The translation, print and distribution project refugeephrasebook.de is not associated with the facebook community page of the same name (http://bit.ly/nym-page), which is administrated by Nine Yamamoto Masson – the support group for this page can be found here: http://bit.ly/rpb-fb. After difficult discussions and differences in philosophy, in Summer 2015 the document owners and the majority of the team decided to develop the open branch of the project independently of Nine.
This step also emphasized a commitment to transparency and openness by publishing the data on the website https://refugeephrasebook.de 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. We could use existing infrastructure to accept donations to support print runs, so that >110.000 phrasebooks were printed in 2015.
In our current structure, the website, translation tables and printable versions are currently maintained by a team of 8 volunteers (see https://refugeephrasebook.de/impressum/), 3 of which are regularly voted by the whole team as a steering commitee to quickly solve bigger decisions. Since the data is open, everyone can built on it and create something useful with the phrases. We feel that recognition should be connected to what you do with the data, and how it supports refugees. We continue to welcome any contribution to translate, print, code, design and distribute useful tools for language support.
refugeephrasebook.de team
