1,000 Dreams is a project being undertaken by the non-profit organization Witness Change and they have a powerful mission. They are determined to amplify the voices of refugees worldwide and help them tell their stories in their own words. Refugees don't typically have control of their narrative, and often people will only see their travails through a media lens, without listening and empathizing with the people themselves. The public can't learn about the challenges they face and the strength they need to overcome these.
1,000 Dreams is interviewing 1,000 European refugees to help share these stories and amplify the voices of people who aren't afforded a platform. To accomplish such an ambitious goal, they have 40 refugee storytellers who have been refugees themselves, to meet, photograph and interview them, letting them tell their stories.
Trint and 1,000 Dreams partnered together to help aid the transcription, translation and storytelling. 1,000 Dreams collects thousands of hours of audio and interviews. By using Trint, they can automatically transcribe and translate these to text in the languages they need to.
Once these transcripts are completed and edited, they get passed to a team of editors who turn them into 1,000 character blurbs for social media and their website. The website will also contain the full transcript of each interview.
Due to the nature of work 1,000 Dreams is undertaking, there is a need for interviews in a wide variety of languages to be transcribed. The languages, including French, German, Arabic, Turkish, Italian, Dutch, Swedish, Serbo-Croatian and Spanish, can be transcribed as Trint's AI software is trained to pick up dozens of different languages. This feature plays a crucial role in helping them capture these stories.
Within Trint, the 1,000 Dreams team collaborates on transcripts, ensuring everything is correct and leaving notes for their colleagues. This collaboration allows the storyteller who conducted the interview to address any questions the transcription/translation team may have. Their team is spread around the world, and the ability to communicate through Trint helps streamline their work.
The other key benefit for 1,000 Dreams is the time saved; Angela Pritchett, their English Transcription and Editor Manager, stated, "Just the amount of time it takes to go through that raw audio and compare versus Trint has been a lifesaver." She continued, "It's saved me so much time and patience in that I don't have to try to find that one comment that I miss; I know exactly where to go."
Taking the menial and the functional out of the powerful work that 1,000 Dreams is accomplishing empowers their team to spend time on the things that matter and add the most value. At the time of writing, they have interviewed and told the story of almost 700 refugees. At a moment in time when the refugee crisis has again come to the collective forefront globally, the work they are doing is more important than ever.