Nour Al Hassan begins each morning with a simple question: how can language unlock opportunity? In the pre-dawn quiet of her Dubai penthouse, she reviews the latest Tarjama AI benchmarks and scans messages from clients spanning Riyadh boardrooms to Tunisian startups. It’s a far cry from the makeshift offices where she launched her first translation storefront in Amman—yet the mission remains unchanged: to dissolve barriers and amplify Arab voices in a global conversation.
Born and raised in Jordan, Nour earned her law degree at Al Ahliyya Amman University before realizing that her true passion lay at the intersection of technology and human expression. In 2008, she founded Tarjama (“translation” in Arabic) with just a handful of remote female collaborators, positioning quality—and cultural nuance—above volume. From day one, she insisted on rigorous vetting: translators held advanced degrees, editors peer-reviewed every sentence, and project managers liaised closely with clients to capture brand tone and technical precision. Within two years, Tarjama had grown from a local service into the Middle East’s premier language-solutions provider, managing over 35,000 freelancers and 154 full-time staff across seven offices by 2022.
Yet Nour wasn’t content with human labor alone. Inboardroom presentations to Wamda Capital and Anova Investments, she argued that AI could enhance, not replace, human expertise—speeding up turnaround while preserving linguistic integrity. Her vision led to Tarjama’s first Series A in 2019, raising US $5 million to build proprietary translation-management software. By embedding machine-learning algorithms trained on millions of annotated Arabic texts, Tarjama’s platform could now suggest contextually appropriate phrasing for legal, medical, and technical documents—cutting initial drafts by 40 percent without sacrificing accuracy.
The next leap came in 2017 with Ureed, a spin-out digital marketplace that linked businesses directly to freelance linguists, copywriters, and editors. In an era when global companies scrambled for Arabic content, Ureed offered vetted talent, secure payments, and transparent ratings—democratizing access to high-caliber language services. Within three years, Ureed facilitated over 1 million projects, from marketing campaigns in Cairo to subtitling for Nordic streaming platforms, and helped women in remote MENA communities earn sustainable incomes.
As Tarjama and Ureed flourished, Nour took on leadership roles beyond her companies’ walls. From 2015 to 2017, she served as a fellow at The Aspen Institute, mentoring emerging Middle Eastern entrepreneurs on scaling social-impact ventures. She joined the World Economic Forum’s Global Shapers Community and, in 2023, was featured among Forbes Middle East’s “20 Women Behind Tech Brands” for her work in AI-powered language solutions. Her keynote at the 2024 Gitex Global Summit underscored a simple truth: “Data is neutral, but language carries values—our models must honor that responsibility.”
That sense of responsibility propelled her latest venture: Arabic.AI, unveiled in early 2025. Anchored by Pronoia, a proprietary large-language model benchmarked against GPT-4, it excels in Arabic dialects and transliteration subtleties, outperforming Western models in regional tests. With Pronoia, Tarjama can now auto-generate press releases, legal summaries, and creative copy that resonate authentically across Levantine, Gulf, and Maghrebi audiences—bridging continental divides in real time.
Under Nour’s stewardship, Tarjama’s annual revenue has surged past US $15 million, and its AI initiatives earned “Most Promising Language Tech” at the 2024 MENA FinTech Awards. Yet she measures success not by lines translated or startups funded, but by voices heard. In 2023, Tarjama sponsored a project translating refugee-student essays into English for university applications—a program that helped 120 young scholars secure scholarships abroad. In 2024, Ureed partnered with UNICEF to localize child-safety guidelines into five dialects, ensuring critical information reached over 2 million caregivers across the region.
Nour credits her team’s diversity—“35% women in leadership, freelancers from 55 countries, and employees spanning five generations”—for driving Tarjama’s creative breakthroughs. She has instituted “Culture Jams,” monthly hackathons where linguists and engineers co-create new features, from voice-over alignment tools to sentiment-aware subtitles. These sessions have produced innovations like ContextLock, which flags culturally sensitive terms before translation, protecting brands from inadvertent missteps in cross-border messaging.
Looking ahead, Nour envisions Tarjama and Arabic.AI powering a “polylingual web,” where language is no longer a barrier but a channel for collaboration. She is exploring blockchain-based “translation credentials” to authenticate translator expertise and piloting neural-style rendering for literary works, preserving poetic meter and metaphor across languages. Meanwhile, Ureed is testing a “micro-loan” feature enabling freelancers to access small business credit—another step toward financial inclusion for under-banked creatives.
Through it all, Nour remains anchored in empathy. She visits Tarjama’s Amman maternity-leave support group and hosts virtual roundtables for Ureed freelancers wrestling with economic uncertainty. At her annual “Voices for Change” forum in Dubai, she convenes policymakers, technologists, and grassroots activists to shape industry standards for ethical AI and equitable gig-economy practices.
In a world racing toward automation, Nour Al Hassan’s journey reminds us that language is inherently human. By blending legal rigor, technical innovation, and a deep respect for cultural nuance, she has not only built thriving enterprises but also woven a digital tapestry where every dialect, every accent, and every storyteller can find their place. And as the sun sets over the desert skyline, she closes her laptop contentedly, confident that tomorrow’s words—translated, transcreated, and AI-enhanced—will carry us all forward.
