Tarjimly Connects Refugees to Interpreters in Minutes Using AI

Tarjimly is a nonprofit app that connects refugees, immigrants, and aid workers with volunteer translators and interpreters in minutes, using machine learning to find the right person from a global volunteer network, and it matters because language barriers are one of the most immediate dangers displaced people face. A refugee who cannot communicate with a doctor may not understand a diagnosis or a dosage. A family filling out an asylum application in a language they cannot read risks errors that can sink their case. Professional interpreters exist but are scarce, expensive, and rare in the languages that refugees actually speak.

Founded in 2017 in response to the Syrian refugee crisis and backed by Google, Tarjimly has been described as Uber for translators. A person needing language help opens the app, requests support, and an algorithm matches them with a qualified volunteer anywhere in the world who can assist over text, voice, or video.

Matching Is the Hard Part

The core technical problem is not translation itself but matching. When Tarjimly launched its app in 2019, its volunteer network collectively spoke around 80 languages, and the machine learning system had to decide, in real time, which volunteer to alert for each request, weighing language pair, dialect, availability, ratings, and the sensitivity of the situation. The organization says its network now covers more than 250 language pairs.

Dialect matters enormously in this work. A volunteer fluent in formal Arabic may struggle with a Syrian or Sudanese dialect. The matching system learns from feedback after each session, improving its ability to route requests to volunteers who have succeeded with similar needs before.

Where AI Fits In

In 2024, Tarjimly deepened its use of artificial intelligence through a partnership with Google. As the Associated Press reported, the collaboration lets Tarjimly use large language models to assist with translation needs while continuing to train its systems, allowing volunteers to respond more urgently to requests. The design is deliberately layered: instant machine translation handles quick, low stakes needs, while human volunteers remain the backbone for medical consultations, legal appointments, and asylum interviews where nuance and trust are critical.

This hybrid approach reflects a hard won lesson of humanitarian technology. Off the shelf machine translation often performs poorly in the less serviced languages refugees speak, and errors in a medical or legal context can cause real harm. Keeping humans in the loop, with AI speeding the connection and supporting the conversation, captures the speed of software without betting lives on generic models.

Refugees Helping Refugees

One of Tarjimly's most distinctive choices is hiring refugees themselves. For rarer languages and sensitive scenarios, the organization pays and trains bilingual refugees as professional translators and interpreters, creating what it describes as a feedback loop of economic empowerment. The people best positioned to interpret for displaced communities are often members of those communities.

The volunteer side scales the model globally. Bilingual professionals anywhere can donate a spare half hour from a phone, and thousands have, turning the world's diaspora populations into an on demand interpreting workforce.

Language Access as Aid

With more than 120 million people forcibly displaced worldwide according to UN estimates, the need is structural. Displacement almost always crosses a language border, and every service a displaced person needs, shelter, healthcare, legal status, schooling, work, runs through conversation. Organizations from the UN refugee agency to local clinics have identified language access as a persistent, underfunded gap in humanitarian response.

Tarjimly's answer is modest in cost and large in consequence: an app, a matching algorithm, a corps of volunteers, and now AI to make the connection nearly instant. The next time a doctor in a Greek camp needs to explain a treatment to a Kurdish speaker, or a lawyer in Texas needs to prep an Afghan client for an asylum hearing, the interpreter may be one tap away, somewhere across the world, waiting to help.