Launch HN: Tarjimly (YC W18 Nonprofit) – Realtime Translators for Refugees
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
19 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 45.3 ms ] threadI’m sure you’ve thought of this, but, given that Facebook’s Messenger is generally not end-to-end encrypted, is it a good choice for discussing legal matters? Are you considering alternatives?
Most of the lawyers using Tarjimly censor the PII (personal identifying information) themselves either by covering those parts of documents or omitting them in conversations, which does the trick most of the time. Generally, these nonprofit lawyers are so strained for resources they're excited to use something over nothing to help them do their job.
We wanted to get something available quickly, which is why we started with Messenger and that's made on-boarding incredibly easy, but security is proving to be more and more important. We're going to see if the WhatsApp API will be end-to-end encrypted and we're in the design phase of our own mobile app to create an even better experience (especially for calling where Messenger is being difficult).
We built a message editor which allows us to immediately edit any string in our application and website. It also allows our friends to correct and verify all the strings used in our application:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=160ZFXDpddf8VHHgnYulvbzdnWb...
Almost every refugee we met has WhatsApp and they use it much more profusely than Messenger, especially for groups. The one exception being Farsi speakers who live primarily in Telegram. They all use Messaging apps as a lifeline to their families back home and an outlet to the wider world, so they're almost all willing to buy data plans and get a smartphone.
Aziz and I felt the same way, and we felt bad about buying flights to basically go translate (because we're engineers there wasn't much else we could offer really).
You should definitely sign up as a translator and connect us to your friends who were at the refugee camps when you get a chance: atif@tarjim.ly
Edit: ops, now I saw the newsletter box at the end of the website.
Definitely looking into WhatsApp, Telegram, and especially our own mobile app where we can do a lot more.
We have an email signup at the bottom of the site, where you can signup for our newsletter - perhaps I should make that more visible.
Yeah, I saw the newsletter after. Maybe separating the box of donating would be better to skim.
0-https://www.bemyeyes.com/
But... the fact the it uses (or even can use) Facebook Messenger is enough to put me off recommending it to anyone or even really sharing news of the product.
Facebook not a company that I'd trust with data about me or those at risk.
Regardless, congrats on the launch, the landing site looks great too!
I'll keep an eye out for updates on alternatives to Facebook Messenger.
Keep up the good work!
Have you considered using other platforms that are widely used in the region, such as Telegram?