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How women and AI are solving the translation bias

In this episode of the Better Heroes podcast series, host Matt C. Smith talks to Nour Al Hassan about how women and AI are solving the translation bias.

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Nour Al Hassan

Why shouldn't we have hope? Even if you fail today, you can succeed tomorrow. So why can’t we be hopeful? I don't think anyone can build a business being a pessimist. Usually, being pessimist or cynical, you don't build businesses. You can't. You can’t accomplish this with that mentality.

Matt C. Smith

The truth is humanity can save itself and our planet. And right at this very moment, there’s someone who took on the challenge — and is on the path to solving an incredibly tough, global problem. This podcast was created to tell you about them.

You’re listening to Better Heroes, a show from the global EY organization about the untold stories of entrepreneurs devoting their lives to impactful innovation. I’m your host, Matt C Smith.

There are over 7,000 languages that are spoken across the globe, and to connect across borders, regions and continents, the world needs high-quality translation services.

But when Nour Al Hassan was working in the Middle East in the early 2000s, she found these services were severely lacking one of the world’s top 10 most spoken languages — Arabic.

That’s when Nour decided to start an Arabic translation service, Tarjama. From its inception, Tarjama has done more to connect people than just translate. In the Middle East, women comprise 20% of the workforce, but Tarjama has started to close that gender gap by thinking outside the box.

Al Hassan

I think my story is quite interesting because I stumbled on the translation by coincidence. I'm a lawyer by education and was working in an international organization as a consultant. And as you know, every consultant needs to produce their work, most likely in English, and when you want to translate it, you end up struggling, whether with talent or with cost or with speed, to deliver your work to customers. So, there was always agony when it came to translation in my previous situation. And this is where the original idea came from. I started a very small boutique company in Amman, thinking that I was just going to serve a couple of clients. Then I discovered there was a huge demand for it; left my job, dedicated my time to it, and then, a few months later, I relocated to the UAE, and I started my journey from here, serving the Arab world and any customer that's coming from a global perspective to the region that needs content and Arabic translation.

Smith

Dubai is an interesting place. You know, we've seen Dubai go through some transformative years in the last decade, specifically. Obviously, it had its entertainment and hospitality kind of revolution 20 years ago. And then, now, we have this incredible new nomad hotspot. I'm seeing a lot of innovators and entrepreneurs moving there, being a transit hub and having such a multicultural smorgasbord of people.

Al Hassan

Absolutely. So, Dubai is, I think, a very unique spot where it bridges the east and the west. And you're still in the MENA region. So, it serves our purpose being here very well. Most of the multinational companies are already located in Dubai and have been operating in Dubai for years, which made perfect sense for us to exist here to be able to serve our clients in a better way.

Smith

For my benefit and many of our friends listening to this as well, I'm sure, what is, sort of, the fundamentals of translation services and linguistics. Talk us through sort of the product ranges. What are the typical things businesses come to you to have translated?

Al Hassan

First, the service is very complex. People think that translation is a very one kind of service where I need you to translate this document. Translation, in fact, has a lot of intricacies to it. So, when you have to do translation, it’s different all across — there’s transcreation, there’s localization, there’s editing, there’s machine translation, there’s post-editing, there’s the subtitling for movies, there’s the dubbing, there’s the interpretation for events, etc. And all these services require a different kind of expertise or skill to be able to deliver to the customer. So, the way you translate a website or a document is completely different from translating a novel, for example.

Smith

You mentioned localization. Can you expand on what you meant by localization in translation services?

Al Hassan

Let's say you are an e-commerce platform, and you're trying to enter the Saudi market, like Saudi Arabia. You cannot go to Saudi by just translating. You need to localize the content in line with the culture that fits perfectly to the country that you're entering, using those particular terminologies and really focusing on the culture and the way they see these things. So, you localize the brand or the product to that specific country. So, it's so different than just translating.

Smith

Think of an ad you’ve seen on a billboard or on TV. So, often, they use a pun or idiom that you only get because you live in that area and speak the language. Nour says good translation services don’t just translate content word for word. They localize it and make it work for a specific region.

Al Hassan

In the Middle East, we are 420 million people. In this part of the world, we have 22 dialects, and that's 22 dialects across countries. In the same country, you sometimes have five, six or 10 dialects between north, south, east and west that you need to accommodate. So, it's not really an easy job. It's not straightforward.

Smith

I'd be curious about your experiences with biases around linguistics, right? Because for example, I have a British accent, which tends to do well in the United States. People trust me. People think I know what I'm talking about. Maybe you think I'm educated; maybe I'm not. Who knows? I have a British accent. You'll believe everything I say, right? But it's true, you know, having these different accents and dialects, they play a lot. I'm just curious, do you have businesses that sort of ask for dialects that are more trustworthy or more convincing for sales?

Al Hassan

So, now for sales, from a marketing perspective, they would ask you to do it in a certain dialect depending on the country you're trying to enter. But Arabic, which is the modern standard Arabic, which is a classical Arabic that everybody uses, and this is the language that everybody in the Arab world understands very well. But let's say, from a dialect point of view, there are certain dialects that are commonly liked by customers. So, for example, the Jordanian way of translation is usually more appealing from a Gulf perspective. I'm not being biased because I'm Jordanian. This is something that we've experienced over time. And Jordanian translators tend to have the ability to localize their content to a certain way from a gulf perspective in dubbing for a series. The Syrian accent, the Egyptian accent and the Lebanese accent are more wanted and liked because we've been used to hearing and listening to them over the years. So, every product has its own, I would say, dialect that is usually favored by the customer or the listener.

Smith

Okay. So now I feel like I'm up to scratch, and our friends are, too, about understanding how localization services and the linguistic world work. I'm curious about the other side of what you've done — an incredible job. Actually, why you're here talking to us today is placing women at the core of this. When did that sort of journey start? Because it sounds as if, you know, you experienced the market problem first. And when did you involve women in that process?

Al Hassan

Tarjama’s inception has always revolved around women. So, the day I started the business, it was as well by coincidence. When I started looking for talent, we found a pool of talent. Many of these employees or translators who started working with me as freelancers early on were women. And most of them were highly educated, some with PhD and master’s degrees, and went to top universities but sitting at home, not working. So, I was like, this is really weird. Why is this happening? And what’s the cause of it? Like, these women should be CEOs of companies or take high positions in certain corporate or a company. And then we discovered when I was chatting to these women that most of these women are either raising children or had cultural barriers back then when I started, that obligated them to be at home and they're, like, dying to work. They are really desperate to have a job and financial independence was one of the main things. And a common factor in every conversation that I had with these women was that we'd love to gain income.

Smith

When Nour first started Tarjama around 2007, working from home wasn’t normal, but the women she wanted to employ needed a job that allowed them to still take care of their homes and children. And to Nour, remote work also made financial sense.

Al Hassan

So, I thought, why do I need this woman to come to the office? First, I'm going to incur a lot of expenses as a startup. I don't need to rent an office. It's just going to become so expensive because I need to provide laptops, electricity, plus other things. If they work from home, I have no issues as long as they deliver on time and they deliver good quality. So that's how we started. And then, from one woman to the other, we had word of mouth. We managed to have a very large pool of women working with us. Of course, we have men as well in the company now, and we are at a 50:50 ratio today.

But when we started earlier, it was all about women. So, I think this industry attracts females, too, because when I did some stats in Saudi, most of the graduates in the translation space or linguistic space were women. And these women were forced to look for other jobs because they couldn't find work.

Smith

I'm curious about the typical user journey of a customer that comes through and how does that work from your matchmaking and tailoring of the product to the customer's needs?

Al Hassan

In the early days, it was a pool of translators for everything.

Today, the journey has been automated completely, and we transformed the way we engage with our customers. We built a platform where the customer comes to the key portal to upload the documents. When we receive the documents, it immediately gets pushed to the right translator based on their capabilities. We have a translation management system that we built as well that all our translators use today. It gives them everything they need, from insights, number of words, accuracy, where they need to focus on and segments that they need to translate or rewrite from scratch because the translation system did not give them a 100% rating against their work. And then, the end product gets pushed back to the customer.

So now we have subject matter experts for each and every domain because we service a huge number of domains, from gaming, medical, legal and finance to consulting, etc. So, you can't have the same translators for everything.

Smith

When it comes to translation services right now, this is a formerly, kind of, capital- and labor-intensive thing right back in the day, before platforms like yours and technologies, it was individuals, you know, reading, translating with that kind of contextual relationship to it. How have you evolved the technology, and how are you using technology to accelerate your ability to offer better services?

Al Hassan

So first, what we did was we built a marketplace for freelancers. So, we have over 100,000 freelancers on the marketplace that helps us to scale in languages and dialects, in certain segments, with content writers or translators. Then we looked at it internally. We were using third-party tools. We cannot rely on third parties; we want to build our own. So, we built the portal, the translation management system and the machine translation to Arabic, and everything is plugged into a marketplace, one environment, and everybody's in the same environment. This helped us to scale, so we could translate millions of words instead of hundreds or thousands, and it helped us to drop costs for the customers and be able to accommodate their needs in a faster manner. And if you don't build technology today or you don't embrace technology in our space, because you know, AI is in everything today, especially in our space, you're going to be pushed out of business soon or you will end up using third-party tools, and your margins are going to drop drastically. Because in order for you to make money in this business, you need to do volume and that means you need to be able to scale. And in order to scale, you cannot have just the human process — you need to automate.

Smith

Nour is absolutely fascinated by how AI, coupled with human translators, can improve translation services.

Al Hassan

So, we don't run away from it. On the contrary, we learn more about it. We try it; we test it; we educate ourselves so much about it. First, I think it's definitely a fantastic technology that's going to disrupt us in so many ways, but at the same time, it would create a lot of opportunities. It's going to be a tool that will enable. It will actually create opportunities. If you team it up with humans, you can do wonders. ChatGPT today is like a parrot. So, what it does is, whatever it finds on the net, it's just going to collect it, rewrite it and push it to you. The fact is it's coherent, but it's not accurate. It can't do citations. It lacks a lot of things, yet it's the same as machine translation. Think of machine translation. Can you rely on machine translation 100% without any human intervention? No.

You cannot just assume that the human will not have a role. But I'll tell you what will happen. You will lose a translator, or a translator will be out of a job if they do not use AI, and that's very soon. And that's the same already with the writing tools. Instead of you wasting so much time on the research part, it will do all the research parts for you, and then you do the creative part. So, it's elevating human skill. We are made to use our creativity or think out of the box when we want to translate or we want to write something, not spend 90% of our time researching. And when we want to reach the creative part, we’re already drained. So, I think, same as excel sheets and calculators and the way things used to be done before manually, it's just that you need to take this as something that will help you, and it will definitely expedite the way we do things and enhance our capabilities, not only as a disruption. You will get disrupted if you fight these tools. So, it’s important to embrace such technology and think about how we make use of them.

Smith

I couldn't agree more. And I think you really hit the nail on the head there when it comes to embracing these technologies that can allow us to automate the mundane, the boring stuff.

Are you developing these yourselves internally? Do you have a team that's looking into the future of translation, localization and other?

Al Hassan

Yes, we have an AI team and a technology team. Every technology we built, we built ourselves, and we continue to build. We're building even more things like speech-to-text, subtitling, etc. Everything that's in our service that we could potentially automate, add machine translation and AI to it, we're doing it.

Smith

Looking at what you've just explained to me right now, you see this incredible business. Go back 12 years, a little bit more even, in fact, 14, 15 years before you left for the UAE and started to develop this business. Would you have ever thought that you'd be running this business talking about AI and translation back then that you are now?

Al Hassan

Absolutely not. I thought I was going to be in fashion, not the translation business. But, looking at the translation business to the end where we are, it's such an interesting business, and it has so many layers under it, and it's a huge space. The language business globally is very sizable. It's huge. And every single day, you hear about M&As or investments that are happening in this space because people don't know much about them. They think it's being disrupted while it's actually growing substantially.

Smith

One sector that Nour expects to grow in the coming years is speech-to-text. The technology would improve searchability for things like videos and podcasts.

Al Hassan

I think if you look at everything today from any tool that you're using on your phone, any of these bots that support you, any of these, from the likes of Alexa, Siri and others, this is all actually speech-to-speech, some are speech-to-text. So, I think you're going to get more of that. And if you think of content today, a lot of content you’re consuming today is video. More than reading an article, you listen to it as podcasts more than before, which means the voice is going to be a big thing in the way the world is heading. This is why, for us that ASR into dialect, especially to Arabic, is something that's close to our heart and something that we are experimenting with already.

Smith

Exciting to look forward to. You mentioned the industry is just really growing and expanding, obviously supported by global borderless growth and business, etc. Your business, placing women at the core of that, has incredible economic benefits both in your Arab market and others.

Now, you have created this model where businesses come to them effectively by being remote only. And I'm just curious if this is something that should be expanded into your industry and why isn't it.

Al Hassan

I think it is because of some companies in the US; I know a few companies that do, like, data annotation, and they target women only. Some do boot camps for women on the technology side as well. So, there are a few businesses that are global that do that. In the region, honestly, I'm not sure. I don't want to forget someone, but I'm not sure if there's anything specific in the service industry that reaches women, in particular, I'm honestly unaware of.

Smith

And it's a very nice model because, you know, if you think about it, obviously, you're providing a service to your customers and increasingly developing and improving service. However, at the same time, the core of your business is empowering women.

Al Hassan

Correct.Smith

So, what's next for Tarjama?

Al Hassan

So, I think many things. We're trying to expand. We’re expanding into the region as well as to new geographies. We just made a big acquisition in the subtitling dubbing space that got us a couple of new locations in Europe and Canada. So, our focus will be as well to expand there. We have not been selling globally, and I think many companies and clients need Arabic as well from a global perspective. And this is where we really want to focus our energy. We're focusing so much on our expansion to Saudi Arabia. Qatar is a new geography that we just expanded to. So, I think it's expansion, that's our target. Our second thing is we're making more acquisitions. So, we're looking at a couple of M&A opportunities in this space, and the space is growing more on the product side. So, more and more features on the machine translation, more features on our current tools, and on the ASR dialects are something that we're launching very soon. Yeah, I think, honestly, in this space, the sky's the limit. So, there's so much potential and growth, and I think the space is very hot still, like, there's so much opportunity in it.

Smith

And ureed.com. Would you tell us about the ureed.com platform?

Al Hassan

Yes, Ureed is the first product that we launched which is the marketplace for freelancers. This marketplace has almost 60% females. It has 100,000 freelancers on it, content writers, designers, annotators, translators into many language pairs and developers as well. And when we launched it, we launched it as a B2C marketplace, and now we pivoted into a B2B marketplace more because we discovered that customers want us to do the vetting for them and then team them up with the right candidates. We have a lot of candidates from the Middle East. We know by geography, by country, by gender. We have with the profiles a wallet and escrow account to pay the freelancers, timesheets academy to train. It's a full-fledged ecosystem, to be honest.

Smith

It's fascinating to see your journey as an entrepreneur, too. Did you ever feel like you were going to be an entrepreneur?

Al Hassan

From day one, from the moment I graduated, from my first job, I always knew I wanted to build a business. I've always been wanting to build a business. I always thought I was going to graduate, work for a few years or do my master’s and then start a business.

Smith

And you've built a business with impact at its core, which you didn't quite realize at the beginning. You stumbled on that problem as well. Have you found that journey challenging, trying to place impact at the core of what you're doing?

Al Hassan

The impact part, no. In the beginning, honestly, because when I used to tell clients we have women that work from home, they do amazing quality of translation, everybody was like, “a woman working from home and giving good quality? we're not sure.” Because there's always this perception that a good employee needs to be sitting from 9:00 am to 5:00 pm and then they will produce good work. And that was 15 years ago, a really long time ago. The world has changed. But when you tell customers, “just test us, try the quality and then you judge,” it takes a while for people to trust the quality. And that was a bit of a challenge in the beginning. The second challenge was, when I started my business, the ecosystem of venture capital did not exist, and the abundance of cash investing in startups did not exist. So, I bootstrapped all the way to 2019 until the business became profitable and had growth. I did not have an office; I worked almost from coffee shops until 2016. So that was part of the difficulty. But I think it was interesting because now when I look at startups, I keep telling them, please reserve cash, don't burn. People used to laugh at me before the recession, but now, what’s happening? Two years ago, the ”it” thing was burn, burn, burn, grow at any cost. Now we’ve shifted back to positive PNL and looking at numbers and companies that make sense financially, which Tarjama did from day one. So yeah, it's been quite challenging, of course, and building technology for someone who is not a techie is so difficult. Like I had to go through multiple iterations and multiple failures in even recruiting the right talent to build the product in the early days until we managed to where we are today, educating myself about AI and taking courses. Yeah, it was risky, and I'm a risk taker, so I think that's what took Tarjama and brought us to where we are. It's a daily affair, and you just need to wake up every day and smile and say, “okay, today is going to be a better day.”

Smith

How did you keep a level head and maintain your mental and physical health throughout a process that sounds like it was pretty arduous, as is any entrepreneurial journey? How did you keep a level head?

Al Hassan

When I started building this business, I was very serious about the growth and putting it on the right track. So, I dropped so many things out of my life. My social life became so minimal because you can't be an entrepreneur building a business, waking up in the morning, and partying at night every night. It just doesn't work. So, something's got to give. So, I had to drop that out of my life completely. I'm somebody that wakes up every morning and exercise every day, like a minimum of six days out of seven. I try to eat clean as much as possible, and I sleep very early, so I'm usually in bed, nine thirty, ten, 10 thirty max. Yeah, and I like it. And honestly, this is what keeps me in balance because otherwise, I lose my health. But it's not what everyone can do. Entrepreneurship is not for everyone, and building a business is not for everyone. Some people are made to be top-notch employees at their jobs, and some are meant to be entrepreneurs.

Smith

What are the traits required to be a good entrepreneur?

Al Hassan

I think discipline; you just need to be super, super disciplined. You need to be focused, laser-focused, because you tend to lose attention very quickly in our business, and you get sucked into things here and there. Especially when they start to think that your business is successful, they say, come sit on this board, invest in this company, speak here, speak there, and you end up not focused on your business. Another thing I think is you just need to be super honest with yourself and hire a good team that is better than you. Because if you're hiring people that are worse than you or like you, the business will not improve. You need people that are better. I love sitting with my C-level people and learning from them every day. I love sitting and asking them questions, and I know that they're smarter than me in the space they're in.

Smith

For aspiring entrepreneurs and future “Better Heroes,” Nour’s advice is to surround yourself with the right people.

Al Hassan

Honestly, I’ve made terrible decisions in hiring, and I based hiring on my gut and feelings too. And then you discover that the person is not the right person, could be great somewhere else, but doesn't work perfectly for your company, or you don't share the same vision. So, I think, to be honest, when you hire someone, ensure that you don't make that judgment by yourself. It's better to have more involved, more people from your team to make a decision. So now, when I hire someone, especially from a c-suite level, I involve four people in the process, and sometimes, I even call my investor to interview them as well. So, I'm not making a decision on my own because sometimes I see things from my own perspective. And if I'm pressed for something subconsciously, I start convincing myself that this is the right person. And then a few interviews later with a few other people, we discover that, no, that's not the right person. We're only seeing one aspect of the personality or the qualification.

And by the way, it's okay to make mistakes because you will never be able to know someone 100% until you work with them or travel with them or live with them. Right? We know that for a fact. So that's true, you can't. People make mistakes in marriages, and they date for a long period of time. You will think we're not going to be able to make mistakes when hiring. It's the same. So, it's fine as long as you hire, but you must fire faster.

Smith

That's such great advice. It's so true, though, that in order to be a good hirer, you actually need to be a bad one first and make a couple of mistakes in order to know exactly. Because, I mean, the reality is everyone's first time hiring is their first time in that process. You need to make that mistake and undo that error as soon as possible and try not to repeat it by involving others in the process. But I see you as a real thickhead in your game; you've done an incredible job, and just give high fives and kudos to you for doing this and continuing to do this. What drives you?

Al Hassan

Oh, I ask myself this question every day when I'm tired, and to be very honest, I think my team and my customers. I feel like I owe it to my team that they've been working with me. Many families live off this business; many freelancers are working with the company. I cannot let these people down, and I cannot let my customers down because I have committed to delivering to my clients, and I need to deliver the best. And there's a mission to this because the Arabic language is important. It's the fifth spoken language. There's so much that can be done in the Arabic language space. And I feel I took this mission, and I need to continue. So, I cannot just drop and just let go.

Smith

What would you do after this? Of course, Tarjama is successful as it continues to grow and develop. What is the end goal for you?

Al Hassan

I'd love to see this company probably exit or IPO or do something big, like, leave a big mark. I'd love it to continue. Of course, I'd love this business to continue years and years after, even if it's going to evolve into something else. What's next for me? Honestly, I don't know, because I still feel I can still give a lot to this business. But I know for a fact that if one day I sold or exited or no longer ran the business day to day, I'm going to do something else for sure. I'm not going to sit doing nothing. I have no answer because every day I have a new idea, like I'm going to do a spa, I'm going to do an organic farm, I'm going to do this and that. It's definitely going to be in the health space for sure.

Smith

Obviously, we're encouraging entrepreneurship here. Like you said, it's not for everyone. Do you believe there is a middle ground where we can gain the benefits of entrepreneurship yet still? Is there a steppingstone, a middle ground? Is it joining a platform like you, you know, on your route to entrepreneurship?

Al Hassan

Could be. I think every employee can be an entrepreneur in their company, like, coming up. You don't need to build it yourself, but if you have an idea that could progress the business and you pitch it to your management, and your management embraces it — fantastic, why not? And many companies do that already. Or invest in one of your employees if they decide to leave and, like, do their own business.

Smith

Nour, I'll finish with one last question, which is, what gives you hope?

Al Hassan

Well, I think, why shouldn't we have hope? I think when someone reaches a hopeless stage, that would be when they lose their health or they can't give anymore. But if you're healthy, if you have the energy, even if you fail today, you can succeed tomorrow. So why can't we be hopeful? I don't think anyone can build a business being a pessimist. Usually, being pessimist or cynical, you don't build businesses. You can't count on that. You can’t accomplish this with that mentality.

Smith

The eternal optimist. Nour Al Hassan, thank you so much for joining Better Heroes. It was so wonderful to hear about the incredible work you're doing both for businesses in translation and linguistic services everywhere, but for Arabic women and Arabic-speaking women around the world. Thank you.

Al Hassan

Thank you so much, Matt. And thank you, EY, for having me.

Smith

Thank you all for joining me, Matt C Smith, on this podcast episode of Better Heroes. You can learn more about Tarjama and Nour at Tarjam.com. And you can learn more about EY Ripples and all of our impact entrepreneurs at www.ey.com/eyripples. Links are in our show notes.

Please don’t forget to subscribe to our podcast, Better Heroes, wherever you listen to your podcasts. You can also rate and leave our show a review to help others find out about the amazing work of our impact entrepreneurs. We’d like to thank our podcast producers Hueman Group Media, who helped us bring this show to life (pronounced “human”).

That’s it for today’s episode. We’ll be back next week.

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Better Heroes is a project of EY Ripples, a global program to mobilize people across the EY network to help solve the world's most urgent social and environmental challenges. By extending EY skills, knowledge and experience to impact entrepreneurs on a not-for-profit basis and forging collaborations with like-minded organizations, EY Ripples is helping scale new technologies and business models that are purposefully driving progress toward the UN’s 17 sustainable development goals.

The views of third parties set out in this podcast are not necessarily the views of the global EY organization or its member firms. Moreover, they should be seen in the context of the time they were made.

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Matt C Smith
Professional MC, Broadcaster & Host, The Lunicorn

Nour Al Hassan
Founder and CEO of Tarjama

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How women and AI are solving the translation bias

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