By Layan Damanhouri
Saudi Gazette
A new app on Facebook Messenger launching soon aims to help refugees landing in foreign land by linking them to translators around the world.
Tarjimly, meaning ‘translate for me’ in Arabic, was founded by a group of young MIT alumni from Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and the US inspired after members of the team worked in a refugee camp in northern Greece.
“The language barrier was the most requested by refugees and migrants to communicate with other people around the camp,” one of the team’s engineers, Yamen Al-Hajjar, told Saudi Gazette.
Abdullah Al-Mentheri who was in the location to provide physical and other types of support saw that he spent most of his time on translation, Arabic being one of the most demanded.
“It became clear that communication was one of the biggest problems that refugees face on a daily basis and we built our team from within our MIT network to address this problem,” added Al-Hajjar.
The group of friends from various backgrounds joined together to develop the app. Some members of the team already had experience working on the Messenger bot platform.
“We paid for the servers and hosting ourselves and developed the code for Tarjimly in our free time outside our full-time jobs over four months,” said Al-Hajjar. “Most bots are human to machine, but the Tarjimly bot routes humans to humans, which yielded several unique technical challenges that we eventually managed to overcome.”
One challenge was the privacy and security of the user base and making sure the right measures are in place to ensure the app is used for its intended purpose and delivers the most impact.
Asked about why they had decided to choose Facebook for launching the service, he said: “The Facebook Messenger Bot platform allows for a rich set of tools, effortless registration, intelligent routing, anonymity, and no limit to number of supported languages.”
He added, “We wanted to be hosted on a growing platform where lots of users spend a large amount of time. Our team believes apps are slowly dying, in general, and social messaging and bots are taking their place.”
The founding team members Abdulla Al-Mentheri, Yamen Al-Hajjar, AbdulAziz Al-Ghunaim, Abubakar Abid, and Atif Javed hope to extend the service to a wider, global audience to help the refugee community.
