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Origen: Reilly Brooks

Explaining climate change in 100+ languages

This article originally appeared on Medium

Everyone knows that Sophia Kianni doesn’t stop talking. “Literally, I am like a radio,” she says. “I grew up really believing that my voice matters…it’s because my parents always raised me that way.” When Sophia visited her relatives in Iran in middle school and saw how pollution blotted out the stars, she decided to use her voice to educate others about climate change — a subject she couldn’t find information about in Farsi. So she started translating resources for her family.

“It was me, annoying my relatives — you guys need to care about this, blah blah blah,” she jokes. But neither Sophia nor her family could have predicted how her platform would explode, leading her to launch a mass translation operation. “This time,” the 19-year-old says, “I’m annoying thousands of people and getting my point across to them instead of pestering just my relatives.”

Farsi would become just one of over 100 languages Sophia helps to translate — thousands of volunteers do the rest.

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Through social media, young people “have so much access to one another,” Sophia says. “It’s so easy for us to communicate our thoughts and improve our perspectives. I feel like every generation is more progressive than the previous. We have so much compassion and humility, and care about one another.”