane (Nane to her friends) began her career in translation through volunteering with Plan International in Germany, which led to a medical translation job in Toronto, followed by four years working in the occasionally surreal and decidedly unromantic world of online dating in London. She then spent almost eight years as Head of Localisation at a language-learning EdTech start-up, helping it grow from start-up to scale-up and through its eventual exit. After a stint as an independent consultant, she joined London-based FinTech start-up Currensea as its first-ever Localisation Manager, building the localisation function from the ground up.
Jussi Kyllönen
ADVISORY BOARD MEMBER
Jussi's passion for working with people led him to a career in social services. He currently works in the Finnish public sector as an in-house educator and coordinator, and over the years he has broadened his competencies to the fields of futures research, foresight and development, and management sciences.