Richard Ishida has worked since July 2002 at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), as part of the W3C Internationalization Activity. This activity has the mission of ensuring universal access to the Web, regardless of language, script or culture, by proposing & coordinating any techniques, conventions, guidelines and activities within the W3C that help to make and keep the Web international.

Prior to that he was for many years an Internationalisation Consultant at Xerox Global Services, where through seminars, courses and consultancy he helped product groups around the world develop web sites, documents, and on-screen information so that it can be easily localised for the international marketplace.

Richard is a popular and regular speaker at globalisation-related conferences, mostly by invitation (and has delivered tutorials twice a year at every International Unicode Conference since 1995).

He has a background which includes translating and interpreting, computational linguistics, and translation tools. And has spent time studying French, Spanish, Italian, German, Russian, Japanese and Arabic.