Tarjama ranked 25th top LSP in the Asia-Pacific region for 2018 according to a recent report released by Common Sense Advisory, which listed top language service providers by region. Tarjama stands out as the only MENA company in the Asia-Pacific ranking, which included companies from countries such as Australia, China, and Japan. This reflects Tarjama’s truly unique identity and positioning as a company founded by an Arab woman, based in the MENA region and steadily consolidating an important share of the regional market, which has typically been dominated by either small storefront language service providers, or large multi-nationals with a MENA affiliate. The ranking looks at a variety of business, financial and operational data points, but ultimately ranks companies by revenue which CSA views “as a proxy for many of the criteria that are important to buyers – the capability to do the job, the production expertise to do it, or the technology knowledge to compete.”
The ranking reflects Tarjama’s impressive journey of growth –it is currently the empowering workplace of 110 full-time employees, who have collectively facilitated the translation of a whopping 220 million words to date. And although the company started out as a straight-forward translation company, its offering has evolved and expanded in line with market demand, turning it into a one-stop shop for all things language-related that supports global clients with content creation, editing, proofreading, subtitling, localization, design, and interpretation.
So what is the key to Tarjama’s success? Founder and CEO Nour Al Hassan believes that it lies in a few key factors. “First of all, we believe in offering opportunities to women, who now make up 70% of our workforce, and it’s been a real win-win. In many cases, although the women are highly qualified, they have barriers in accessing the labor market. Tarjama is helping to break down those barriers by offering an alternative format which is working from home. We also empower employees at all levels with the tools they need to deliver an outstanding service.” This outstanding service has become Tarjama’s calling card among its over 500 clients, who include governments, consulting firms, startups, and global companies. Most of these are regular customers turn to Tarjama for long-term solutions, often outsourcing their entire translation departments into the specialized company. The company’s COO, Zaid Abul-Feilat, believes that adaptability to the region’s needs has been vital to the company’s growth. A client-centric approach has driven the company to provide round the clock support, high responsiveness to client needs and requests, and several layers of quality checking to achieve maximum linguistic proficiency. The company is also utilizing and customizing translation technology to standardize their human-led content; giving it an edge through the big-data collection.
The company’s growth is allowing it to explore the educational content creation and re-creation through localizing international projects; one of which will be unveiled soon by providing Arabic versions of a very popular online educational platform. Tarjama is also launching their own original MOOCs in Arabic revolving around translation skills; hence, to meet the rising interest in reading more original content from the region, Tarjama’s offering is heavily evolving in the direction of content creation.
What’s next for Tarjama? In anticipation of the market’s fast-paced evolution and the ever-present potential for disruption, the company is hopping on to pioneer the scene by recently developing the Middle East’s largest online platform for editorial services. Through focusing its efforts on featuring top talents from the heart of the Middle East, the company maximizes on the scalable nature of the platform to cater to e-commerce businesses and new regional companies’ great demand for localized content. Through the platform and its ongoing development, Tarjama’s future roadmap will continue to aim at climbing up the regional ranking ladder as a grassroots Arab company.