"Like everyone who followed the news about the disaster, and notably after speaking to my brother who is living in Tokyo, I wanted to do as much as possible to help." said Mayel de Borniol, one of the service's creators. "We realised that Babelverse, a human interpretation service we recently started to develop, could be a big help to foreign aid teams, by allowing them to better communicate on the field."
In the aftermath of the Japanese earthquake and tsunami, Babelverse has set up (during a 12 hour all night coding marathon) a dedicated and completely free service, meant to break down language barriers between aid teams, NGOs, media and locals.
With it, absolutely anyone who is fluent in English and Japanese can very easily make themselves available, so that anyone who needs interpretation can call a single local number or Skype account (or even using their web browser) to automatically be connected to one of the available volunteer interpreters.
In its first 48 hours of operation, more than 100 bilingual people have volunteered their time (4 hours each on average, totalling more than 16 days of online time).
"We'd like to encourage as many people out there who are able to help out by offering their time and language skills during this crisis to come and participate"
For more information and to check out the service, visit http://babelverse.com
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Babelverse is the first application for real-time voice translation, powered by a global community of human interpreters.
