In the midst of an escalating refugee crisis, citizens oceans away from conflict are often left feeling helpless, wondering how to support those on the frontlines. And while there are numerous aid organizations worthy of philanthropy, for bilingual individuals around the world, there’s a new way to offer help and translation services to refugees and aid workers in the midst of crisis.
Meet Tarjimly.
Tarjimly is a Facebook Messenger bot that launched late January 2017. The bot instantly connects translators around the world to refugees, nonprofit organizations and immigrants in need of communication support. According to UNHCR, there are more than 22.5 million refugees worldwide.
“Communication is one of the biggest problems refugees face whether they’re stuck in limbo in camps, navigating a route to safety, or resettling into a new home,” shares cofounder Atif Javed. “They struggle to communicate everyday things, but sometimes they need help in life-or-death scenarios. It’s unacceptable for people to suffer, or even die, because of communication. Existing translation tools are robotic, inaccurate, and not nuanced enough in so many of these circumstances.”
For Javed, his experience and passion to solve this problem comes from his time working for tech companies like Tesla, Apple, NASA, and as Oracle’s youngest product manager in company history. Now a data product manager at AJ+, he shares, “I realized I can have data for people clicking a button, but nothing for people dying in refugee camps.”
It was this realization, along with the Muslim ban, that spurred the creation of Tarjimly.
The Tarjimly team includes millennial co-founders and MIT graduates Atif Javed; Aziz Alghunaim, a full-stack software engineer; and Abubakar Abid, a now-Ph.D. candidate at Stanford University in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. Javed states that following graduation, the three friends, all devout Muslim Americans, realized something needed to be done. “We stepped into the world with growing hate towards our faith, an unending refugee crisis, and an emboldened wave of xenophobia in our country,” says Javed.
Tarjimly’s bot technology uses sophisticated routing algorithms using implicit and explicit feedback – a level of sophistication that Javed states would cost traditional organizations millions of dollars to create. Yet, through a team with the right experience and a personal connection to the issue, Tarjimly is getting ready to scale the technology through partnerships with more than 15 organizations around the world. Providing translation services through volunteers alone, Tarjimly has already recruited more than 2,200 volunteers who have signed up, following a test to assess fluency, to provide support to refugees, medical staff, aid workers, and legal aids in the midst of both day-to-day and crisis situations.
“Tarjimly helps refugees, humanitarian workers, and average people, like you and I, who want to do more than just post on Facebook or donate money. It allows us to tangibly connect and help people translate text, images, documents, and audio notes via Messenger, an app that refugees are already using,” says Javed.
The decision to launch Tarjimly on the Facebook Messenger platform was strategic – meeting refugees and aid workers through an existing platform they’re familiar with. It’s this strategic move that keeps the team focused on reaching as many people as possible, and this April, Facebook’s team took note. David Marcus, the VP of Facebook Messenger, shared at F8 how Tarjimly used Messenger to provide translation services for Murad, a volunteer translator from Morocco, who was helping a family resettle in San Diego.
According to Javed, “Our mission is to put a translator in the pocket of every person in need by building the future of person-to-person translation. Our vision is a world where refugees are no longer statistics in our minds, but real people that we talk to and help every single day.”
Tarjimly allows refugees, immigrants and aid workers to access translation services through a... [+]
According to Javed, this is just the start for Tarjimly. As a technology company, the goal is to become the new standard for translation services by empowering a person-to-person translation in as many languages as possible. The company is currently focusing on Arabic, Farsi and Pashto as it launches the service for refugees, though Javed says that moving forward, the goal is to incorporate as many languages as possible into Tarjimly’s infrastructure. In the future, the team hopes to provide a full-spectrum of translation services including help for travelers and ESL teachers.
On World Refugee Day, Javed reminds us, “It’s very easy for real stories to become statistics very quickly. The best thing you can do is actively engage with refugees in your community and in your area. Real impact is made by helping real people.”
Through the technology we hold in our hands every day, Tarjimly’s goal remains to eradicate the barrier of communication, offering help and translation for anyone, no matter what.
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