Mardiyanto Saahi lives in Indonesia, he helped Melissa Ilardo in 2015 when she was conducting her PhD research on Bajau People in Indonesia. He helped her communicating the research to the people, collecting saliva samples, and measuring the spleens. Encouraged by Melissa, he learned translation and he has become a full-time freelance translator in English to Indonesian language pair. He also volunteers as a translator at TED and Global Voices and now he is interested in language extinction issues and wants to do something in language revitalization efforts.