Refugee Phrasebook

Last updated
Refugee Phrasebook
Refugee Phrasebook Cover (Bos-Cro-Slov).png
Refugee Phrasebook in Slovene language
CountryGermany
Languagevarious languages
Genrebilingual phrasebook
PublisherOpen Knowledge Foundation Deutschland
Publication date
2015
Media typeOpen data project under Creative Commons license (CC0)
AwardPrix Ars Electronica “Award of Distinction” for Digital Communities
Website https://refugeephrasebook.de/

Refugee Phrasebook is an online collection of useful vocabulary and phrases for refugees who have recently arrived in various European and potentially other host countries. Published as open source software, it is a multilingual tool that provides basic useful vocabulary related to the most common immediate needs of refugees and their helpers. [1] As of early 2022, it provides phrases in more than 28 languages, including Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Dari, Bosnian, Albanian, English, German, Hungarian and others. In order to support refugees having to communicate in new linguistic situations, everyone is free to adapt, print and distribute pairs of translated important phrases in basic everyday situations.

Contents

Description

Refugee Phrasebook was started by women with immigrant backgrounds in Berlin, Germany, in the context of the arrival of hundreds of thousands refugees in 2015. [2] [3] It is an open collaborative project to provide basic vocabulary to refugees. It assembles important phrases from various fields and encourages designers and experts in the field to improve on the material. While the first collection of phrases was limited to a closed document with a narrow focus, volunteers quickly migrated the data to an open table in Google Sheets and significantly increased the number of participants with their network. This step also emphasized a commitment to transparency and openness by publishing the data with a Creative Commons license (CC0), reuseable for refugee aid projects everywhere. Due to translation requests from helpers, the length of the tables has more than tripled since the beginning. As of early 2022, the phrases now include a broad range of topics, from a simple “Hello” to “ I need to see a doctor”, covering a general set of phrases as well as sentences for juridical and medical needs.

Local initiatives are welcome to adapt, print and distribute all contents of the project's page to support refugees in all regions. It currently contains vocabulary in 28 languages:

Prompted by the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, Refugee Phrasebook added useful phrases in Ukrainian, English and languages of host countries such as German, Polish and Slovakian. [4]

The project is noncommercial, the books are available for free and provided without further political or personal branding. The content is freely available under a Creative Commons License (CC0) and can be reused by anyone everywhere.

Supported by the Open Knowledge Foundation Germany, the project is coordinated by the Berlin-based support group “Refugee Phrasebook“ and is constantly expanded by numerous volunteers, among them Wikimedia Deutschland. Further, it does not claim ownership of the content, since it is a crowdfund ed effort. [5]

Detailed and updated information about the project as well as printable versions of the phrasebooks for different regions are published as Refugee Phrasebook at Wikibooks. [6]

Recognition

Refugee Phrasebook was recommended in March 2022 as a useful tool for digital translation next to Google Translate and Microsoft Translator by the German website Redaktionsnetzwerk Deutschland. [7] According to Creative Commons, the project has spread all over Europe, attracting global press such as The Guardian, Wired, Newsweek, STERN magazine, Die Zeit, and Der Spiegel, as well as winning the Prix Ars Electronica “Award of Distinction” for Digital Communities. [3]

See also

Related Research Articles

A translation memory (TM) is a database that stores "segments", which can be sentences, paragraphs or sentence-like units that have previously been translated, in order to aid human translators. The translation memory stores the source text and its corresponding translation in language pairs called “translation units”. Individual words are handled by terminology bases and are not within the domain of TM.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Creative Commons license</span> Public copyright license for allowing free use of a work

A Creative Commons (CC) license is one of several public copyright licenses that enable the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted "work". A CC license is used when an author wants to give other people the right to share, use, and build upon a work that the author has created. CC provides an author flexibility and protects the people who use or redistribute an author's work from concerns of copyright infringement as long as they abide by the conditions that are specified in the license by which the author distributes the work.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wikibooks</span> Free resource library of books hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation and edited by volunteers

Wikibooks is a wiki-based Wikimedia project hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation for the creation of free content digital textbooks and annotated texts that anyone can edit.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wikisource</span> Wikimedia Foundation project, an online digital library of free content textual sources on a wiki

Wikisource is an online digital library of free-content textual sources on a wiki, operated by the Wikimedia Foundation. Wikisource is the name of the project as a whole and the name for each instance of that project ; multiple Wikisources make up the overall project of Wikisource. The project's aim is to host all forms of free text, in many languages, and translations. Originally conceived as an archive to store useful or important historical texts, it has expanded to become a general-content library. The project officially began on November 24, 2003 under the name Project Sourceberg, a play on the famous Project Gutenberg. The name Wikisource was adopted later that year and it received its own domain name.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Open educational resources</span> Open learning resource

Open educational resources (OER) are teaching, learning, and research materials intentionally created and licensed to be free for the end user to own, share, and in most cases, modify. The term "OER" describes publicly accessible materials and resources for any user to use, re-mix, improve, and redistribute under some licenses. These are designed to reduce accessibility barriers by implementing best practices in teaching and to be adapted for local unique contexts.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Phrase book</span> Collection of ready-made phrases, usually for a foreign language along with a translation

A phrase book or phrasebook is a collection of ready-made phrases, usually for a foreign language along with a translation, indexed and often in the form of questions and answers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wikimedia movement</span> Global community of contributors to Wikimedia Foundation projects

According to the Wikimedia Foundation, the Wikimedia movement is the global community of contributors to the Wikimedia projects. This community directly builds and administers the projects. It is committed to using open standards and software.

OpenStax CNX, formerly called Connexions, is a global repository of educational content provided by volunteers. The open source platform is provided and maintained by OpenStax, which is based at Rice University. The collection is available free of charge, can be remixed and edited, and is available for download in various digital formats.

AGROVOC is a multilingual controlled vocabulary covering all areas of interest of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), including food, nutrition, agriculture, fisheries, forestry and the environment. By November 2021, the vocabulary consisted of over 39,600 concepts with up to 924,000 terms in up to 41 different languages. It is a collaborative effort, edited by a community of experts and coordinated by FAO. AGROVOC is made available by FAO as an RDF/SKOS-XL concept scheme and published as a linked data set aligned to 20 other vocabularies.

Agricultural Information Management Standards, abbreviated to AIMS is a space for accessing and discussing agricultural information management standards, tools and methodologies connecting information workers worldwide to build a global community of practice. Information management standards, tools and good practices can be found on AIMS:

Grammatical Framework (GF) is a programming language for writing grammars of natural languages. GF is capable of parsing and generating texts in several languages simultaneously while working from a language-independent representation of meaning. Grammars written in GF can be compiled into a platform independent format and then used from different programming languages including C and Java, C#, Python and Haskell. A companion to GF is the GF Resource Grammar Library, a reusable library for dealing with the morphology and syntax of a growing number of natural languages.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wikivoyage</span> Free travel guide that anyone can edit

Wikivoyage is a free web-based travel guide for travel destinations and travel topics written by volunteer authors. It is a sister project of Wikipedia and supported and hosted by the same non-profit Wikimedia Foundation (WMF). Wikivoyage has been called the "Wikipedia of travel guides".

UniLang or UniLang Community is a multilingual online collaboration website, with online language resources publicly accessible.

A Rights Expression Language or REL is a machine-processable language used to express intellectual property rights and other terms and conditions for use over content. RELs can be used as standalone expressions or within a DRM system.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tatoeba</span>

Tatoeba is a free collection of example sentences with translations geared towards foreign language learners. Its name comes from the Japanese phrase "tatoeba" (例えば), meaning "for example". It is written and maintained by a community of volunteers through a model of open collaboration. Individual contributors are known as Tatoebans. It is hosted by Association Tatoeba, a French non-profit organization funded through donations.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wikidata</span> Free knowledge database project

Wikidata is a collaboratively edited multilingual knowledge graph hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation. It is a common source of open data that Wikimedia projects such as Wikipedia, and anyone else, can use under the CC0 public domain license. Wikidata is a wiki powered by the software MediaWiki, and is also powered by the set of knowledge graph MediaWiki extensions known as Wikibase.

memoQ is a proprietary computer-assisted translation software suite which runs on Microsoft Windows operating systems. It is developed by the Hungarian software company memoQ Fordítástechnológiai Zrt., formerly Kilgray, a provider of translation management software established in 2004 and cited as one of the fastest-growing companies in the translation technology sector in 2012 and 2013. memoQ provides translation memory, terminology, machine translation integration and reference information management in desktop, client/server and web application environments.

In natural language processing, linguistics, and neighboring fields, Linguistic Linked Open Data (LLOD) describes a method and an interdisciplinary community concerned with creating, sharing, and (re-)using language resources in accordance with Linked Data principles. The Linguistic Linked Open Data Cloud was conceived and is being maintained by the Open Linguistics Working Group (OWLG) of the Open Knowledge Foundation, but has been a point of focal activity for several W3C community groups, research projects, and infrastructure efforts since then.

dict.cc is a free, multilingual online dictionary. For offline use the dictionaries can be downloaded as text files and used in various programs on Windows, iOS, Android and Palm OS. Dict.cc GmbH have their main office in the Austrian capital city of Vienna.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Creative Commons NonCommercial license</span> Set of licenses allowing free noncommercial use

A Creative Commons NonCommercial license is a Creative Commons license which a copyright holder can apply to their media to give public permission for anyone to reuse that media only for noncommercial activities. Creative Commons is an organization which develops a variety of public copyright licenses, and the "noncommercial" licenses are a subset of these. Unlike the CC0, CC BY, and CC BY-SA licenses, the CC BY-NC license is considered non-free.

References

CC BY icon-80x15.png  This article incorporates text from this source, which isby Open Knowledge Foundation Deutschland e.V. available under the CC BY 4.0 license.The text and its release have been received by the Wikimedia Volunteer Response Team ; for more information, see the talk page .

  1. "About the Project". Refugee Phrasebook. Retrieved 2022-03-10.
  2. Shabbir, Nabeelah (2015-09-04). "German volunteers launch online phrasebook for refugees". the Guardian. Retrieved 2022-03-10.
  3. 1 2 "A simple and versatile resource for refugees: an interview with Refugee Phrasebook". Creative Commons. 2016-12-07. Retrieved 2022-03-10.
  4. "Startpage". Refugee Phrasebook. Retrieved 2022-05-17.
  5. Refugee Phrase Book. "Impressum / Contact Info". Refugee Phrasebook. Retrieved 2022-03-10.
  6. "Refugee Phrasebook - Wikibooks, open books for an open world". en.wikibooks.org. Retrieved 2022-03-10.
  7. "Digitale Übersetzer: Diese Tools helfen bei Sprachproblemen". www.rnd.de (in German). 2022-03-10. Retrieved 2022-03-10.