About the Project

Welcome to Refugee Phrasebook: Together we 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.

Following up on our December update, we prepared a 2 minute video to highlight current challenges and plans for the project. Thank you all for your support!

Refugeephrasebook.de bietet eine Sammlung von hilfreichen Phrasen, Vokabeln und Links für Geflüchtete und Helfer, um Ankommende bei der Orientierung nach der Einreise zu unterstützen. Ein Netzwerk von Freiwilligen übersetzt Vokabular zur ersten Orientierung mit einem Grundwortschatz sowie medizinischen und juristischen Themen in 44 Sprachen. Die Übersetzungen und Ressourcen werden als offene Daten und als druckfertige Dateien zur Verfügung gestellt. Sämtliche Materialien sind unter einer offenen Lizenz verfügbar. Flüchtlingsinitiativen, Designer und Helfer können die Daten kostenfrei nutzen und anpassen, um eigene Versionen zu erstellen und diese für Hilfsprojekte verwenden.

Refugee Phrasebook is an open collaborative project to provide important 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 still limited to a closed document with a narrow use case, 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 August. 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 this page(→FAQ) to support refugees in all regions. It currently contains vocabulary in 28 languages:

The project is noncommercial, the books will be 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. (→FAQ)

Do you want to support the project and distribute copies to refugees? The current printable versions (wiki + pdf) can be found here. You can also create a custom version.

For questions and feedback, contact us at rphrasebook@gmail.com