Author: Translators without Borders

Since 2011 Translators without Borders (TWB) has translated more than 40 million words for humanitarian and development organizations, a significant achievement for a small non-profit. Last year alone, 10 million words were translated.

10 million words in 2016

In 2016 TWB achieved a new record, with dedicated translators providing more than 10 million words in just 12 months, through the Translators without Borders Workspace powered by ProZ.com. Here is an insight into what that actually means.

The graph below presents, the total delivered words for each month in 2016. After breaking all previous records with 1.2 million words translated in the month of May, December figures were even stronger with 1.33 million words delivered. The 2016 average shows a steady growth from 563K in words in January to 927K words at the end of the year.

A Five-Year Perspective

It is interesting to look at an extended view over 5 years to better appreciate the enormous growth experienced over time as a result of the contributions of our committed volunteers.

The Community

By December 2016, TWB was working with 3,800 volunteer translators, a 21% increase from one-year prior. Without the commitment of these translators, our achievements would not have been possible. Five ‘super’ volunteers, donated more than 6 percent of our total translation output with a combined delivery of 2.4 million words between them! These volunteers are Eric Ragu (702k words), Ishaklamia (604k words), Chris Hall (420K words), Ashutosh Mitra (351k words) and Raquel Bentué (348k words).

The Languages

Over the past 12 months, our translators accepted volunteer assignments in 122 language pairs (compared to 139 in 2015). English to French continues to be the largest combination with 26 percent of translations, followed by English to Spanish (14%), French to English (10%), English to Arabic (6.6%) and Spanish to English (4.6%). Overall, the top three language pairs represented 50 percent of the words delivered.

The Partners

A record 228 humanitarian organizations requested the services of TWB in 2016. Some of the larger pieces of work were in collaboration with Wikipedia, Médicos Sin Fronteras de España, American Red Cross and the International Network of Street Papers. The combined words delivered to these top 5 organizations accounted for 35 percent of the total.

Providing 10 million translated words in one year for non-profit partners was a proud achievement for TWB. This represented partnership with over 200 humanitarian organizations, but what is really impressive is the content that translators are working on. From training material for community health care workers to guidance for traumatized refugees; and from nutrition information for small babies to security instructions for people living in conflict zones, TWB volunteers have worked on some truly impactful projects.

Over five years ago, TWB, with the generous support of ProZ.com, created the first-ever translation workspace dedicated to our vision: A world where knowledge knows no language barriers. Today, over 40 million words later, we are working hard to ensure that the translations we deliver have a positive impact on the lives of people; that the service we offer to non-profit partners is professional; and that translators we work with are proud to be part of TWB. Over the past months, we have been introducing improvements to the TWB translation interface for our partners, offering expanded and tailored language and communications solutions, ensuring top quality translations of life-saving information, and adding technologies that increase efficiency and improve access to vital information. We are also working on our translator incentive program, soon to be delivered, because we believe in the importance of showing our volunteers appreciation for making it possible to achieve over and above what we thought would be possible five years ago.

Here is to topping 10 million words again in 2017 and reaching more people with more vital information in the right languages.

By Enrique Cavalitto, ProZ.com

One of the things I love about my job here in Greece is that I get to meet the dedicated people who are deployed to TWB’s Humanitarian Interpreter Roster. Since TWB started deploying interpreters to work with our partner organizations in Greece in July, I have had the opportunity to meet them before, during and after their assignments. They tell me about their experiences on the ground and how they feel their work meets, or falls short of meeting, the needs of refugees.

Humanitarian Interpreter roster and medical assitance

I first meet Ada in Athens in August, freshly arrived and very eager to start her deployment with Médecins du Monde (Doctors of the World). Having first learned Farsi as a second language at university in her native Poland, Ada’s many years of work in Afghanistan developed her fluency in Dari – the dialect of Farsi spoken there. Female Dari-English interpreters have been difficult to recruit throughout this crisis response, but they are crucial for partners delivering medical services. Like female patients all over the world, many refugee women only feel comfortable with females in the consulting room.

After a brief orientation in Athens, Médecins du Monde sent Ada where they needed her most – to a mobile clinic servicing camps of Afghan refugees in western Greece. Ada tells me that the absence of a Dari speaker had created a backlog of patients at the camps.

“As soon as refugees heard that a Dari interpreter was here, they came to the doctor.”

Many of the patients Ada interprets for are children – not surprising given UNHCR estimates that 28% of refugees currently in Greece are children. Earlier this month she told me: “Today I was called to the hospital by another organization.  The child had a very rare disease, and they wanted me there because I knew this child’s case.” Unlike earlier in the crisis, when the refugee population was largely transitory, working with static communities means that interpreters have the chance to build trust and bring individual case knowledge to their work: “I told them that, of course, I could go.”

Breaking down language barriers in refugee camps

Refugee camps in Greece often occupy abandoned factories and military sites. Vasilika camp in northern Greece sits within a gloomy old warehouse.

Ada is not the only interpreter working to break down language barriers to public service provision here. Among the most challenging language barriers for refugees in Greece nowadays – be they stranded or struggling to integrate in Greece – are those faced when accessing public services. Health and asylum services present obvious challenges, but social services, such as the tax office (where refugees must go to obtain a tax number in order to work legally), are also operated entirely in Greek. Anyone who has tried to access and make sense of tax paperwork in their own language can only guess how impossible it must seem to someone struggling in a foreign language. And yet these steps are necessary to access essential services and enjoy basic rights as a refugee here in Greece. The fact that the Greek public sector is simply not equipped to place an interpreter at key points of access, means that humanitarian interpreters are needed to fill the gap.

“There were some really rough cases”

I catch Rahim on Skype a few days after his return home to Cardiff, Wales. He’s already back at university after a month-long deployment with Médecins du Monde in central Greece. An Arabic-English interpreter, Rahim joined the TWB Humanitarian Translater Roster to do humanitarian work during his university breaks. I ask him if he’s exhausted: “Not really” he says with that calm, unflappable manner I’ve come to associate with interpreters, “I didn’t go for a holiday”. Knowing he spent most of his deployment at a camp with notoriously bad conditions, I ask how he felt when he saw it for the first time: “I’d seen refugee camps before so it didn’t surprise me, it was just sad.” Like Ada, Rahim also worked as part of a mobile medical team, splitting his time between two camps of Syrian refugees: “Patients were all ages and with a range of conditions: children, older people, pregnant women…people with chronic diseases, or problems stemming from the bad diet here. There were some really rough cases”.

In one such case, which sadly demonstrates the absolute necessity of having interpreters at hospitals, Rahim was called to a local hospital to urgently assist a Syrian woman in her sixties with a serious heart condition. Totally alone in Greece, she had been taken to the hospital before, but with no interpreters present, she could not, and would not, sign the consent form that would allow a cardiac catheterization. Once there, Rahim interpreted the doctor’s explanation of the procedure and read the consent form to her in Arabic. Now understanding the need for the operation, the woman signed the form and agreed to return for the procedure on the scheduled day.  She did turn up for her appointment but – just one hour before the operation – refused the procedure. “She told me later that the room didn’t look familiar, it didn’t feel familiar – she freaked out”, Rahim explains. On duty at the camp at the time, Rahim could not be at the hospital to reassure her by interpreting for the doctors or nurses. Tragically for this woman, hospitals here don’t do second chances, so her only opportunity to undergo a crucial operation had passed. Rahim is, as ever, very clear: “There were no interpreters at the hospital” he says.

Recruiting of interpreters

Translators without Borders started recruiting, testing and training interpreters in July 2016. They are then independently contracted by our trusted partner organizations in Greece. Since the establishment of the Humanitarian Interpreter Roster, 5 people have been deployed.

By Lali Foster, former Translators without Borders Communications Manager, European refugee crisis response