Dr. Emmett P. Tracy

Dr. Emmett P. Tracy is an experienced Chief Executive Officer of KaffeeHouse and Academic Dean of Hult International Business School with a specialization in digital transformation, internationalization, and global leadership. He has expertise in global partnerships, fundraising, real estate planning, administration, and strategic design. He has outstanding communication and written skills and is fluent/proficient in English, French, Italian, and German.

Prior to Hult, Dr. Tracy worked at institutions of higher education in North America, Europe, and Africa serving program administration and faculty roles. He is the co-founder of a machine learning platform for translation studies and he has received grants from governments and universities in America, Ireland, and Austria. Academically, Dr. Tracy’s research centers on the societal, cultural, and educational impact of cultural contact in diverse, multilingual communities. He holds a PhD in Classics from Trinity College, Dublin, an MFA with a concentration in translation studies from Columbia University, and an MBA from INSEAD.

Before becoming the Academic Dean of Hult, Dr. Tracy was an instructor at Trinity College, Dublin in the Department of Classics. He also worked at Columbia University in the Office of the Dean of General Studies.

Dr. Tracy’s specialties include Change Management, Leadership Development, Internationalization, Complex Modeling, and Turnarounds.

About KaffeeHouse

KaffeeHouse promotes a new form of short literature experience through online access by offering an online global crowed-sourced translation platform that enables Authors, Translators, Readers, and Students to Contribute, Read, and Share.

They introduced the Kaffeehouse Platform as an online and hence globally connected version of this idea. The name of the platform is based on a German-English word play with Kaffee meaning Coffee in English and House meaning Haus in German. The purpose of this dual lingual name is to reflect the multilingual nature of the Kaffeehouse Platform. The Kaffeehouse platform seeks to reincarnate the multicultural and multilingual space, known as the Viennese coffeehouse culture, within a digital and globally accessible online platform and with a specific focus on short form text and crowd sourced translations.

However, a new publishing ecosystem presents challenges for smaller players, and it remains difficult to navigate the gaps between major conglomerates and smaller independent publishers. As a result, European, African, and Asian publishers often fail to reach wider global audiences, and the inefficiency and the lack of reliable market projections makes the value chain a slow and corrigible process. There are two reasons that can be identified: 1) Lack of market access and 2) Lack of translations. It is the mission of Kaffeehouse to achieve both and to ensure more literature is brought to more people in more languages.

Kaffeehouse does this by helping publishers across the industry anticipate market demands and provides access to a greater supply of global literature. By breaking down linguistic barriers, Kaffeehouse matches translation talent with industry needs within one easy to use platform. To ensure content quality, Kaffeehouse works with independent global publishers and freelance translators. The Kaffeehouse platform allows translators to transmit a translation in any target language and if needed in multiple languages. Because Kaffeehouse focuses on short form text, the translation task is simple to execute and not time consuming.

Kaffeehouse skirts a line between translation publishing and digital language learning market. A platform for learning, it belongs to the Education Tech industry and Language Learning segment. As an open-source translation site, it complements the Independent Publishing market, and as a translation data and library provider it belongs to the translation industry.