Ultralingua Team

Ben Cochran - Software Developer

Ben is a recent graduate of Carleton College where he majored in Computer Science and dabbled in Studio Art. He enjoys biking and making sculpture (though his small apartment doesn't allow for much of that).

At Ultralingua he tends to Mac, iPhone and iPad products (and a few others here an there). He likes to think about application design at every level, from the user interface to the low-level implementation.

Chris Ernt - Graphic & Interface Designer

Chris is a graduate of the University of Minnesota and the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. At Ultralingua, Chris works on designing user interfaces, making icons, and doing anything else that involves Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator. Outside of work, he enjoys DJing, making music, watching movies and tending to his vintage '71 Schwinn. His favorite typeface is Futura and his current favorite color (in hex code) is #387CC0.

Blake Howald - Computational Linguist

Blake is Ultralingua's multi-faceted resident computational linguist. Blake focuses primarily on Natural Language Processing (NLP)-based product research and development - in particular, algorithm (conjugators, decliners) and ULAPI development - but also assists in the management of the linguistics interns and business customer relations.

Blake is a native of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and received a B.A. in linguistics from the University of Pittsburgh, a J.D. from the University of Detroit Mercy School of Law and a Ph.D. in linguistics from Georgetown University. In addition to his work at Ultralingua, Blake adjuncts at the University of Minnesota, conducts primary research in computational semantics, pragmatics and discourse structure, walks his Catahoula Leopard Dog, and performs first-language acquisition experiments on his infant daughter. More on Blake’s research can be found here.

Chris Kuehl - Marketing Assistant

Chris is currently pursuing a degree in Marketing and International Business with an emphasis in German at the University of Minnesota. His passion for languages started when he started learning German, a language which he has studied since middle school. His combined interest in marketing and languages helps Chris succeed in his marketing assistant duties at Ultralingua.

Spending a semester abroad in Cologne, Germany for the fall of 2011, Chris had the opportunity to travel throughout Europe and experience many different cultures and languages. He used the Collins German-English Dictionary to help him with his university courses in German and communicating with his host family. A native of Appleton, Wisconsin, Chris enjoys soccer and playing guitar in his spare time. Traveling throughout Europe has also given him the “travel bug,” so he hopes to continue traveling internationally in the future.

Ashleigh Lincoln - Marketing and Communications Coordinator

Ashleigh oversees consumer marketing and communications at Ultralingua, working on public relations, marketing communications, and market research while supervising the intern program. If you talk to @ultralingua on twitter, facebook, or elsewhere online, you're probably talking to Ashleigh. She is a University of Minnesota graduate with a degree in Strategic Communication and a minor in Spanish.

Before coming to Ultralingua, Ashleigh worked at several non-profit organizations in the Minneapolis, MN area as well as a public relations agency in London. In her spare time, Ashleigh enjoys traveling internationally (thirteen countries and counting) and being outdoors. She lives in St. Paul, MN with her french bulldog Bianca.

Jeff Ondich - Chief Technology Officer

In 1997, Jeff Ondich was living the sporadically peaceful life of a professor of computer science at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota. That's when a friend asked Jeff to help develop a small electronic French-English dictionary. Before long, the little dictionary project became Ultralingua, Inc. As Ultralingua's owner and CTO, Jeff is author and maintainer of the core code driving Ultralingua's dictionary products, and has a hand in most of the user interfaces as well.

Jeff continues to teach at Carleton, where his students keep him up-to-date on the latest cool technologies. His main academic interests are similar to his Ultralingua interests: software engineering and natural language processing (how do you get a computer to do something useful with "natural" languages like English or French?). He is also venturing into location-based applications, with an emphasis on augmented reality.

Born and raised in St. Louis Park, Minnesota, Jeff received a B.A. in mathematics from St. Olaf College in 1983 and a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Minnesota in 1989. He returned to St. Olaf to teach for two years, after which he joined the faculty at Carleton in 1991. He lives in Northfield with his wife, son, daughter, three cats, and a ninety-pound dog. In his spare time, if any, he watches movies, goes on hikes (27 Minnesota State Parks so far), and plays the piano.

Shaun Reynolds - Senior Software Developer

Shaun was born and raised in rural Alaska, venturing "outside" for his college education. He holds a bachelor's degree in Computer Science from Carleton College, and has a decidedly entrepreneurial history, having founded a couple of successful companies in diverse industries. Most recently he has returned to Minnesota to work for Ultralingua.

He enjoys bringing this energy and experience to Ultralingua, working closely with the management and development teams to make sure that all of Ultralingua's software projects are well conceived, properly executed and much-loved. He is also tasked with ensuring that Ultralingua's development team attempts impossible tasks only when they will, in fact, be successfully completed. When wearing his developer's hat he writes software for a diverse set of purposes from consumer products for mobile devices to business oriented cloud services.

Shaun currently lives in northeast Minneapolis with his wonderful wife Tawny.

Bill Upham - Project Manager

Bill Upham is Ultralingua's project manager. He's just barely in charge of a great group of software developers and an ever-vigilant quality assurance and testing team. Bill oversees a vast list of projects, while scheduling and prioritizing Ultralingua product releases. He also works closely with the marketing and customer support staff to make sure Ultralingua is developing cool, useful, and desirable software.

On a personal note, Bill's the father of three fantastic daughters; is a current dog and former cat owner; went to school for music composition and theory; studied Spanish and German, as well as picking up bits and pieces of French and Italian; and loves music, movies, books, food, software, and language, of course!

Jenn Van Osdel - Software Developer

Jenn is a recent Gustavus grad with a double major in Math and Computer Science. Her love for natural languages like French and Hungarian gradually spread to the more technical, but equally beautiful, land of programming languages, making a software development role at Ultralingua the perfect fit!

Besides programming, she loves to go to concerts, read books, and go thrifting. She also loves to cook and travel - two passions that started when she studied math in Budapest, Hungary for a semester. Being from the suburbs and really missing the "big city" feel of Budapest, she is very excited to be living and working in the Twin Cities straight out of college.

Jeremy Bergerson - Germanic Languages Specialist

Jeremy Bergerson received his Ph.D. in Germanic Linguistics from the University of California-Berkeley and his B.A./M.A. in Germanic Philology from the University of Minnesota. He has worked on etymology and lexicography, and taught German for the last ten years.

Currently, he is working as a freelance translator of all the Germanic languages into English, and as a proofreader of English translations. When he is not working, however, cycling, gardening, cooking, baseball and reading take up most of his time.

Marc Bonneval - French-Italian Languages Specialist

Marc Bonneval edited our French-Italian corpora from 2003-2010, during which time he contributed significantly to the quality of our products. Bonneval had strong roots in both French and Italian, having lived most of his life in France and Italy. He was born in Paris in 1953, and studied and worked there for forty years. In 1972 he began staying in Italy regularly, and worked there as a teacher in a French school from 1993-2008. He returned to France to live in Ariege in 2008, where he remained until he passed away in May 2010.

With a background in humanities and social sciences, Bonneval was a respected professor (philosophy, ancient languages and literature), researcher (in sociology of education), and translator (from Italian into French). He was also involved in journalism and literary criticism.

Herman Koutouan - French Language Specialist

Herman is a current doctoral student in French with a minor in History at the University of Minnesota, where he also teaches French. Focusing primarily on the notions of animality and orality, his current project attends to the ways in which beasts are discursively represented in medieval fables and bestiaries in High Medieval France. He ultimately hopes to put in dialogue cultural and societal facets of the medieval West with others existing in Sub-Saharan Africa by probing how humans in these two societies defined themselves through their identification with or separation from the animal.

Herman also holds a B.A. in English with a minor in Linguistics from the University of Abidjan-Cocody in Côte d'Ivoire (2000). In 1999, his short story La Plainte de Gadou Paul won the CEDA-AECI Literary Contest, published in the collection of short stories Une Histoire pour l'An 2000 (Editions CEDA 2000). He went on to spend a few years in New York City where he obtained an Associate degree in Paralegal Studies from LaGuardia College (2004). Between 2005 and 2009, while working on his B.A. and M.A. in French at the University of Minnesota, Herman collaborated with Montreal-based company Drawn and Quarterly as a freelance translator on three volumes of the comic book Aya de Yopougon.

Besides reading fun medieval stories about werewolves, hybrid creatures and one-eyed monsters to his happily-scared infant daughter, Herman also enjoys interacting online with his subscribers on his FrenchtasticPeople language site. He loves singing and dancing, too…well, that's only when nobody is watching! Much to the disappointment of his French colleagues, he will only drink sweet wine and is NOT a great fan of foie gras (to which his colleagues usually respond: "c'est un sacrilège!").

Leland Guyer - Spanish Language Specialist

Leland Guyer is Professor of Hispanic and Latin American Studies at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1979 and began teaching at Macalester in 1983. His favorite courses to teach include Spanish and Portuguese languages, Latin American literature and literary translation. He enjoys maintaining the Ultralingua word list and encourages feedback on how to make the dictionary more complete and useful. His current primary research area is in the field of literary translation, and he has several projects in preparation. He is also an avid private pilot and takes great pleasure in mountain and desert backpacking.

Rob Hardy - Latin Language Specialist

Rob Hardy has a B.A. in Latin and History from Oberlin College (1986) and a Ph.D. in classics from Brown University (1991), and is pleased to have been given responsibility for the care and feeding of Ultralingua’s Latin-English Dictionary. He has taught Latin at Oberlin College, Brown University, Gustavus Adolphus College, South High School (Minneapolis), the University of St. Thomas, and Carleton College, and has also tutored homeschool students and worked as a K-12 substitute teacher.

Rob spent most of the 1990s as a stay-at-home father for his two sons, and spent two years writing for Garrison Keillor’s The Writers’ Almanac. He is also a published poet, whose poetry has appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies, including 33 Minnesota Poets (Nodin Press 2000). His chapbook, The Collecting Jar, won the 2005 Grayson Books Poetry Chapbook Competition. His translations and adaptations of Greek tragedy have been performed at Carleton College, where he is currently a research associate in classics.

He enjoys walking, cross-country skiing, cooking, reading American history and obscure novels by British women novelists, volunteering in his community, and bragging about his children.

Jan-Mark Kunberger - Spanish-German Languages Specialist

The German-Spanish corpus is maintained by Jan-Mark Kunberger. He has overseen a German-Spanish online dictionary since 2001 with the MYJMK author community, using a multiple eye process to proof new corpus entries. All of the authors are highly qualified translators covering a broad range of special fields such as tourism, communication, arts, media, techniques, chemistry, law, physics, flora, fauna, biology, culture, gastronomy, poetry, medicine, politics etc. Today it offers one of the most comprehensive German-Spanish corpuses including a large volume of technical terms.

The MYJMK author community has professional experience in a variety of industries such as automotive, government, law, translation, university education and mass media. MYJMK authors are located across Europe and South America, so local language characteristics are incorporated into the data as well.

Darren Wright - Asian Languages Specialist

Darren Wright is a Chinese translator in the aerospace industry. He is also an active member of the American Translators Association (ATA) and is currently serving on a committee that is working to establish the ATA’s first Chinese-English translation certification exam.

Since middle school, Darren has had a passion for learning languages and has studied Latin, French, and Thai in addition to Chinese. Prior to returning to the U.S. for his present job, he worked as the director of a study abroad program in Xi’an, China for the Alliance for Global Education and as a resident director for the State Department’s Critical Language Scholarship Program in Beijing, China.

While attending graduate school, Darren worked part-time as an instructor of Chinese language and culture at the University of Colorado in Boulder and Denver; as a Chinese lexicographer; and as a Cruise Host along the Yangtze River in China. He received two MAs in Chinese Literature and East Asian Religions from the University of Colorado at Boulder and a BA in Chinese Studies from Brigham Young University. Although no longer working in academia, he continues to learn about ancient Chinese religion and to read Chinese literature. He also enjoys spending time with his wife and daughter traveling, running in the park, playing games, and watching cartoons.