Organizations Filed Purposes:
The mission of Translators without Borders (TWB) is to provide people access to vital knowledge in their language by: Providing aid in humanitarian crisis response through translation and interpreting; providing translation and simplification services that are culturally appropriate, accessible and open-source; building language translation capacity at the local level; and raising awareness globally of language barriers.
Translators without Borders is a not for profit providing language services for humanitarian and development programs around the world.
Crisis Response - Words of Relief - During the fiscal year, TWB deployed its Words of Relief (WoR) humanitarian language services in Bangladesh, northeast Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). In Bangladesh, WoR provided research-based language guidance, training, and terminology support as well as audio and text translations for the Rohingya refugee response. In northeast Nigeria, TWB developed language mapping, terminology services, interpreter training, and research-based guidance on language data in the humanitarian response and language in data collection, and provided translation support to humanitarian action in support of internally displaced people and host communities. In DRC, TWB delivered a program of support to the country's 10th Ebola response, including original research and related guidance, training, advocacy and terminology support for risk communication and community engagement in the languages and formats accessible to people at risk. WoR is designed to eliminate language barriers that can impede vital response and relief efforts, by facilitating more effective two-way communication between affected populations and responders. The learning generated by research and interventions on the ground was used to raise awareness across the humanitarian sector globally of language as an underregarded factor in the reach, impact, and accountability of humanitarian action.
Other programs in Development and Preparedness - TWB development and preparedness programs provide language support for non-crisis aid programs worldwide, facilitating effective communication between humanitarian workers and the populations they serve. TWB focuses on the most vulnerable by translating life-saving information and building local language translation capacity for underserved languages or where no translation capacity exists. The development and preparedness language service program relies on TWB's custom translation environment Kató to deliver the majority of its work. Kató is a managed, crowd-sourced platform connecting the TWB community of approximately 35,000 volunteer translators and language professionals directly with non-profit partners. In 2019, TWB delivered nearly 18 million words in 140 language pairs for approximately 150 NGO partners amplifying the reach and impact of their work. TWB also advises aid organizations on the most effective approach to multilingual communication in specific contexts and develops custom workflows and technologies. Beyond written translation, TWB also provides a range of other language services including plain language editing, audio translation, localization and multimedia support (transcription, subtitling, voiceovers).
Gamayun, the language equality initiative combines language technology and machine learning to improve communication with people who speak marginalized languages. It builds voice and text data, integrating them into effective fit-for-purpose tools for humanitarian and development contexts. With funding from Cisco and Microsoft, TWB developed data sets in the following languages: Coastal Swahili, Congolese Swahili, Nande, Hausa, Kanuri, Tigrinya, Kurdish Kurmanji and Rohingya. A pipeline to develop neural machine translation was developed with a repository containing the necessary scripts for training and evaluating systems. These data sets, along with the machine translation models are available on the Gamayun Portal https://gamayun.translatorswb.org/
Executives Listed on Filing
Total Salary includes financial earnings, benefits, and all related organization earnings listed on tax filing
| Name | Title | Hours Per Week | Total Salary |
|---|
| Aimee Ansari | Executive Director | 40 | $130,096 |
| Dermot Carty | Board Member | 1 | $0 |
| Francis Tsang | Board Member | 1 | $0 |
| Iris Orriss | Board Member (outgoing 31 Aug 2019) | 1 | $0 |
| Salvatore Giammarresi | Board Member | 1 | $0 |
| Nigel Fisher | Board Member (outgoing 1 May 2019) | 1 | $0 |
| Donna Parrish | Secretary | 1 | $0 |
| Simon Hale | Treasurer | 2 | $0 |
| Andrew Bredenkamp | Board Chair | 4 | $0 |
Data for this page was sourced from XML published by IRS (
public 990 form dataset) from:
https://s3.amazonaws.com/irs-form-990/202023179349300932_public.xml