When people flee violence, disaster, or persecution, language barriers compound every other hardship. Babel gives refugees, asylum seekers, and humanitarian workers a real-time multilingual voice from the first moment of arrival.
Refugee registration requires communicating personal history, family composition, persecution grounds, and documentation status — often through interpreters who may not speak the refugee's dialect. Babel enables direct communication between refugees and registration workers.
Food distribution, shelter allocation, medical referrals, and camp rules require communication with populations who may speak dozens of different languages. Babel gives humanitarian field workers real-time multilingual voice for every interaction.
Asylum determination interviews require refugees to communicate the details of their persecution — fear of harm, family circumstances, country conditions — with precision and nuance. Babel supports preparation, pre-hearing communication, and informal legal consultations.
Trauma processing requires language. Psychological support services for refugees are chronically underresourced — and interpreter availability for mental health appointments is even more limited than for medical ones. Babel enables more frequent, higher-quality psychosocial support sessions.
Refugee children often arrive mid-school-year in countries with different languages. Parent engagement with schools, child welfare services, and education authorities requires communication that interpreter services often can't cover fast enough.
The resettlement process — job training, language courses, housing applications, social services enrollment — requires sustained communication across language lines for months or years. Babel provides the bridge while the host-country language is being learned.
Babel works in environments with 3G or better connectivity, which covers most urban refugee settings and an increasing number of camp environments. For truly off-grid settings, Babel's team is developing offline-capable communication tools. Babel's architecture minimizes bandwidth requirements to function in lower-connectivity environments.
Babel supports the major languages of displaced populations globally — Arabic, Somali, Tigrinya, Amharic, Pashto, Dari, Rohingya, French, Swahili, Haitian Creole, and many more. Language coverage continues to expand with priority on humanitarian-context languages. Organizations serving populations speaking languages not yet covered should contact Babel directly.
Refugee communication involves some of the most sensitive personal information — persecution history, family circumstances, political affiliations, medical history. Babel does not store conversations for training purposes, does not collect personally identifiable information beyond what is necessary for service delivery, and does not share information with third parties including governments. Enterprise and NGO deployments include additional data protection agreements.
Yes. While Babel is not a certified court interpreter service for official asylum hearings where legal certification is required, Babel is valuable for everything around those hearings: helping refugees understand questions that will be asked, explaining legal concepts in their language, preparing testimony narratives, and communicating with pro bono legal representatives. Many refugee-serving legal aid organizations are exploring Babel for exactly this preparation use case.
Join the waitlist — Babel gives every refugee and asylum seeker a real-time voice from the first moment of arrival.
Join the WaitlistEvery displaced person deserves a voice. Babel gives them one in any language.
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