Nour Al Hassan, founder and CEO of Tarjama&: Each week, My Morning Routine looks at how a successful member of the community starts their day — and then throws in a couple of random business questions just for fun. Speaking to us this week is Nour Al Hassan (LinkedIn), the founder and CEO of Tarjama&. Edited excerpts from our conversation:

My name is Nour Al Hassan. I’m the founder and CEO of Tarjama&, a company that focuses mainly on language services, and which recently started building its own AI solutions and technology. I’m a lawyer by education, and I started this business 16 years ago. We have offices in Riyadh, Dubai, Amman, Montreal, and Paris.

Before I founded Tarjama, I was working as a consultant at an international organization. There was always demand and requests for translation, but the biggest two issues that we used to face are poor quality and turnaround time. So, I decided I want to build a company with global standards, but MENA-based and MENA-focused. I wanted it to be the best and the largest when it comes to language services.

We recently rebranded from Tarjama to Tarjama&, to reflect the work we do on the content, event documentation, and marketing and social media side. There’s a wide spectrum of services that Tarjama delivers now, but because the name is very well known and well established, we kept the name and opted for Tarjama& to reflect the adjacent services we offer.

We started by building our own machine translation engine that is tailored for business use, and that has very good quality Arabic data in financial, legal, and medical industries. We later decided we want to build our own translation management system, which is like an ERP system for translators. It organizes their work, and has machine learning embedded in it. We sell that to linguists and to business clients.

We work with government entities and large consulting firms, banks, and the healthcare sector, among other domains. We have over 600 recurring clients.

We are the only company in the region that built Arabic machine translation engines with that quality and the only company that went and built a translation management software for translators, which is a very complex product.

We also recently entered the large language model (LLM) space, and we’re fine tuning our own Arabic LLM that will have more capabilities than just translation, and plan to launch it soon.

The main things we’re looking into now is how to integrate large language models into our workspace and business model. How do we use AI to make us more productive and how do we make AI work with humans to produce the best possible quality? We do still believe that the human role is crucial despite all the hype on large language models’ capabilities, and we do think that, no matter what you want to build, the human feedback in the loop is crucial.

As a CEO, I’m supposed to set the vision of the company, so that’s what I do for a living. I look after the growth of the company, in terms of revenues, for example. I have to hold the PNL. I am responsible for brainstorming with the team on what new technologies we need to take on, who are the clients we want to go after, or the new markets we want to enter.

In terms of my morning routine, I’m usually up by 6am. I start by having coffee and cleaning up my inbox, and see if there’s anything urgent that I need to push out of the way. Then, I exercise. By 10am, my day starts with meetings all the way up until 7pm. My day is usually split between meetings with clients and meetings with my team members.

The one constant in my routine is working out. I try as much as possible to do at least five to six days a week at the gym, and I also prioritize sleeping early. The best thing to keep you organized is to wake up early and start your morning with a workout, so you’re high energy and so that it sets the tone for your day.

My work-life balance is, well, completely off balance. I do work a lot — more than I should — and I barely have one day off a week if I’m lucky, so I’m struggling with it. It’s not very feasible at the stage where Tarjama& is now at, with its growth plan and the recruitment and hiring needs. I think I will get there soon, though, because I’m recruiting really good people to help me. My team is growing, and I have more mature people around me, so it’s one of my main targets in 2025 — to stop doing anything post 5 or 6pm, and to take my weekends.

When the weather is nice in Dubai, I like to go on a beach walk in the evening to unwind. I also like to watch a series or a movie on Netflix to try to switch off.

I listen to a lot of podcasts. My current favorite is Humans vs. Machines with Gary Marcus, and I also enjoy How I Built This. As for books, I like every book that Peter Drucker wrote, especially The Effective Executive. I like Blink as well, and Shoe Dog, which is about Nike’s founder.

For my personal goals, I really enjoy investing in startups, and want to do more of that. As for my goals for Tarjama&, I want to expand it so it has a global footprint, and I want it to be among the top 10 language services firms in the world.

The best advice I got is to remain focused, and that was from the founder of Aramex, Fadi Ghandour. I always tend to like to build too many things at the same time, and he advised me to remain focused, because that’s the only way you can accomplish one target at a time.

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