Soraya Barrera Coello, our VP of Operations at Translate.One, has been recognized with the Operational Excellence Leadership Award 2026 by Acquisition International. The award celebrates leaders who drive meaningful business transformation through innovation, operational excellence, and outstanding leadership.
Following this recognition, Acquisition International spoke with Soraya about her leadership philosophy, the challenges and opportunities of integrating global teams, the role of AI in operations, and what it takes to build a culture of continuous improvement. Read the full interview below.
Soraya: Translate.One’s mission is to connect the world through language, helping organizations communicate effectively across borders, cultures, and markets. We combine innovative technology, artificial intelligence, and human expertise to deliver tailored multilingual content solutions that enable businesses to grow globally while maintaining accuracy, consistency, and cultural relevance.
Our specialization extends beyond traditional translation. We provide end-to-end language and localization solutions, including translation, localization, interpretation, multilingual content management, testing, quality assurance, regulatory support, and consulting services. Through our technology platform and global network of experts, we help organizations streamline multilingual content operations and engage audiences worldwide.
At the heart of everything we do are three core values: quality, partnership, and innovation. We are committed to delivering exceptional quality through rigorous processes and industry-leading standards, building long-term partnerships based on trust and collaboration, and continuously investing in technology and new approaches that help our clients communicate more effectively in an increasingly connected world.
Our vision is to be the global partner of choice for organizations navigating the complexities of international communication, empowering them with innovative, adaptable, and comprehensive language solutions that remove barriers and create meaningful connections across languages and cultures.
Soraya: Honestly? I didn’t plan it. And I think that’s what makes the story worth telling. It started with a challenge while I was a project manager that, at the time, felt completely overwhelming: building a round-the-clock project management operation for a major pharmaceutical client.
We’re talking 24/7 coverage, three different countries, a team I had to recruit, train, and coordinate almost from scratch, all while making sure every single request was delivered on time, on process, and at the quality our client expected. If anything went wrong at 2am on a Sunday, it was my problem to solve.
What I discovered in that experience changed everything: I didn’t just survive it, I thrived in it. There was something about the complexity, the moving parts, the human puzzle of aligning people across continents toward one shared goal, that lit something up in me. That project became my unofficial MBA in operations leadership.
From there, the path unfolded quite naturally: Team Lead, Head of Production. and now, as VP of Operations at Translate.One, leading the transformation, integration, and strategy for a business that has grown significantly through acquisition across the globe.
Do I have a naturally structured brain? Absolutely. Am I the kind of person who colour-codes their calendar and genuinely enjoys an Excel formula? Guilty as charged. But what I’ve learned is that the real superpower isn’t the structure. It’s knowing how to hold space for creativity within it — how to think beyond the obvious solution while keeping the operation stable and the people in it energised. I didn’t choose operations. Operations chose me, and every year, I’m more convinced it was the right match.
Soraya: At its core, my leadership philosophy rests on two pillars that I believe are inseparable: structure and people. Remove either one, and the whole thing collapses. Structure gives people something to move within: clear goals, clear expectations, clear direction. Without it, even the most talented team will drift. But structure alone is just a blueprint, it’s the people who actually build the thing and that means meeting them where they are. I am a firm believer that everyone learns and adapts at a different pace, and a great leader has to hold space for that without letting it become an excuse for stagnation.
In practice, that looks like setting expectations clearly and then walking alongside people as they find their footing. When someone is struggling, the answer is never to look away. It’s to name it, constructively and with care, and help them find a way through. Empathy and accountability are not opposites. Done right, they are the same conversation. I lead from the front. I’m visible, I’m hands-on, and my team knows I’m not asking anything of them that I wouldn’t take on myself.
That visibility matters enormously during periods of change or uncertainty, and in a business that has grown as rapidly as ours through acquisition, uncertainty is never far away. People need to see the captain at the helm, not hiding in the cabin.
The goal I keep coming back to is simple: everyone rowing in the same direction, toward the same destination, with a shared understanding of why it matters. When you have that — real alignment, not just the PowerPoint version of it — extraordinary things become possible. A company without its people is just an idea, and a team without a clear, common goal is just a group of individuals in the same building. My job is to be the bridge between the two.
Soraya: Because I show up. Fully, consistently, and without the distance that a title can sometimes create between a leader and their team. Being a VP doesn’t mean I’m above rolling up my sleeves. If my team is under pressure and a project needs an extra pair of hands, I’m there. Not as a performance of humility, but because that’s genuinely how I believe leadership works. The moment you become unreachable (physically or emotionally) you stop being a leader and start being a title on an org chart. And a title on an org chart never built anything worth building.
With my team, it goes deeper than workload. I want to be their safety net. I trust them with the tasks I assign, and I make sure they know that trust is real. I invest in their growth, I open doors for them, and then I step back and let them walk through.
Nothing illustrates this better than the story of our Head of Quality, Christiane Schaeffler. When I was unable to attend the TEKOM conference to deliver a presentation, I asked Christiane to step in. She was nervous. I told her simply: I chose you for this because I know you can do it. She didn’t just deliver, she was so exceptional that she was approached to join the ISO committee. That led to an invitation to the annual ISO TC37 conference in Strasbourg, where her contribution during discussions was met with a standing ovation and she was assigned to lead a taskforce. From nervous stand-in to standing ovation and taskforce lead.
That moment had nothing to do with me — and that’s exactly the point. The proudest moments in leadership often don’t. For our clients, the regard comes from a different place but the same root value: I genuinely care. I care about their products, their outcomes, and the trust they place in us when they hand over something that matters to their business. I treat their work as if it were my own: with the same scrutiny, the same ownership, the same commitment to getting it right. I don’t manage client relationships from a distance. I’m present, I’m solutions-focused, and when something is difficult, my first instinct is never to deflect, it’s to find a way through together. People will always remember how you made them feel when things got hard. I want both my team and our clients to know that when things get hard, I don’t disappear. I lean in.
Soraya: We are already doing something the rest of the market isn’t, and that alone tells you a lot about how we think about innovation. Translate.One is the first company in the UK to offer real-time AI interpreting and translation that integrates directly within our clients’ existing systems. That’s not a future ambition. That’s our present reality, and it’s the foundation from which everything we plan to build next will grow. But innovation in our industry right now isn’t just about what technology can do. It’s about making that technology genuinely work for our clients in a world where budgets are under pressure and the volume of global content is only increasing.
Localization is no longer a backstage function, it’s receiving recognition as a strategic driver of market expansion, cultural connection, and brand identity at an unprecedented scale. Our goal is to make sure every client we work with can access that strategic power without it costing them a kidney.
In the next five years, I see our innovation agenda focusing on two areas. The first is deeper system integration. The most forward-thinking enterprises are no longer treating language AI as a standalone application, they’re embedding it as a layer inside their broader workflows. We want to be the partner that makes that integration seamless, reliable, and genuinely cost-efficient for our clients, no matter what systems they’re running.
The second is content lifecycle management. More and more of our clients are wrestling not just with translation, but with how they create, manage, and distribute content across global markets in the first place. We want to step into that space helping clients build smarter content strategies from the ground up, so that multilingual delivery becomes built-in rather than bolted on. The next five years in this industry will belong to companies that stay close to their clients, stay honest about what technology can and can’t do, and stay ahead of what’s coming. We intend to be one of them.
Soraya: The first thing I would say is: be patient. With your journey, with your team, and with yourself. Leadership is not a destination you arrive at — it’s something you practice, imperfectly, every single day. Beyond that, here is what I know to be true from my own experience. Put the right people in the right positions. This is arguably the most important decision a leader makes.
The people around you are not just executing your vision, they are carrying it forward, shaping it, and inspiring everyone working with them to move in the same direction. Get this wrong and no strategy in the world will save you. Get it right and you barely have to push. The momentum builds itself.
Be reachable. Not just logistically, but emotionally. Your team needs to know that when something is hard, when a project goes sideways, or when they simply need to talk something through, you are there. Let them vent. Let them be human. A leader who is too polished or too busy to have a real conversation with their people will eventually find themselves leading no one.
Normalise failure. This one changed how I lead. The most successful people I know — and the most successful companies — are not the ones who never got it wrong. They are the ones who failed, reflected, and came back stronger. If you want a team that takes initiative and thinks creatively, they need to know that an idea not working out is not a career-defining moment. It is part of the process.
Never stop learning. Read widely, stay curious, and seek out perspectives that challenge your own thinking. Some of the books that have shaped how I lead: The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership AND Failing Forward — both by John C. Maxwell, The Toyota Way to Lean Leadership — Jeffrey Liker & Gary Convis ad finally The Servant — James C. Hunter. Leadership is a privilege. Treat it like one.
