Jaap van der Meer is a language industry pioneer and visionary, who started his first translation company in The Netherlands in 1980. In 1987, his company INK published the first desktop term extraction and translation memory software. He initiated the standards initiatives for the localization industry in the mid 80s and was leading in applying corpus analysis to support more efficient translation processes. He inspired and funded the founding meetings of the LISA organization and co-founded the SAE TopTec Multilingual Communications Conference for the automotive industry. He was President and CEO of ALPNET from 1997 till 2004, a period of tremendous growth for one of the first publicly traded global translation companies. In 25 years, Jaap accumulated a vast network of contacts in the globalization and localization industries.
In 2005, Jaap van der Meer established the Translation Automation User Society (TAUS), along with founding members from most of the leading IT companies. TAUS is a community of users and providers of translation technologies and services and serves as an outsourced research resource for the translation industry focusing on translation automation, industry collaboration and business innovation.
In 2008, the TAUS members also founded the TAUS Data Association (TDA), which emerges as a global translation industry platform for the hosting and sharing of all language data (translation memories). Members benefit through a reduction in cost and friction in translation management, while supporting the advancement of translation technology and innovation of the translation industry. Jaap van der Meer is the director of TDA.
Jaap van der Meer is a regular speaker at conferences and author of many articles about technologies and translation and globalization trends.