Growing up as the only hearing child in an all-Deaf family — a circumstance he says is rarer than being struck by lightning twice — Thibault Duchemin was always translating. From phone calls to doctor’s appointments, he often served as the de facto bridge between his parents and sister and the hearing world. That’s something he says a lot of CODAs (children of deaf adults) end up doing, since live interpreters can be prohibitively expensive.
作为一个全聋家庭中唯一的听力正常的孩子——他说这种情况比两次被闪电击中还要罕见——Thibault Duchemin一直在翻译。从打电话到预约医生，他经常充当父母、妹妹和听力正常的世界之间的桥梁。他说，这就是很多coda（聋人的孩子）最终会做的事情，因为现场口译员可能非常昂贵。
“At the time, there was just no solution available, if you wanted to understand what the doctor is saying. You had to pay for an interpreter, and sometimes it’s really expensive,” Duchemin told UC Berkeley News. “And that’s in France, right? So that’s not even a developing country, in which things might be more difficult. Obviously I’d get really upset about it. I’d think, there’s so many better ways we can make things happen.”
“当时，如果你想明白医生在说什么，就没有可行的解决方案。你必须花钱请翻译，有时真的很贵，”Duchemin告诉加州大学伯克利分校新闻。“那是在法国，对吧？”所以这甚至不是一个发展中国家，在发展中国家，事情可能会更困难。很明显，我会为此感到非常难过。我想，我们有很多更好的方法来实现这一目标。”
Duchemin was particularly angered by how the inaccessibility of daily life to Deaf people impacted his younger sister Pauline. Pauline, who is two years younger, struggled to make friends in schools with hearing children, often finding herself at the periphery of social interactions, unable to follow along despite her ability to lip read. Large group conversations with overlapping speakers were just too difficult to follow.
Duchemin尤其感到愤怒的是，聋哑人的日常生活不便对他的妹妹Pauline造成了影响。Pauline比他小两岁，在学校里很难和听力正常的孩子交朋友，她经常发现自己处于社交活动的边缘，尽管她会唇读，但却无法跟上。演讲者重叠的大型群体对话实在是太难听懂了。
Pauline was beginning to explore the idea of going to law school and becoming a lawyer in 2013, around the same time that her brother came to Berkeley to get his master’s in engineering. When she and Thibault learned that there were no deaf lawyers in France, he was inspired to start working on a better alternative to existing live transcription services.
2013年，Pauline开始考虑上法学院并成为一名律师，大约与此同时，她的哥哥来到伯克利攻读工程硕士学位。当她和Thibault得知法国没有聋人律师时，他受到了启发，开始研究一种更好的替代现有现场转录服务的方法。
“We started with, what would it take for a deaf person to be able to practice law?” he said. “She would need to fully have conversations with clients; she would need to, you know, give a pleading sentence in a trial.”
“我们从一个问题开始，怎样才能让一个聋哑人能够从事法律工作？他说。“她需要与客户进行充分的交谈；你知道，她需要在审判中做出认罪判决。”
Talking to other deaf and hard-of-hearing people about what they needed to live their daily lives helped Duchemin and his team further identify how they could help. “When we talked to 150 people, they all told us, ‘I really struggled to understand what other people say, especially when there’s a group of people.’ It’s pretty hard to understand multiple people at once.”
与其他失聪和听力障碍人士交谈，了解他们的日常生活需要什么，这有助于Duchemin和他的团队进一步确定他们可以如何提供帮助。“当我们与150人交谈时，他们都告诉我们，‘我真的很难理解别人在说什么，尤其是当有一群人的时候。’同时理解很多人的意思是非常困难的。”
From this, Duchemin and his collaborators Pieter Doevendans and Skinner Cheng built a mobile app offering real-time captioning. With support from Berkeley institutions like the SkyDeck incubator and the Big Ideas Contest, that app would eventually become Ava, a company which today offers live captioning services using a unique combination of AI and trained captioners to hundreds of educational institutions and a number of Fortune 500 companies.
以此为基础，Duchemin和他的合作者Pieter Doevendans以及Skinner Cheng开发了一款提供实时字幕的手机应用。在SkyDeck孵化器和Big Ideas Contest等伯克利机构的支持下，这款应用最终变成了Ava公司。如今，Ava公司利用人工智能和训练有素的字幕员的独特组合，为数百家教育机构和多家财富500强公司提供实时字幕服务。
Without UC Berkeley’s unique spirit and bent towards socially-minded innovation, Duchemin said, Ava wouldn’t have evolved into a product that provides captions for thousands of people every day. “It’s a very positive place, Berkeley,” he said. “A lot of setup was done for students to start thinking about either an entrepreneurial project or an inventive project. And that was something very different. Berkeley Big Ideas was definitely one of these competitions in which it was actually permitted to dream big.”
Duchemin说，如果没有加州大学伯克利分校独特的精神和对社会创新的执着，Ava就不会发展成为一个每天为成千上万的人提供字幕的产品。“伯克利是一个非常积极的地方，”他说。“为了让学生们开始思考创业项目或创造性项目，我们做了很多准备工作。这是非常不同的。伯克利大创意大赛绝对是这样一场比赛，它实际上允许人们有大梦想。”
Phillip Denny is the director of Big Ideas, which is a year-long program that offers training, funding, and other forms of support to teams of students working on early stage social impact projects. Since it began in 2006, Big Ideas has supported over 4,000 projects, involved more than 10,000 students, and awarded over $3.2 million to its winners. Contest finalists work with mentors to help refine their proposals and participate in workshops designed to support their diverse needs.
Phillip Denny是Big Ideas的负责人，这是一个为期一年的项目，为从事早期社会影响项目的学生团队提供培训、资金和其他形式的支持。自2006年启动以来，“大创意”已经支持了4000多个项目，涉及1万多名学生，获奖者获得了320多万美元的奖金。决赛入围者在导师的帮助下完善他们的提案，并参加旨在满足他们多样化需求的研讨会。
Denny said projects like Duchemin’s are a great example of what makes Berkeley a uniquely innovative environment. “The thing that we prioritize through Big Ideas is really the potential for making a profound social impact,” he told UC Berkeley News. “We want to make sure that the projects we’re supporting can benefit the lives of individuals, of communities or of the planet. That social impact really made [Duchemin] stand out — because obviously, this is a lived experience that he had, but it’s an experience that millions of people across the world have.”
Denny说像Duchemin这样的项目是一个很好的例子，它使伯克利成为一个独特的创新环境。他告诉加州大学伯克利分校新闻：“我们通过‘大创意’优先考虑的事情，确实有可能产生深远的社会影响。”“我们希望确保我们支持的项目能够造福个人、社区或地球的生活。这种社会影响确实让杜谢明脱颖而出，因为很明显，这是他的亲身经历，但也是全世界数百万人的经历。”
“And then just the innovative aspect,” Denny continued. “There had never been a platform like this created before, and he and his Berkeley team were putting it together.”
“然后是创新方面，”Denny继续说。“以前从来没有创建过这样的平台，他和他的伯克利团队正在将其整合在一起。”
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Participating in the Big Ideas Contest gave Duchemin’s team the resources to take their project seriously, and go beyond what might’ve been possible otherwise as a student trying to get a company off the ground. “People were not just saying, ‘Oh, we’re gonna give you a little check,’” Duchemin said. “They were literally like, ‘We’ll make sure that you have significant capital so you can actually get started.’ That definitely made it possible for us.”
参加Big Ideas大赛给Duchemin的团队提供了足够的资源来认真对待他们的项目，并超越了作为一个学生试图让公司起步的可能性。“人们不只是说，‘哦，我们要给你一点支票，’”杜舍明说。“他们的意思是，‘我们会确保你有足够的资金，这样你才能真正开始创业。’这绝对让我们有了可能。”
Ten years later, Ava has grown far beyond what he could have ever imagined as a master’s student at UC Berkeley. Calling in from SOCAP, a conference for social impact financers where he was using Ava to help run captioning for deaf and hard of hearing participants, Duchemin told UC Berkeley News that his dream is to make Ava accessible across the world, in places where there might be fewer interpreting resources for deaf and hard of hearing people.
十年后，Ava的成长远远超出了他在加州大学伯克利分校读硕士时的想象。Duchemin在SOCAP（一个社会影响金融家的会议）上打电话给他，他在那里使用Ava帮助聋人和重听人参与者运行字幕，他告诉加州大学伯克利分校新闻，他的梦想是让Ava在世界各地都能使用，在那些聋人和重听人的口译资源可能较少的地方。
“Right now, we’re operating in the U.S. and France. And as we do this, then we can start operating with other languages, or keep the same language, but operate in other countries that have lower means, and create the same structure — train local scribes, and use the improved AI to work for their accents,” he said. “We’ve kept that spirit of Big Ideas, I think, of having an opening to the world.”
“目前，我们在美国和法国开展业务。当我们这样做的时候，我们就可以开始使用其他语言，或者保持相同的语言，但在其他手段较低的国家运营，并创建相同的结构——培训当地文员，并使用改进的人工智能来学习他们的口音。我认为，我们一直保持着‘大创意’的精神，向世界开放。”
But as Duchemin emphasized, it all started at UC Berkeley. “I think, first, it was the ecosystem,” he said. “It’s not just Berkeley Big Ideas, it was the fact that everybody was like, ‘You can do it.’ It’s the culture.”
但正如Duchemin所强调的，这一切都始于加州大学伯克利分校。“我认为，首先是生态系统的问题，”他说。“这不仅仅是伯克利大创意，而是每个人都在说，‘你可以做到。这是文化的问题。”
Denny hopes the success of alumni like Duchemin will motivate today’s Berkeley students to participate in this year’s Big Ideas Contest, for which applications are due on November 20.
Denny希望像Duchemin这样的校友的成功能够激励今天的伯克利学生参加今年的“大创意大赛”（Big Ideas Contest），申请截止日期为11月20日。
“It’s Berkeley, right? We already have that history of engaged scholarship. We have students who come to Berkeley because of that ethos we have in terms of activism and engagement,” he said. “And then through Big Ideas, we really channel that energy and identify those who are leading in that space, who are developing technologies and programs and systems that can benefit the world.”
“是伯克利，对吧？我们已经有了从事学术研究的历史。有些学生来伯克利是因为我们在行动主义和参与方面的精神。”他说。“然后通过‘大创意’，我们真正引导这种能量，并确定那些在该领域处于领先地位的人，他们正在开发能够造福世界的技术、项目和系统。”
In the years since Duchemin first conceptualized Ava, his sister Pauline has become France’s first deaf lawyer with the help of the technology her brother made, which she used to participate in classes throughout her time in law school. Today, he said, she often takes on cases related to social issues, sometimes working with disabled clients.
在Duchemin 首次提出“Ava”概念后的几年里，他的妹妹Pauline在她哥哥发明的技术的帮助下成为了法国第一位失聪的律师，她在法学院期间一直参加这种技术的课程。他说，如今，她经常接手与社会问题有关的案件，有时会与残疾客户打交道。
Ava’s “Manifesto for Total Accessibility” notes that “total accessibility will be a shared effort,” one that cannot be achieved through technology alone. “If we’re just a technology company, we won’t be able to push forward the impact we ought to make. As a social enterprise, it’s our responsibility to go beyond, to be more,” the manifesto reads. Prioritizing the needs of Ava’s users, Duchemin hopes, is just the first step towards making a more accessible world, from the doctor’s office to the court bench and beyond.
Ava的“全面无障碍宣言”指出，“全面无障碍将是一项共同的努力”，仅靠技术是无法实现的。“如果我们只是一家科技公司，我们将无法推动我们应该产生的影响。作为一家社会企业，我们有责任超越，做得更多，”宣言写道。Duchemin希望，优先考虑Ava用户的需求，只是创造一个更容易接近的世界的第一步，从医生的办公室到法庭的长凳，甚至更远。
