The UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), adopted in 2015, are a universal call to action to end poverty, protect the planet, stop gender discrimination, erase health discrepancies, improve educational quality, and ensure that by 2030 all people enjoy peace and prosperity.

Access to knowledge is a precondition for meeting the Sustainable Development Goals. The good news is that for the first time in human history, it is now possible to share the sum of all human knowledge. Yet even if every person on the planet were connected today to the Internet via their mobile devices, we would still have one final barrier, and it’s a big one: the language barrier.

This challenge was behind the creation of Translators without Borders, founded by Lori Thicke in 1993. A global community of over 100,000 members, Translators without Borders is dedicated to helping people to overcome the language barriers to access vital information.

Language may not be something you have thought of before, but looking at it through the lens of the UN goals for global development, you will never see it the same way.