Want to End Poverty and Save Lives? Translate!

During all those years I spent “almost giving” I imagined myself serving food in a refugee camp, or teaching children in an orphanage. I never dreamed that my own métier – translation – could actually be a key to ending poverty and saving lives.

The thing is, knowledge is incredibly powerful. Knowledge ensures better health and longer lives, it reduces maternal mortality, it empowers women, it saves children from dying unnecessarily, it improves economic opportunities, it lifts people out of poverty, it encourages protection of the environment…

Oh wait, aren’t those the Millennium Development Goals?

Translation is essential to meeting all eight Millennium Development Goals by 2015.

Translators without Borders is supporting the Millennium Development goals.

 Few people make this connection, but in fact, without translation how can there be global access to knowledge? And without global access to knowledge, how can the Millennium Goals be met to reduce poverty, maternal mortality, childhood deaths and AIDS? How will we ensure universal access to education,  environmental sustainability, global partnership and the empowerment of women?

We believe all people deserve access to knowledge

Translators without Borders is working tirelessly to facilitate the transfer of knowledge from one language to another by creating and managing a community of NGOs who need translations and professional, vetted translators who volunteer their time to help.

Through the Translators without Borders platform powered by ProZ.com, aid groups can easily connect directly with professional translators, breaking down the barriers of language and building up the transfer of information to people in need.

We have an excellent and growing community in European languages, but we still have a huge need for translators from other parts of the world, particularly from the Middle East, India and Africa.

If you are a translator in these languages, and you are willing to donate your time and professional skills to Translators without Borders, you will directly support humanitarian projects that will give people the knowledge they need to live healthy and productive lives.  To join TWB, we ask you to fill in the translator application form. We particularly need those of you who translate into Arabic or an African or Indian language.

We have many exciting projects going on right now for those languages including subtitling health videos and translating health articles from Wikipedia. Our goal is to take down the language barriers to information so that people in the developing world will have access to the same information we do. To make global knowledge local – and to make local knowledge global.

There is so much good we can do. Please join us.

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