People seeking protection arrive from Ukraine, Syria, Afghanistan, Eritrea, Somalia and dozens of other countries. At reception centres, municipal desks and schools they meet staff who do not share a single word with them.
Between them they speak hundreds of languages: widely spoken ones like Ukrainian and Arabic, and rare ones like Tigrinya, Pashto and Dari. For many of these an interpreter is hard to find, and until one is found everything simply waits.
Cloud translators are not a way out. They send the conversation to someone else's servers, which is the wrong place for a conversation with a vulnerable person, and many of these languages they do not cover at all.
One compact computer, two screens, two microphones. The official and the visitor sit facing each other and take turns speaking. Each reads the conversation in their own language, on their own screen.
Speech recognition and translation run on the device itself. There is no account, no server and no connection to lose.
The device works with its network interfaces switched off. Privacy is a property of the hardware, not a promise in a policy.
More than 400 languages, heard and translated on the device. The ones ordinary translators skip are the ones we start with.
We deliver the device, install it, train the staff and maintain it. An organisation gets a working desk, not an IT project.
Our mission is simple: nobody's case should wait because nobody in the building speaks their language.
For legally sensitive hearings a certified interpreter stays essential. We cover everything before and around them: first contact, daily life, administration.
Speech goes in, translation comes out, and it already works. The open question was whether it fits into a machine cheap enough to put on every desk. It does.
“I went through the refugee journey in Nijmegen myself. I saw how systems stall when people cannot understand each other. We built Refuge.Help so that barrier disappears.”
Imagine a front desk where the language a person speaks no longer decides how long they wait.
We are looking for funding and pilot partners to put the first devices on real desks.
Talk to us →Безкоштовне CV для українців у Нідерландах: 9 запитань голосом — PDF нідерландською або англійською.
Бесплатное CV для украинцев в Нидерландах: 9 вопросов голосом — PDF на нидерландском или английском.
Gratis cv voor Oekraïense vluchtelingen: 9 vragen inspreken, pdf in het Nederlands of Engels.
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