Causes: International, International Development

Mission: TWB is at the core of CLEAR Global, a nonprofit helping people get vital information and be heard, whatever language they speak. We do this through language technology, partnerships, and an international community of over 80,000 members. Our TWB community members contribute their time and language skills to support our partners' humanitarian efforts. We complete various tasks, ranging from translation and subtitling, to revision and voice-over.

Results: To date, the TWB Community has translated 80 million+ words of vital information. Conservative estimates suggest that at least 25 million people have accessed the 120 medical articles TWB simplified and translated into 100 languages for the Wiki Med Project alone. TWB is also working hard to respond to COVID-19.Already TWB has translated over 5 million words of COVID-19 content into over 100 languages, is mapping languages and literacy in vulnerable regions, creating a multilingual glossary of emergency health terms and advice in 23 languages, and combating misinformation by monitoring social media in 12+ languages.

The organization has assembled and deployed teams to work directly on language capacity in the field, most recently in Bangladesh, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Nigeria. In Nigeria, for example, TWB supported 25 organizations to translate over 1,600 products totaling close to 600,000 words, as well as conducted trainings in humanitarian interpretation, translation, and data collection for over 500 people. In 2017,23% of Rohingya refugees felt they had information on what assistance they could receive; one year later, thanks in part to TWB, 84% felt they knew what assistance was available to them.

TWB investigated language barriers in areas of DRC affected by Ebola to support responders to engage more effectively with people at risk. TWB is also leading the humanitarian community in helping people to understand their right to assistance free from sexual exploitation and abuse. We have simplified, translated and field verified the six principles for the prevention of sexual exploitation and abuse into 100 languages.

TWB has also launched Gamayun, the language equality initiative, an open source platform intended to apply cutting-edge language technologies to improve rapid communications in languages that are currently marginalized. It is a collaborative effort with tech partners, native-speaker communities, NGOs, and content creators and owners, to use text and speech data to automate translation in under-served languages. Using a repeatable, scalable model, TWB and its coalition of partners are piloting three languages to test and refine the process, with the aim of bringing 10 underserved languages online over the next 5 years.

Target demographics: people get vital information and be heard, whatever language they speak.

Direct beneficiaries per year: Over 200 nonprofit partners around the world.

Geographic areas served: countries all around the world

Programs: supporting humanitarian responses with language support in northeast Nigeria, Bangladesh (Rohingya refugee response), the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mozambique, the global COVID-19 response.