I grew up in Lebanon, where you greet someone with «hi, kifak, ça va». Three languages in three words, and nobody thinks twice about it. A sentence starts in Arabic, borrows a word from French, lands in English, and nobody stops to announce the switch.
Then I moved to Montréal, a city bilingual by law, and found that the ease I grew up with had nowhere to go. I did a master’s in User Experience at HEC Montréal, and workshop after workshop I watched the same thing happen. The facilitator opens the floor. The room goes quiet. Not because nobody has anything to say, but because saying it means picking a language, and picking a language means deciding who you are in that room before you have even made your point.
I waited for someone to build the tool that would fix it. Every live-polling platform I tried picked one language and let the rest of the room fall away. So I stopped waiting and built it myself.
That is the room Nabad is for. Not a room that needs accommodating. A room that is already completely normal, and has simply never had a tool that treated it that way.
A room is only as smart as the people who feel able to speak in it. Every person sitting silent in your session is something you paid for and did not receive. Most of the time they are not disengaged. They are translating, second-guessing, and running out of time while the conversation moves on.
I am Scarlett Myriam Jebara. I designed, built and run Nabad on my own, from Montreal, Quebec, after a master’s in User Experience at HEC Montréal. It is independently funded and is not owned by, affiliated with, or operated on behalf of any other company. The only official website is nabad.live and the only official contact is info@nabad.live.
Eight languages work today: Arabic, English, Persian, French, Spanish, Russian, German and Portuguese, with Arabic right to left throughout. Your session data lives on infrastructure I pay for, and the full list of who processes what is on the Data and Security page, written plainly rather than legally.
Each of these is a page about Nabad written in that language. It is not a language switch: the site itself follows whatever you pick in the menu at the top.