“I need to see a doctor”: building an open-source refugee phrasebook – Wikimedia Blog

"Volunteers are building an open collection of useful words and phrases for refugees who just arrived. The Refugee Phrasebook is a multilingual tool that provides basic useful vocabulary related to the most common immediate needs and uses Wikibooks as a platform.

With the ongoing humanitarian crisis in the Middle East and in Europe, where over a million refugees have and are seeking safe haven in Europe, the need for better communication with and for refugees has become urgent. These refugees are coming into countries like Turkey, Greece, Italy, Slovakia, or Germany with little to no knowledge of the Turkish, Greek, Italian, Slovak, or German languages.

In response, an international group of volunteers started the Refugee Phrasebook in August to collect and translate useful phrases for refugees in more than 30 languages.

The phrasebook catalogs a general set of phrases as well as sentences for juridical and medical needs, from the simple 'hello' or 'water' to more complex requests like 'I need to see a doctor.' Requests for more phrases have tripled the total length of the tables in the last four months.

All of this has been collected into a single Google Doc, which we have licensed under CC-0—also known as the public domain. Anyone can take the work and reuse or remix it for any purpose, including refugee aid projects all over the world, without fear of copyright infringement.

However, many of the refugees have little access to the Internet or mobile phones, so we have had to print several booklets. Supported by Wikimedia Deutschland, we organized a Wikibooks workshop and printed 10,000 of them in Thessaloniki, Greece, each containing 20 to 40 pages. Local volunteers and OKF Greece helped with distributing them to the Aegean Greek islands, where many of the refugees have ended up."