Translators Without Borders
A global community of over 100,000 language
volunteers
offering language services to social impact organizations worldwide.
Translators without Borders translate more than ten million words per year for non-profit
organizations. These translations provide information, safety and
opportunity for people across the world.
TWB in numbers…
Since our inception:
700+ Organizations
trusted us with the language needs
28,000+ completed projects
using over 1,500 language pairs
Our work focuses on crisis response, development, capacity building, and advocacy. By specializing in language solutions, we provide meaningful and critical support that allows the core work of a wide range of humanitarian, development, and social impact organizations to be more effective and to better serve communities.
The work of Translators without Borders is focused on providing people with access to vital knowledge in their language by:
- Providing translations for non-profit organizations in the areas of crisis relief, health, education, and beyond
- Building capacity by training new translators in under-resourced languages
- Developing voice tools and data to ensure technology serves speakers of marginalized languages
- Raising awareness of why language matters in social impact work
Over 4 billion people on the planet can’t access information or communicate digitally, because little or nothing exists in the languages they speak. You can help in changing that:
Volunteer with us
Become part of the Translators without Borders (TWB) Community to help people get vital information and be heard, whatever language they speak.
Volunteer with us
Partner with us
TWB works with organizations in diverse sectors, from humanitarian aid to social justice. We use translation and other language services to help increase our partners’ impact.
Partner with us
Donate
We need your help to continue to deliver life-saving information in languages people understand.
Donate
Sponsor us
Our work is supported by companies who share our values and vision of a more linguistically inclusive world.
Sponsor us
Join our global community of volunteer linguists on an online platform where you can connect, learn, grow, and make a real impact.
TWB volunteers use their language skills to help social impact organizations reach marginalized communities who speak low-resource languages.
By translating vital resources, like health messages and crisis updates into these languages, our volunteers ensure that no matter where
people are, they can access the information they need.
“It is both amazing and also very comforting and inspiring to see people donate their time and skills to defend the principles of action and the ideas of humanitarian assistance.”
“I wanted to thank you sincerely for all of your hard work coordinating these translations… I hope we can push them out fast enough to refugees so they really make an impact!”
Whether you’re new to translation or a seasoned
professional, our community is for everyone.
All TWB volunteers get full access to the TWB Learning Center, where you can start with the basics through our introductory translation courses. Experienced translators can deepen their expertise in humanitarian translation or stay current with emerging technologies like machine translation post-editing.
Whatever your level, there’s always something new to learn and grow from.
Building language technology voice by voice
Many tools we use today, from voice assistants to emergency services, are built using voice data. But for too many languages, that voice data just doesn’t exist. Without it, these languages (and the people who speak them) remain excluded from the digital world.
TWB Voice is a platform for collecting voice data where linguists contribute with voice recordings, transcripts and data validation.This data help build voice technologies like Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Text-to-Speech (TTS) for low-resource languages.
As the need for our work grew, in 2021 we created a new organization, CLEAR Global, to help us build on the work of Translators without Borders and the community.
The mission?
Helping people get vital information and be heard, whatever language they speak.
Some of our partners
