Tarjimly

Tarjimly is the world’s most accessible translation service, connecting refugees and humanitarians to a global network of 60,000 volunteer translators in 175+ languages through an AI-enabled mobile app. Tarjimly has provided free language services to over 1,300 organizations, translating 5.3 million words and interpreting 2.1 million minutes, supporting 500,000 refugees with access to critical services.

The Problem
Due to global conflict, political unrest, and climate change, the forcibly displaced community has climbed to a staggering 110 million people. 44% of the refugee population cannot understand the information they’re given or communicate with people trying to help them due to language barriers. These barriersbarries acutely harm refugees by restricting the access, efficiency, quality, and scale of support across every social sector. Language barriers prevent Ukrainians from finding employment, Afghans from resettling their children, Congolese from seeking medical and trauma care, Guatemalans from asylum access, Syrians from getting an education, and Sudanese from finding housing. Humanitarians can’t do their daily job effectively because of language barriers, which can lead to discriminatory denial of service, critical errors, isolation, and ultimately adverse health outcomes. Eliminating language barriers for refugees has a transformational impact on their lives, enabling them to resettle, return to normalcy, and thrive. Nonprofits and local governments have limited language support because of the significant costs associated with hiring translators. Existing language services fall dramatically short of the surging demand, with high costs, long wait times, and low language coverage.

The Solution
Tarjimly — which means ‘translate for me’ in 12 languages — dramatically improves the speed, volume, quality, and cost-effectiveness of global humanitarian and social support by providing high-quality, on-demand, remote translation and interpretation that is free for refugees and affordable for humanitarians. Tarjimly’s community solution activates the world’s 3 billion bilinguals, mostly from diaspora communities, to volunteer as on-demand translators for people in need. For rarer languages and sensitive use cases, Tarjimly hires and trains hundreds of multilingual refugees as professional interpreters through the Tarjimly Talent program, creating a feedback loop of economic empowerment and unmatched language coverage.

Tarjimly’s technology solution delivers a suite of interpretation and translation products and services using AI matching of translators to beneficiaries, delivering the right translator at the right time. Beneficiaries can filter by gender, dialect, and unique expertise as well as schedule, chat, video call, and submit documents. In partnership with Google.org and PJMF, Tarjimly bridges language barriers and the digital divide by utilizing human-verified translation data to train LLMs for low-resource languages.