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Thanks! Yes it's at the bottom of our website where you can add your email to our newsletter: https://tarjim.ly

Thanks! Curious, what's the specific concern with Facebook Messenger? The two I've gotten most is either "I'm not on FB" or "I don't trust FB".

Definitely looking into WhatsApp, Telegram, and especially our own mobile app where we can do a lot more.

We have an email signup at the bottom of the site, where you can signup for our newsletter - perhaps I should make that more visible.

Wow that's the exact persona we were envisioning when we created it! :)

Aziz and I felt the same way, and we felt bad about buying flights to basically go translate (because we're engineers there wasn't much else we could offer really).

You should definitely sign up as a translator and connect us to your friends who were at the refugee camps when you get a chance: [email protected]

Thank you! It's crazy to look back and see where we were 1 year ago haha

Thanks! We're actually in touch with the WhatsApp team and they like what we're doing - we're working with them to be able to access their API, but it is still in the early stages. We're envisioning interesting scenarios for creating translation groups using WhatsApp and leveraging their end-to-end encryption to enhance privacy.

Almost every refugee we met has WhatsApp and they use it much more profusely than Messenger, especially for groups. The one exception being Farsi speakers who live primarily in Telegram. They all use Messaging apps as a lifeline to their families back home and an outlet to the wider world, so they're almost all willing to buy data plans and get a smartphone.

I'm actually having some friends go through making corrections in the next few days since not everyone on our team speaks every language - Burmese is rough!

We built a message editor which allows us to immediately edit any string in our application and website. It also allows our friends to correct and verify all the strings used in our application:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=160ZFXDpddf8VHHgnYulvbzdnWb...

The conversations are actually anonymous between translator and refugee/aid worker. All we provide is their first name (so it's clear they're talking to a person instead of the application). So there is no way for the two parties to know anything about each other except what they willingly provide (no full names, no locations, no phone numbers - we actually route calls through our own Tarjimly operated numbers).

Most of the lawyers using Tarjimly censor the PII (personal identifying information) themselves either by covering those parts of documents or omitting them in conversations, which does the trick most of the time. Generally, these nonprofit lawyers are so strained for resources they're excited to use something over nothing to help them do their job.

We wanted to get something available quickly, which is why we started with Messenger and that's made on-boarding incredibly easy, but security is proving to be more and more important. We're going to see if the WhatsApp API will be end-to-end encrypted and we're in the design phase of our own mobile app to create an even better experience (especially for calling where Messenger is being difficult).