It was established in 2010 as a sister organization of Traducteurs Sans Frontières, founded in 1993 by Lori Thicke and Ros Smith-Thomas.

They aim to accomplish this by facilitating collaboration between non-profit humanitarian entities and a volunteer community of translators.

Some of these include Doctors Without Borders, Medecins du Monde, UNICEF, Oxfam, Handicap International.

In June 2017 Translators without Borders merged with The Rosetta Foundation, an Irish registered non-profit organization is known to relieve poverty, support healthcare, develop education and promote justice through equal access to information and knowledge across the languages of the world.

[10] They are responsible for the following:[11] Words of Relief was piloted from January 2014 to May 2015 in Nairobi, Kenya and concentrated on Swahili and Somali.

Approximately 475,000 words of crisis relief content from various sources including the Infoasaid Message Library were translated.

The Words of Relief model has been deployed to respond to several crises worldwide, including the Ebola emergency[13] in West Africa and the 2015 Nepal earthquake.

[14] Response Teams in Arabic, Persian, Greek, Kurdish and Urdu also provide rapid translations for aid organizations along the refugee route in Europe.

[15] Translators without Borders is in partnership with the Mother and Child Health and Education Trust in India.

[16] The videos cover a variety of health issues, such as breastfeeding, malnutrition, post-natal and newborn care, and more.

New translators in the centre are trained to work in Kiswahili, as well as a number of the other 42 languages spoken in Kenya.

Baker and Piróth define as "problematic" the fact that some of the "participating for-profits" in TWB's projects are "handsomely paid", while those who undertake translation tasks are "systematically asked to work on a volunteer basis".