This is Atif and Aziz, co-founders of Tarjimly (https://tarjim.ly) - a nonprofit that allows bilingual speakers to volunteer as translators for the 23 million refugees worldwide using anonymous chat, phone, and video. All for free.
Aziz and I graduated MIT during the Syrian refugee crisis. Our friends and family all told us about the dire situation, but one problem stuck out: refugees desperately struggled to communicate with the medics, lawyers, and aid workers trying to help them. We built Tarjimly as a way to remotely translate by connecting over Facebook Messenger.
A year later, our community of 3000+ volunteer translators has helped over 1500 refugees and aid workers globally.
- Translators come back because it finally gives them a way to do more than just donate money or post online.
- Refugees come back because machine translation (e.g. Google Translate) for refugee languages severely lacks accuracy and situational awareness.
- Aid Workers come back because paid translators are expensive and don't even come close to meeting demand.
We validated these problems by interviewing over 300 refugees and aid workers and doing a 2-week field study in Greece: https://medium.com/@tarjimly/greece-trip-research-reflection...
We built a model to predict translator response based on their previous interactions and ping those who are most likely to respond at the time of request. It takes an average of 90 seconds to get connected to a translator from our passive pool and our current match rate is 92%.
We see Tarjimly growing into an organization that provides micro-volunteerism at macro-scale. We want to work at the front lines of the world's humanitarian needs, in any country that may be. We're looking forward to hearing your feedback and any ideas or experiences you've had in this area. And if you or your friends are bilingual, consider signing up as a translator!
TC: https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/13/bilingual-tarjimly-lets-yo...
Video: https://tarjim.ly/explainer