TAUS Data Association Incorporated by Group of 40 Founding Members
Amsterdam, June 30, 2008: Forty organizations active in buying and supplying translation services and technologies have jointly established 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) will host 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.
"This collaboration is a major breakthrough for the translation industry", says Jaap van der Meer, Director of the TAUS Data Association. "There are simply not enough translators in the world to meet the rapidly growing demand for translations. This initiative helps all industry players to increase the level of translation automation and stimulate interoperability and innovation of business models."
The first release of TDA - expected to be launched early 2009 - will include a language search portal for public use and a language data exchange facility for members. The language search allows translators, customer support staff, product developers and marketers, end-users and any other professionals to find translations of phrases. The language data exchange allows members to provide and pool very large collections of parallel language data to help them automate and streamline translation processes. The European Commission has also agreed to donate its parallel language data to be shared through TDA.
The deadline for companies joining as Founding Members of TDA is August 31, 2008. Founding Members enjoy benefits such as preferential votes on member regulations and nominations for the Board positions and discounts on admission fees.
The Supervisory Board of TDA consists of: Melissa Biggs (Sun Microsystems), Will Burgett (Intel), Gilles Martel (Translation Bureau Canadian Government), Chris Wendt (Microsoft), Francis Tsang (Adobe) and Willem Stoeller (Welocalize).
The Founding Members are: ABBYY, Abu Ghazaleh Legal Translations, Adobe, Applied Language Solutions, Autodesk, Celer Soluciones, Cisco Systems, CLS Communication, Cross Language, Dell, eBay, Elanex, EMC, Intel, Jonckers, Language Intelligence, Language Weaver, Linguistic Systems, Lionbridge, Logrus, Matrixware, McAfee, Microsoft, Milengo, Moravia, Oracle, Prolingua, PTC, SDL, Skrivanek, Sun Microsystems, Sybase iAnywhere, Tilde, VanceInfo Creative Software, Vistatec, Welocalize, Yahoo.
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