Sir/Madam,

There are now multiple industry offerings inviting you to take part in their SaaS cloud-based solution. While these represent a welcome advance on tired old solutions, the new role, power, and importance of language data is still overlooked by many and is often not well understood.

Back in 2008, the founding members of the TAUS Data Association (TDA) had the creative foresight to visualize an industry supercloud of translation memories. They understood the potential and had the courage to act.

While most people in the industry still remain 'lurkers' on the sidelines, translation data are 'leaking' into more or less closed proprietary TM repositories. You give, they take. You want change on your terms, they don't. You leave, your data stays.

TM sharing is becoming a hot topic, as we saw with last week's Translation Leaks article. Within a few days over a thousand people read the article and debates started on several discussion groups.

At TDA we differentiate ourselves as the only industry-sanctioned platform hosting trusted translation data with a genuinely reciprocal sharing model. Ensuring equal and ubiquitous access to translation data to promote translation innovation, and efficiency. Member-driven and independent.

After 18 months of operation, we look back on some great achievements:

• TDA membership has doubled to 90 members
• Database volume has grown to 3.2 billion words in 320 language pairs
• 50,000 searches per month on the free TAUS Search
• Over 12 billion words downloaded by members to train MT engines, and improve services and tools
• A proven robust, secure and scalable platform genuinely applying the TMX and XLIFF open standards
• Free open APIs used by members and non-members to integrate their tools and services

Our mission as TDA is to share more data with every stakeholder in the global translation industry, through powerful services such as: Language Search, TM Sharing and Translation Matching. Share and you can download 10 times what you upload. Extend your, and your clients historic investments in TMs.

TDA offers excellent support, and will keep developing first of a kind new features.

We invite you to join TDA and contribute to a unique initiative. Help the translation industry standout. As a translation agency you pay only €250 per year. Freelance translators pay €50 per year. Organizations pay according to size. See the membership program and join TDA today. It is the best decision you can take before the New Year starts. Give yourself real choices now and into the future. Share openly and benefit from the TDA safe haven.

We wish you a successful and happy New Year!

The TDA Team

P.s. We are inviting everyone with an interest in translation automation to join the Translation Automation discussion group on LinkedIn to get the pulse of innovation and sharing trends in the changing translation industry.