I was born and raised in Beijing, China. There were many issues and different types of discrimination where I grew up, but racial discrimination was not one of them. In Beijing where I went to school, nearly everyone spoke the same language and had the same skin color. Foreign students were welcomed and not treated differently because of how they looked or spoke. The whole class was close together instead of being separated into different groups.
Everything changed drastically for me when I came to the United States as a high school student at age 16. Picture a cheap knock-off of the movie “Mean Girls”. The majority of the students in my high school were caucasian and came from wealthy backgrounds. There were very few minority students and I was the only foreign exchange student I knew. I experienced quite a culture shock and often felt left out and different from the rest of the students at school.
You see, mandarin was the only native language that I spoke up until this point in my life. Although I learned English at school, it was more of a Chinenglish rather than a natural way of speaking and writing. Because I didn’t speak English properly, I was constantly being laughed at and picked on for my accent and use of vocabulary and grammar by my peers. There were many times when students called me hateful names or made offensive remarks such as “communist invasion”, “Chinese food stinks” or “Do you guys eat dogs” that I wanted to say something back but I wasn’t able to accurately express myself and just decided to give up. At that time, I wished that my peers and teachers would understand Mandarin so I could speak in my native language to comfortably and freely express my reasonings and emotions. The inability to express and defend myself against hurtful comments due to language barriers was such a painful experience that I was determined to learn and master English so my voice would no longer be silenced.
Most native English speakers that I know often underestimate how difficult it is for people to learn English or a new language from a completely different language system. It usually takes us years and years of diligent learning and practicing to reach the basic fluency level, and it’s 10x harder if you don’t have the environment to fully immerse yourself in the culture and language. Don’t assume people who speak different languages acquire the skill easily, it takes hard work and tons of effort to get there.
Luckily, I went to Mount Holyoke for college. My school was an all-women liberal arts college on the East Coast that puts tons of focus on building a diverse global community, women empowerment, and critical and independent thinking. I felt included and accepted and regained the confidence of expressing myself and voicing my opinions.
But as I was going through school and then working for companies, I started to realize that many immigrants, classmates, and co-workers whose first language is not English face the same obstacles as I did back in high school. They have great ideas and are very intelligent and hardworking, but their voices are silenced and their comments are dismissed during school seminars and work meetings because they couldn’t “properly” express themselves in a foreign language that they did not grow up speaking. Try imagining yourself conversing, writing, performing public speaking, and even having doctor’s appointments in a completely different language than the one you grew up speaking while being in a foreign country far away from home and family. This is exactly what non-native speakers have to go through every. single day. They also get laughed at and picked on by people who are unsympathetic to their daily struggles and who feel the need to constantly correct their accents. The fear of being called upon by coworkers to chat but not knowing the most appropriate way to respond, the embarrassment of having to make up excuses to skip a session that requires public speaking in a different language, and the nervousness of group conversations and not understanding the content nor when to chime in - This is what a lot of immigrants have to deal with every day. Things as simple as speaking, talking, understanding, or being understood are so much harder for people who spoke a different language growing up.
10+ years later, my new family now speaks four different languages. We rely heavily on family members who can speak all languages for interpretation during conversations. Remote communication and video chat have always been a huge challenge, which the pandemic has only exacerbated. I feel powerless seeing my dad, often witty and wise in his native language, struggling to express himself and share the simplest things in life with my family here in English. Having lived in both worlds and having gone through the pain of language barriers myself, I deeply relate to the frustration and loneliness of not being able to understand and directly communicate with the people you love/care about the most. Like a lot of other multilingual families, we have searched for a communication solution for people who speak different languages, but couldn’t find something that fit our needs because nearly all messaging or social media apps are built for general consumers instead of underrepresented communities, the majority of which is composed of immigrants and people who struggle with language barriers.
75% of the world’s population does not speak English at all. 1 in 5 Americans speak a language other than English at home. 97% of US immigrants speak a native language that is not English. Maybe you’re thinking, why not just learn a new language? It’s easy to say, but it takes a lot of time and effort (at least 720 hours) and becomes increasingly more difficult as you get older, and the majority of the world’s population currently doesn’t have the resources nor access to even learn, let alone master a new language.
It’s ridiculous to me that astronomers started sending radio waves to talk to aliens on other planets quite some time ago, but we humans are still struggling to communicate speaking different languages on Earth. The most ridiculous thing is that the technology is available and maturing enough to facilitate a conversation leveraging machine translation for people who speak different languages or encounter language barriers. Instead of using AI on ad recommendations, why don’t we try to use AI for good to help people break down language barriers and bring the world closer?
That’s when I decided to build Byrdhouse. I initially built the solution to solve my family’s pain point of language barriers, but more and more people started to discover and download the app due to the need for remote communication and speaking different languages during the pandemic.
Byrdhouse provides AI-powered real-time translation across 100+ different languages. I named our company Byrdhouse because when I think of immigrants, I think of a nest of birds. Birds don’t stay in their nest forever. Every year they go out of their comfort zone, and fly 600 hours to migrate to another destination for various reasons, just like how multilingual families may have family members who migrate from their own country to another country with completely different culture(s) and language(s) for their reasons. But I hope these families feel that they will always have a virtual home where they can connect with their loved ones, and where they can feel that familiar comfort and warmth.
Accessibility to language and being able to understand and talk to your loved ones should not be a privilege. We want to start here and continue to create a world where everyone can express themselves freely and understand each other instantaneously no matter what language they speak, where people can enjoy equal language access if they don’t have the resources to learn a new language, and where speaking different languages is no longer a barrier to building deep and lasting relationships.
