Nour Al Hassan (Arabic: نور الحسن) is a Jordanian entrepreneur, founder and CEO of Tarjama, the largest linguistics service provider in the Middle East, and founder and chairwoman of Ureed.com freelance platform.
Career
Nour founded Tarjama in 2008 in Amman, Jordan with the goal of addressing the gap in the region's translation and localization services through employing technology and artificial intelligence (AI).
Prior to this, she worked at the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).
Launch of Tarjama
Nour’s career kicked off as a consultant in a multinational organization, and she noticed the gap in Arabic content and that translation in 2008 was not as advanced as it is today, which created a bottleneck in the progress of consulting workflows. That was when she decided to build a company that offers linguistic services in Jordan - and the MENA region as a whole.
She started from her home office, with a small group of female employees. Noticing the need for expert translators, she then built Ureed.com, a platform that brought together more than 55 thousand language experts.
After a few years, Nour decided to expand through pitching to investors although her team was still small. She expanded the language base and employed advanced technologies and artificial intelligence. After 15 years, Tarjama grew to serve large clients.
ArabicMT
As Tarjama expanded to serve larger clients with tight deadlines and extensive text needs, Nour's team decided to create their own machine translation engine – ArabicMT.
Developing an Arabic machine translation was a challenging endeavor for Tarjama's team because of the language's complexity. With over 12 million unique words, Arabic is significantly more complex than English, which has 600,000 words. The linguistic differences between the two languages further added to the translation difficulty.
For more than five years, Tarjama has employed ArabicMT internally to enhance translators' productivity. Only after being certain that the clients could utilize it independently in their workflows did Tarjama make it available for public use.
Since its launch, ArabicMT has outperformed other engines in delivering Arabic translation services for businesses.
In 2022, Tarjama earned recognition in a Gartner market guide for advanced AI-enabled translation services, sharing the spotlight with Google.
Education
Nour has a Bachelor's of Laws, completed in 2001, from Al Ahliyya Amman University, and a certificate in Executive Artificial Intelligence from Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI).
Support for Women
Nour is an advocate for women’s empowerment.
At least 55% of freelancers on her Ureed.com platform are women, and the freelancing website has allowed more mothers to join the workforce without having to commute to work or commit to a fixed 9 to 5 shift.
Nour hired 60 women in Jordan in 2017, when a mere 17% of the country’s workforce was female. Globally, 90% of Tarjama’s 400 fulltime and parttime employees for the same year were women.
Today, 60% of Ureed’s over 100 thousand freelancers and 70% of Tarjama’s employees in over 20 countries are women.
Nour’s two companies also trained over 300 women in translation.
Recognition and Awards
Nour was named Aspen Institute Fellow in 2016.
She received in 2018 Jordan’s EY Emerging Entrepreneur of the Year Award.
In 2022, Forbes listed her among the year’s 20 Women Behind Middle Eastern Tech Brands.
References
Living people
Jordanian businesspeople
Year of birth missing (living people) Entrepreneurship Arab women Arab businesspeople