Forty organizations active in buying and supplying translation services and technologies have jointly founded a new industry association aimed at sharing parallel language data with the objective to stimulate innovation and automation of translation activities. The TAUS Data Association (TDA) hosts translation memories and glossaries in all languages structured by industry domains and company indexes. TDA will give free access to its databases for the look-up of translations of terms and phrases. Members will be able to select and pool data to increase translation efficiency and improve translation quality.
The initiative for this Association is a response to an evolution in the translation industry where larger and shared language data collections represent ever greater values. The main objectives are to establish a legitimate platform for sharing language data and to respond to the need for clean and trusted data for training of new translation automation technologies.
The TAUS Data Association (TDA) is a global platform representing the interests of business, government, technology and solution providers and practitioners of professional services on an equal and neutral basis.
The Association is based on the principle of reciprocity: before pooling data members are requested to submit data. Both owners and managers of multilingual content (language service and technology providers) are able join as members and submit and pool data and use them to increase efficiency and quality of services and solutions. The Association stimulates collaboration of companies in specific industry domains for sharing language data.
The main objectives of the TAUS Data Association are:
- 1. Legitimate and secure platform for storing, sharing and leveraging language data.
- 2. Access to large volumes of trusted language data for increased translation automation.
- 3. Industry collaboration to promote harmonization of multilingual terminology.
Benefits for members are: increased translation efficiency, market growth and business innovation.
The Founding Members are: ABBYY, Abu Ghazaleh Legal Translations, Adobe, Applied Language Solutions, Armed Forces Language Support Services, Autodesk, Celer Soluciones, Cisco Systems, CLS Communication, Cross Language, Dell, Direct Language, eBay, Elanex, EMC, Intel, Jonckers, Language Intelligence, Language Weaver, Linguistic Systems, Lionbridge, Logrus, Matrixware, McAfee, Merrill Brink, Microsoft, Milengo, Moravia, MorphoLogic, Oracle, Prolingua, Proz.com, PTC, SDL, Skrivanek, Sun Microsystems, Sybase iAnywhere, Tilde, VanceInfo Creative Software, Vistatec, Welocalize. The European Commission has also agreed to donate its parallel language data to be shared through TDA.