Tarjimly: Translating for Humanity

Global conflict and climate change have ballooned the refugee community to 83M+. An estimated 44% (36M) can't understand the info they're given or communicate with people trying to help them. 3M refugees reside in the US and the recent influxes from Afghanistan, Latin America, and soon Ukraine will continue to surge.

Language barriers acutely harms refugees by restricting access, efficiency, quality, and scale of humanitarian support across EVERY social sector - medical, legal/asylum, education, coordination, resettlement, trauma, employment, casework, housing, food, etc. Therefore solving it has the potential for widespread social impact.

Refugees and immigrants are already more medically vulnerable, but language barriers inhibit communication which further reduces patient and medical provider experience and speed. There simply aren’t enough affordable language services and machine translation just isn’t good enough yet, which leads to denials of service, increased exposure risk, and critical errors:

19% of US residents (25M) are limited-English proficient which strained medical care throughout the pandemic especially in poorer communities. Public services (like hospitals and schools) are required by US law to make interpreters available, but the practical implementation of this is severely limited as nearly every medical provider can attest:

• A 2016 survey of 4,586 hospitals suggests that only 56% offered some sort of linguistic services, a very slight improvement over the 54% recorded five years earlier. Another survey suggests that 97% of physicians see at least some patients who have difficulty understanding English (NPR Report).

• The average wait time to call an in-person interpreter if available was 19 mins in one of the world’s best medical systems (Mayo clinic) which ran $4.3M in 2016.

Tarjimly merges 2 core solutions: community and technology. 

• Our community approach leverages the world's 3 billion bilinguals, mostly from diaspora communities, to volunteer as on-demand translators to help the 83 million refugees, immigrants in crisis. For rarer languages and sensitive use cases, we hire and train hundreds of paid bilingual refugees as interpreters to create a feedback loop of economic empowerment.

• Our technology approach delivers global hotlines in 120+ languages using efficient machine learning matching of global translators to beneficiaries right from their phone on the Tarjimly mobile app, which limits burnout and attrition and raises the certainty of high impact.

When a refugee, immigrant, or humanitarian needs language support, they select their language needs on the Tarjimly mobile app and within 2 minutes they are connected with the best available translator in our community of 43,000+ using our ML matching algorithm derived from an array of inputs. Once connected, they can live chat, send documents, and start a phone or conference call:

This approach directly improves:

1) VOLUNTEERISM - a new high-impact category of remote micro-volunteering and training for multilingual communities to easily support people in need with language access using their skills and no minimum commitments (low barriers to entry). It fundamentally improves human understanding and community cohesion by improving resettlement and integration into non-multilingual communities.

3) SOCIAL SERVICES - enable refugees, immigrants, and humanitarians responding to the latest crises to receive the language support they need across social services leading to (1) higher quality services, (2) faster & more efficient services, (3) more cost-effectiveness, (4) more beneficiaries served, (5) and greater access and inclusion of underserved people. This results in improved health, legal access, education, employment, income, living conditions, and access to services.

We have helped thousands of refugees, immigrants, and displaced people in host countries get access to free on-demand interpretation and translation:

• Tarjimly helps these vulnerable populations who are at risk of exploitation and don’t have adequate resources which they can use to access services and resources necessary to stabilize their lives and progress.

  • At Tarjimly, we are proud to support refugees and immigrants during urgent and spontaneous situations, where it is not possible to organize a translator in advance.

  • During the resettlement process for refugees and immigrants, linguistic capabilities act as a major obstacle in accessing basic services, none more important than health care.

  • Tarjimly has come to the rescue to provide medical care in Greek refugee camps, help Afghan refugee women advocate for themselves during labor, and providing legal assistance to Haitian medical refugees, and translating Covid-19 information flyers in the US in partnership with Harvard.

• Especially in the times of Covid-19, Tarjimly has made remote volunteering possible, facilitating conversations between refugees, aid workers, and translators remotely, using our conference calling feature.

  • This ability to connect remotely has allowed people to access help while remaining safely in their homes during the global pandemic. In another scenario, an interpreter, humanitarian, or refugee would have to travel to a location where all the facilities are available, risking exposure.

• Since the start of the pandemic, Tarjimly has connected a translator to someone in need 18,000 times, allowing them quicker and more equitable access to services.

  • ~20% of all sessions on Tarjimly have been medical or trauma counseling in nature. Tarjimly is now fully HIPAA-compliant so we expect that to surge with the backlog of clinics eager to use our service.

  • Our most requested languages are: Dari, Pashto, Arabic, Swahili, Spanish, Farsi, Kinyarwanda, French, Tigrinya, Kurdish, Haitian Creole

• Our service is globally available and is primarily used today by humanitarians (doctors, lawyers, teachers, etc.) supporting vulnerable communities, as they are the ones who need to communicate with patients.

  • Soon the Tarjimly app will be localized to multiple languages allowing us to empower beneficiaries to take control of their language access.

  • Tarjimly has been used in over 60 countries, but is primarily used in the US, Canada, Mexico, France, Germany, Turkey, and Jordan where refugees resettle.

• We recently launched “Tarjimly Talent” and hired 280+ paid translators for rare and in-demand languages.

  • We train and hire refugee translators trained in interpretation, many of whom have fled their own countries in search of safety.

  • We’ve also opened up opportunities for refugee employment by equipping businesses with the app to interview non-English speaking applicants and communicate with them post-hiring.

• Our humanitarian users include some of the largest NGOs as well as many smaller NGOs who can’t afford professional services.

  • We’ve partnered with over 25 humanitarian and language orgs and are expanding this list meaningfully every month.

    • ~15% of our users are from the International Rescue Committee.

    • Others include the Red Cross, UNHCR, World Relief, MercyCorps, Catholic Charities, and individual hospitals.

    • We are running a pilot with the IOM in Qatar and looking to announce similar ones with the UNHCR Mexico and IRC.

  • Many of these organizations pay for Tarjimly Premium which allows us to offset our costs, pay the refugee translators, and forge a path to self-sustainability.

    • We have ~200 paying users and ~$5k in monthly recurring revenue (15% sustainable).

• Tarjimly was designed to ensure anonymity, confidentiality, and proper safeguarding so that refugees can ask for help and discuss private issues without fear.

  • Tarjimly has followed Keeping Children Safe’s standards for safeguarding.

  • Now that we’re HIPAA compliant, we can partner with global medical institutions providing healthcare to refugees, immigrants, and Limited-English Proficient (LEP) patients.

Our staff and board are professional software engineers and program managers from the humanitarian sector, all from underrepresented backgrounds and located in 6 countries. Nearly all of us are former refugees and immigrants, so we all personally resonate with the challenges of the communities we serve. We also conduct research, trainings, and workshops with beneficiaries and partners directly to embody inclusion for their voices in our development process.

Our co-founder served as an interpreter for his own refugee and immigrant family and witnessed first hand how his family struggled with language barriers from simple tasks to critical events such as going to the doctor, to school, or to work. The co-founders also volunteered in refugee camps in Turkey and Greece and saw how crippling language barriers were in aid distribution, emergency medicine, and rescue operations.

Our organization caters to the needs of refugees, migrants, asylees, and humanitarian workers. We regularly are in contact with all these stakeholders and engage them to shape new features, improve the experience, and better deliver services to beneficiaries.

We are extremely data-driven and publish our real-time impact on our public dashboard: https://tarjimly.org/data. Our quarterly roadmap is based on needs identified by qualitative and quantitative data analyses (i.e. internal dashboards, interviews with partners, and feedback from users), and our quarterly goals are tied to impact metrics.

Solve will help Tarjimly with our biggest challenge: building a powerful network across industries and sectors, mainly health and education, which we can partner and expand our services to. Solve can act as a great capacity building platform for our organization which will help us improve our service delivery, growth and receive support, advice from industry experts across solve and MIT partner networks.

Current approaches and tools fall dramatically short of meeting the sheer demand because the sector is fixated on perfect quality. All together, our unique community and technology approach allows us to deliver a step function increase in access and availability to people in need with little sacrifice in quality. From that perspective, we are aiming to change the market by proving a better path exists.

There are 3 main methods of serving language needs in humanitarian settings today:

1. In-Person Services - these are wholly insufficient as there simply isn't enough supply and they have tremendous logistical and financial hurdles at scale.

   1. If you are lucky to be resettled by a wealthy country or NGO, in-person interpreters might be provided for you only in high-risk settings such as court cases and critical medical appointments, leaving most use-cases unmet.

   2. If you are lucky, you might have a bilingual family member who can help you. Indeed, most immigrants and refugees today are forced to rely on this, masking the extent of the problem and leaving many people wholly unserved.

2. Remote Services - this is a massively growing market as technology has opened the doors of possibility with high quality communication, routing algorithms, and global economic opportunity, while Covid has restricted the viability of in-person services.

   1. Existing providers are prohibitively expensive because they exclusively use paid translators (don’t supplement with volunteers) for high-margin/high-risk scenarios (not the majority of use cases).

3. Machine Translation - these remain a last-resort, but are mostly unused due to large gaps in:

   1. Functionality (lack of availability or even digitization for the long-tail of languages, especially those less economically powerful)

   2. Quality (common mistakes and lack of clarity in the certainty of a translation, which a human can tell you)

   3. Trust (simply not used in the field today partly due to history of “pure-tech” failures breaking the bridge of trust between the tech and humanitarian sectors).

Through Tarjimly, healthcare providers can communicate with people from different backgrounds clearly and efficiently, providing them with the best services possible in a matter of minutes. Tarjimly is taking an old, expensive, cumbersome experience of vetting, scheduling, and managing translators into a consumer-like on-demand mobile experience that’s free for refugees & cheap for humanitarian orgs.

Today, Tarjimly is the most accessible translator service in the world due to this scalable model of activating millions of translators remotely around the world.

Full Landscape Analysis

Our biggest long-term goal is to make Tarjimly the most accessible and most used translation service in the world. Tarjimly becomes the go-to app whenever someone requires immediate translation, specifically in health and humanitarian aid settings. Our 5-year goal is to grow an army of over 1 million translators, cover all the languages spoken in the world, and help 1 million people with on-demand language access.

Our impact metrics and goals are publicly available on our Data Dashboard, Org Roadmap, and Public Product Roadmap. Our 2022 goals include:

1. Growing Translator pool to 50,000 and reaching language coverage (over 50 translators in a language) of 90. Currently 40,000 with 79.

2. Growing Weekly sessions from 702 to 1000 and positive rating from 85% to 90%.

3. Growing Monthly match rate from 84% to 95% and Monthly match time from 75s to 60s.

4. Grow Tarjimly Talent (recruit and train more refugees as paid rare language translators) from 218 to 400 to improve session quality and match rates.

5. Launch new features like scheduling and reconnecting, further improve match rates and reliability.

6. Find new methods / business models for organizations to access Tarjimly at scale by signing contracts with large humanitarian organizations (IRC, Red Cross, UNHCR, etc.)

As a technology non-profit, Tarjimly looks to validate our programs with data relating to wide-scale, national, and international adoption of our app.

We are implementing survey questions at the end of sessions to measure all the specific outcomes that came from the service and we are aiming to launch a randomized control trial (RCT) with an NGO partner in the next year so we can further map our impact to the UN SDG goal of improved health for all ages.

As of March 2022:

• Translator Connections to Beneficiaries: 41,977 (avg 86 seconds wait time, 700+ connections per week, 85%+ rated positive)

• Words Translated: 2.2 million from 191k messages

• Minutes Interpreted: 161k from 19k calls

• Beneficiaries Supported: 18,500+

• Languages Supported: 144

• Volunteer Translators: 42,000+ (over 4000 have certified medical experience)

• Monthly Recurring Revenue: $4k

• Humanitarian and language partners: 25

• Highest use cases: Medical (19%)

• Humanitarian organizations signed up: 200+

• We've overcome tough challenges with connection speed, tech reliability, translator quality, and confidentiality.

We are extremely data-driven and publish our real-time impact on our public dashboard: https://tarjimly.org/data. Our quarterly roadmap is based on needs identified by qualitative and quantitative data analyses (i.e. internal dashboards, interviews with partners, and feedback from users), and our quarterly goals are tied to impact metrics.

Theory of Change Slides

Our three-pronged approach of Technology, Partnerships, and Community shapes our Theory of Change. By providing high quality on-demand remote interpretation to humanitarian organizations doing the tough work on the ground, we believe we can improve outcomes in these 5 ways for displaced people:

1. It can improve the quality of the service they receive

2. As well as the speed and efficiency with which they receive it

3. It can reduce the costs to deliver it

4. Allowing for more beneficiaries to be served

5. As well as increase access to the underserved

And so when these interventions begin to cut across sectors, the impact could support displaced people to better survive and thrive in all kinds of ways.

Tarjimly combines a massive human-powered community with widely-available mobile app tech available on Android and iOS. We built an innovative custom multi-party calling feature in partnership with one of our funders, Twilio. The people on the call can be located anywhere in the world (barring sanctioned countries). We are also working on implementing versions of Tarjimly to be used on WhatsApp and Telegram for wider penetration and availability.

When people in need create a request on Tarjimly, our machine learning matching algorithm connects them with the best available trained translator from a community of 42,000+ in under 2 minutes with whom they communicate, translate, and interpret in real time over text and voice. They can start conference calls, submit document translations, and filter by gender, dialect, unique expertise, and many more.

• Tarjimly's goal is to give every person in need a voice. That value carries into our processes (decisions, targeting, workshops) to center the needs of vulnerable communities.

• We support 144 rare and diverse languages and empower refugees by employing them as rare language translators.

• Tarjimly was built to promote DEI by eliminating language injustices, providing an inclusive voice for refugees, displaced people, and immigrants. All the team members including founders belong to underrepresented backgrounds & strongly stand for it.

Tarjimly over the past 5 years has built a first-class tech nonprofit for the humanitarian sector that’s changing the lives of refugees. Due to our investments in reliability and Premium, Tarjimly is now an integral part of the weekly workflow for hundreds of humanitarians around the world. Lives Impacted via avg weekly sessions grew 5x from 100 to 500 in the past year. We expect to translate more this year than the entire 3 years before: 2 MILLION words since inception. 

Furthermore, we now have the necessary prerequisite quality controls in place which caters to the needs of the humanitarian and nonprofit sector. We are now HIPPA compliant, have undergone Safeguarding training and introduced Translator training and rare language hotline numbers. This means we can now unlock more impactful partnerships, such as those with health workers, hospitals, and large resettlement agencies. This establishes a paid business model with Tarjimly Premium that we sell to large organizations to fund our paid translators, our technology, our programs for those who can’t afford, and become self-sustainable.

Tarjimly aims to take massive strides this year on the path to self sustainability through the sales of Tarjimly Premium to NGOs and hospitals:

• We launched a Tarjimly Premium and Tarjimly Premier offering, targeted to the needs of individual humanitarians and larger NGOs, respectively, who frequently use the app and have high interpretation demands.

• Tarjimly provides them with filters, conference calling, onboarding workshops, priority support, access to paid translators, customized features & dashboards, and a platform to Bring Your Own Translators (BYOT).

• We already have ~200 paid users and Monthly Recurring Revenue is now at 15% of our expenses ($5k). We aim to bring this to a 50% level of sustainability in the next 18 months.

• We expect this to increase subscriptions usage among nonprofits and organizations working with Limited English Proficient people during this pandemic and beyond, especially in the health sector in USA orgs now that we are HIPAA compliant. 

• We aim to maintain a consistent level of financial sustainability which effectively supports our program demand and free services for people in need.

• We plan to expand service government contracts, education institutes, and even the corporate sector who aim to hire migrants and refugees.

Full Financial & Impact Projections

Over the years, we have piloted our product, built a product proof of concept, and attained product growth. We have recruited the human resources who are busy progressing the project and are in talks with numerous large renowned organizations like the IRC, World Relief, and Catholic Charities to try and test our premium feature and then subscribe to it. Organizations have also subscribed to it and are very happy with the services offered.

This year:

- Secured $270k funding from Silicon Valley Community Foundation & Prism Charity Fund which will help us fund part of our program. 

- Currently in diligence process with DRK Foundation, Schox Foundation, Welcome US, Cisco Innovation Challenge, Full Circle Fund.

- Working with International Organization of Migration (IOM) on a paid pilot program. After the successful completion of the program, we expect to enter a multi-year contract with IOM offices worldwide which will help sustain our program.

- $4500 monthly recurring revenue from Tarjimly Premium subscription fees to help offset our costs.

Previously we have managed to raise more than 1 million dollars applying for grants and winning numerous awards/challenges. A breakdown of some are as follows:

Silicon Valley Community Foundation:  268000 USD

Fast Forward:                                             25000  USD

YCombinator:                                             95000  USD

Echoing Green:                                          90000  USD

Westly Prize:                                                5000  USD

Twilio.org:                                                 375000  USD

AWS Imagine:                                            25000   USD

Full Circle Fund:                                        37000   USD

Prism Charitable Fund:                           124960  USD

LSC ( Vatican Challenge):                            7000  USD

AWS Imagine:                                             25000  USD

Hewlett Packard Enterprise:                      28787 USD

BlackRock:                                                248000 USD