Mission & about us
Some languages were never written down by anyone with a server.
Gambifi is an attempt to fix that for a few of them, starting with the ones spoken outside our door.
Manifesto
The Gambia’s largest language is Mandinka. You cannot translate it on any major service. Neither Pulaar, spoken by a fifth of the country. Wolof exists in these tools, but the Senegalese kind — close enough to recognise, far enough to sound foreign.
This is not an oversight anyone plans to correct. Languages get digitised when there is text to train on, and text arrives when a language is written down at scale. Languages that live in speech rather than print stay invisible to the machines, and the gap widens every year the rest of the world builds on top of them.
We think the way through is not more scraped data. It is paying the people who already know the words.
So everything here is built with Gambian speakers rather than about them. They decide what is correct. Their names sit on the phrases they checked. And when the tool is not sure, it says so — because a confident wrong answer handed to a visitor is worse than an honest I don’t know, and because a language deserves better than a good impression of itself.
The learning tools are free and will stay free. The translator is sold, in person, by Gambians who keep the margin. That is the whole business model, and it is deliberately small enough to be honest.
Founders & team
Built by a small group between The Gambia and where the rest of the team is.
Name
Role
One or two sentences — what they do here, and what they did before.
Name
Role
One or two sentences — what they do here, and what they did before.
Name
Role
One or two sentences — what they do here, and what they did before.
Current & future programs
- Running now
The speaker corpus
Gambian speakers record their own language and correct what the machine hears. Every correction is a data point that exists nowhere else, because nobody has collected it before.
- Running now
Free phrasebooks
Everyday phrases with audio from native speakers, free to anyone. Wolof is live; Mandinka and Pulaar are being translated and recorded.
- Running now
The translator
English in, Gambian language out, sold to visitors. It funds the rest, and it is the only part anyone pays for.
- Next
Paying the people who know the words
Translation and recording are skilled work and are paid as such. The mechanism is being built so that contributions are attributed and compensated rather than absorbed.
- Next
The languages you ask for
Every request on the language map is counted. That list — not our guesses — decides which language is built next.
Company
- Registered name
- legal entity name
- Registered in
- jurisdiction
- Founded
- year
- Where we work
- The Gambia, and where else
- Contact
- email address
- Press
- email address
Language data on the map comes from Glottolog (CC-BY 4.0); country boundaries from Natural Earth. Recordings and translations belong to the speakers who made them.
Tell us which language to build next.
The map counts every request. It is the most direct say anyone has in what we do.
Open the language map