Japanese Earthquake/Tsunami Crisis Page – 15th March 2011
When disaster hit in Japan, like everyone following the news, we wanted to do our possible to help. And we realised that Babelverse could be a big help to foreign aid teams, by allowing them to better communicate on the field.
So we set up (during an 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, anyone fluent in English and Japanese could very easily make themselves available, so that anyone in Japan needing interpretation could 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.
The response was amazing! In it’s first 48 hours of operation, more than 100 bilingual people volunteered their time (4 hours each on average, totalling more than 16 days of online time!)
We want to take the opportunity to thank VoIP provider Tropo for sponsoring the cost of our local Japanese phone number as well as the NGO Translators Without Borders and all the others who spread the word.