'Tarjimly' means "translate for me" in Arabic. The root 'tarjim' is found in Arabic, Farsi, Dari, Pashto, Urdu, Turkish, and many other languages. The word embodies the communities we strive to support.
Tarjimly is a 501(c)(3) non-profit we founded in 2017 in response to the Syrian refugee crisis and Muslim Ban where hundreds of people in need of interpreters were stranded at airports across America. We flew to Turkey and Greece to volunteer in refugee camps where 95% of our time was spent in interpreting. We witnessed how thousands of refugees and NGOs struggled with language barriers - even in life and death situations. In Jan 2017 Tarjimly was launched when the Muslim ban was enacted. 4,000 people signed up in the first 24 hours.
We believe it's a human right to be heard and understood.
Our mission is to democratize humanitarian language access through community and technology at a global scale.
We aim to improve the lives of refugees, asylum seekers and immigrants, in addition to increasing the efficiency of humanitarian services, by eliminating language barriers.
Tarjimly’s target population is the estimated 100 million global refugees, asylum seekers, immigrants, and the humanitarians trying to help them.
We are regularly in contact with all these stakeholders and engage them to shape new features, improve the experience, and better deliver services to beneficiaries.
Tarjimly started as a Facebook Messenger bot in a handful of languages, used by a few thousand refugees and volunteers.
Language coverage, data securiy, and scalability were major challenges that drove us towards creating a HIPAA-compliant, best-in-class mobile app, and expanding to a suite of other language access services.
Global conflict, political unrest and climate change have ballooned the forcibly displaced community to over 100 million people. 44% of the refugee population cannot understand information they're given or communicate with people trying to help them in camps, in processing, or resettling in host countries.
Most refugees fall below the poverty line, and even in the US, 76% of medical providers report poor access to interpretation. Language barriers acutely harm refugees by restricting access, efficiency, quality and scale of support across every social sector: medical, legal/asylum, education, coordination, resettlement, trauma, employment, casework, housing, food, etc.
Humanitarians can’t do their daily job effectively, which leads to well-documented discriminatory denial of service for so many, but also critical errors, isolation, and ultimately adverse health outcomes. Eliminating these barriers has the potential for broad social impact across sectors, enabling holistic livelihood improvement for refugees to resettle, return to normalcy, and thrive.
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Tarjimly merges two core solutions: community and technology.We activate the world's 3 billion bilinguals, mostly from diaspora communities, as volunteer translators for the 100 million people in crisis. For rarer languages and sensitive scenarios, we hire and train paid bilingual refugees as translators and interpreters to create a feedback loop of economic empowerment and unparalleled coverage of 250+ language pairs.
Our technology solution uses AI/ML matching of translators to refugees and humanitarians, which lowers commitments, limits attrition, and raises the certainty of high impact - we connect the right translator for the right situation as fast as possible. Beneficiaries can live chat, conference call, submit documents, filter by gender, dialect, expertise, and more.
By providing on-demand remote language support that’s free for refugees and affordable for humanitarians, Tarjimly eliminates language barriers and dramatically improves the speed, equity, and cost-effectiveness of worldwide humanitarian support and social services.
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All human beings deserve the dignity of language access
Humanitarian services should never be denied due to language barriers
Technology needs to be rooted in trust and access to the underserved
Tarjimly is a mission-driven organization that is committed to:
Justice
Providing language access services to all who need it: immigrants, refugees, asylum seekers and the humanitarian organizations who support them.
Equity
Supporting organizations to provide language access to cover all humanitarian services.
Access
Providing technological solutions for accessible language access for refugees, immigrants and asylum seekers.