Author: Translators Without Borders

Words received and delivered

From January 2011 to March 2014, our volunteer translators delivered over 16.2 million words to humanitarian organizations. This is more than 20 times the total of words in the King James Bible.

During the last 12 months we delivered 7,550,275 translated words to humanitarian organizations, equivalent to 329,000 words per month.

 

 

A total of 7,031,425 words were delivered during the year 2013. This represents a 56% increase with respect to the words delivered during 2012, and it is 2.8 times the total delivered during the year 2011.

 

 

Translators

The team of professionals approved by Translators without Borders reached 2320 by the end of March. This number is enough to cope with demand in several language pairs, such as English into Spanish, but this is not enough to provide appropriate coverage in other pairs.

An example is English into French (our most demanded pair) where we have 280 volunteers, but only 220 of them have accepted words for translation so far. Several jobs in that language pair were recently cancelled because no volunteers accepted them. We also need more help into languages of India and Africa.

In case you know any translator you consider to be a good professional and who would be willing to become a Translator without Borders, please let me know via email at twb (at) proz (dot) com.

Our top volunteer translator is Eric Ragu, who has donated an amazing 262K words. Next comes Ashutosh Mitra, who has donated 224K words, an enormous amount for the English into Hindi pair. Then we find ishaklamia (217,000 words),  and Edgard Inc. (163,000 words, translated by a team).

Three volunteers have donated more than 200,000 words each, and 13 translators have donated more than 100,000 words each.

 

 

If you represent a client NGO making use of our services, please remember to thank translators who helped you and be quick to share with them any positive feedback received. Please be sure to acknowledge their work wherever possible and be ready to answer their queries, as your replies will help ensure better translation quality.

Language pairs

During the last 12 months our translators accepted volunteer assignments in 104 language pairs. Top language pair was English to French, representing 23.4% of the operation, followed by English into Spanish (15.0%), French into English (12.8%), Spanish into English (4.4%) and English into Portuguese (4.1%).

 

Overall, the top three pairs represented 51.20% of the words posted for translation in the last 12 months, a slowly growing trend as compared with the values of 48% and 47.3% reported in July and February respectively.

English into Spanish keeps growing faster (from 9.4% to 15.0% and replaced French into English in the second position). This is welcome, as this is the pair with the most volunteers. English into Portuguese replaced English into Arabic as the fifth pair in the operation.

 

 

We are particularly happy to have added the Native American languages Guarani, Quechua and K’iche’ as part of the Wikipedia project, and because of our contributions in the latter, a Wikipedia incubator was created in K’iche’.

 

Clients

A record 139 humanitarian organizations requested our services during the last 12 months, a 39% increase with respect to the number reported in our last newsletter.

Top clients during that period were the Wikipedia project (1.7 Million words delivered), followed by Médicos sin Fronteras from Spain (840,000 words), Médecins Sans Frontières from Switzerland (560,000 words), and then Acción contra el Hambre, Spain and Action contre la Faim, two branches of the same humanitarian organization (292,000 words and 232,000 words respectively).

 

 

 

 

During and immediately following a sudden-onset crisis, one of the most critical priorities for both relief workers and affected populations is sending and receiving information. Yet language barriers frequently complicate this effort. Most recently, aid workers assisting survivors of Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines had to manage communications with and among populations that spoke three indigenous languages: Filipino (Tagalog), Waray-Waray, and Cebuano.

Linguistic barriers are a longstanding, if unresolved, problem in humanitarian operations. In fact, a 2011 report from the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, Disaster Relief 2.0, cites lack of translation support as a “perennial hidden issue…delaying critical communications and disenfranchising affected populations.” It was the 2010 Haiti earthquake that was the catalyst for establishing Translators without Borders to bridge this communication gap by providing humanitarian NGOs around the world with pro-bono professional translation services. 

And now with our Words of Relief translation crisis relief pilot in Kenya, funded by the Humanitarian Innovation Fund and Microsoft, we are tackling this issue head on. It is exciting—and frankly a luxury—to have the opportunity to explore the very real language and translation needs of crisis-response aid workers in a non-crisis environment. That allows us to take the time to get the various elements of the network just right.

Words of Relief is a translation crisis relief network intended to improve communications when the crisis-response aid workers and affected populations do not speak the same language. It is a tool to be used prior to a crisis (when there is a warning of impending crisis), during the first 72 hours, and then in the three months following the initial crisis. The network focuses on three key components:

• translating key crisis and disaster messages into 15 world languages before crises occur (the pilot will focus on Swahili and Somali);
• building a spider network of diaspora who can translate from one of the 15 world languages into regional languages and who are trained to assist right away; and,
• creating a crowdsourced, online (and mobile) application that connects the translation team with aid workers and data aggregators who need immediate help.

With the New Year, Words of Relief is truly taking flight.  We spent the first month of the project interviewing for and securing the perfect team to implement the pilot. As a pilot of a worldwide system, it was important for us to find a global coordinator who could not only oversee the pilot, but also envision its scale-up to a global system. We have done that with Grace Tang, the Words of Relief Global Coordinator, who started this month and who brings with her 10 years leading and managing international teams in complex humanitarian emergencies with international NGOs such as Doctors without Borders (MSF) and Action Against Hunger (ACF). 

Additionally we have hired a dynamite project manager who will focus specifically on making the Words of Relief pilot successful. Phoebe Maina is our new Words of Relief Project Manager, We are very excited to have Grace and Phoebe on board!

Recently we took the first step to piloting Words of Relief: Getting input from aid organizations operating in Kenya (and Somalia), as well as from the Kenyan government. Late in February we began meeting with an array of organizations that are involved in some way with sudden onset crisis. We asked a series of questions, including what types of devices first responders use, the ways that they communicate with affected populations and the type of content or information that they provide to the community. We also presented the Words of Relief network to the organizations and received feedback on the overall concept.

We were fortunate to receive a wide range of feedback from a large group of organizations. We met with Internews, the Inter-agency Working Group in Nairobi, Medecins sans Frontieres (Espana), Frontline SMS, Ushahidi, RedR, Oxfam, IFRC, Info4Disasters, UNHCR, The Sphere Project, East Africa Regional Communications Group, UNICEF, WFP and CARE. Additionally, on 4^th March we held a launch meeting with UN OCHA, IAWG, Humanity Road, BBC Media Action and the National Disaster Operations Center of the Kenyan government.

The most important feedback we received was that the issue of communicating with affected populations is truly a problem. Admittedly, first responders will often sweep the problem aside, but that is because they do not have a useful solution that they can deploy quickly. That is our job; that is why we are creating Words of Relief.

There will be much more to come about Words of Relief in the coming months. We have a page on the website dedicated to the project, and we will send out frequent blogs and social media updates. Stay tuned for more news as Words of Relief builds momentum.

The Translators without Borders Translation Center powered by ProZ.com keeps adding new and better features, most of them inspired by suggestions or usage patterns from translators and clients.

Feedback from clients is now supported
When a job is completed by our volunteers, a notification is sent to the client including a link to provide feedback on the translations received.

In case the client failed to provide feedback, a second email is sent to them a week after the job completion, with the message “We are constantly working to provide you with the highest quality services. Your valuable feedback will help us maintain and improve the quality of our translations. Please consider following the link below and sharing your experience with this recent job.”

When the client accepts to post their feedback, they are offered basic information on the delivered tasks, and asked to leave feedback on any of them with the following scale:

• Excellent: Surpassed expectations
• Good: In line with expectations
• Satisfactory: Below expectations but usable
• Unacceptable: Not usable

Over 100 evaluations have been received so far, most of them ranging from Excellent to Good. This information will be used for monitoring and improving the quality of translations in the Workspace.

Feedback from reviewers
An additional feature for review of the translations and feedback by volunteers in the translation center has been partially implemented and it will further improve quality and complement our screening procedures (for instance enabling the participation of novice translators supervised by experienced professionals).

Going mobile
It is now possible for clients, translators and project managers to access the Translation Center by means of mobile devices such as tablets or phones. Being able to post, accept and manage jobs, and to read and reply to messages while on the run will make it easier to achieve the common goal of breaking down language barriers and building up the transfer of information to those who need it.

New user manuals

Two new user manuals aimed at improving your TWB experience have been released:

• User manual for clients
• User manual for translators

I am just back from my quarterly visit to Translators without Borders’ Translators’ Training Center in Nairobi, Kenya, so this is a good time for an update on the center.

To date, 125 persons have completed our one-week introduction to translation and 30 followed the six-week advanced course. All of the translators and editors who currently work in our center  have followed the advanced course, and have been with us for between 12 and 20 months. Our center is located on a campus with possibly the largest concentration of language experts in Africa. Together, the Bible Translation and Literacy organisation (BTL), SIL (the developers of the Ethnologue), and Translators without Borders employ a group of around 75 persons, all of them professionally involved in translation, linguistics, or language research! Truly an exciting and stimulating environment for our team!

Our staff has spent most of its time working on health, education and crisis translation projects. These include training materials for community health workers, medical articles from Wikipedia, repair instruction manuals for water pumps,  books for very young children, subtitles and voice-overs for health videos , to name some examples. Recently, work has started on the translation of a library of messages and text segments on a variety of topics around crisis intervention. These translations are prepared for distribution during crises and are part of our Words of Relief project that is outlined in the Special Projects article.

The center will soon start training new people to become translators for a range of 12 different Kenyan languages. During a one-week course, they will follow the Introduction to translation program, as well as training to use translation memory tools and to learn specific requirements for the translation of the message library. Trainees will be members of the Words of Relief ‘spider‘ network we are búilding of people who will be translating into their local lanuages in times of crisis.

Over the past two years we have built up contacts with more and more NGOs who  learn about what we are doing, and who are interested in the language support we can provide. For many of the NGOs  we are regarded  as the area’s best kept secret when it comes to translation. And understandably so: In Africa it will be hard to find a dozen trained translators in one office, with computers, internet access, and translation tools, who are translating health information and are prepared to drop everything to translate crisis (war, tsunami, earthquake) related documents when nature strikes. 

On behalf of all in the center, I would like to thank the good people of the OnOurBikes charity bike ride. They have just completed their third big charity ride to support our work in Kenya. This ride was 2,300 KM – what a feat!  We are very grateful for their commitment to our work and would like to especially thank Marek, Lucjan and Ewa of TextPartner, which is the company that organizes the entire ride.  For more information on the charity bike ride, go to www.onourbikes.info.

Established in 2004 by three Hungarian language technologists, Kilgray is the world’s fastest growing translation technology vendor. Its software has been designed by translators for translators – which means it knows exactly what they need.

Today, the company, which is working collaboratively with Translators without Borders (TWB), has eight offices in seven countries – Hungary, the United States, Germany, France, UK, Portugal and Poland. Its staff brings decades of experience from the design and marketing of other translation tools.

Kilgray CEO István Lengyel explains that “We believe that language service providers can only introduce technology that translators also enjoy using, and that enterprises can only be satisfied users of technologies that address the needs of language service providers and freelance translators alike.

“We’ve always had contacts with TWB and had long wanted to move towards greater collaboration. Our original aim was to create a charity project to help people and support the message of our memoQ Server product, which is capable of handling huge collaborative translation projects. We set up an event at two of the industry’s biggest events, the 54th Annual Conference of ATA in San Antonio, Texas, and tekom’s tcworld in Wiesbaden, Germany, being held simultaneously. Our plan was to set up desks for translators from which they could contribute to the charity project together with online contributors.

“We contacted TWB about this and quickly agreed to work together. TWB contacted the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) and we chose to support a project about disaster risk reduction for them. We subsequently created the www.donatetranslations.com website and started promoting this via PR, social media and the memoQ userbase.

“The project, the ‘TWB/Kilgray-memoQ DisasterRisk Reduction Translate-a-Thon’, took place during and after those two conferences in early November and it was a huge success! We expected 100 volunteers to join in but the number of participants reached almost 200 by the end. We hadn’t anticipated the volume of words translated either, so the result (154,386 words in total!) really astonished us! Parts of the document were translated into 19 languages and the full document appeared in four languages (Spanish, Italian, French and Hungarian). We were rather surprised that so few people came to our booths at the conferences but this was because most people were contributing online.

“Helping people is what we enjoy most about our work – it’s an aim we all understand and support.  Kilgray staff devoted a lot of effort into setting up the website, organizing communications, organizing and managing the translation project. As we wrote in the thank you email sent to all participants: Even if only one life is saved because of your efforts, we all think it was worth it!”

Teeth Relief is a UK charity committed to improving oral health within low-income communities. It was founded in 1989 as The Sunnymede Trust by Dr. Sharon Rankin, on her return from voluntary work in Zambia. Dr. Rankin has over 25 years of experience as a dentist and dental trainer, has worked for the FDI (International Dental Federation) as Oral Health Care Development Manager for developing countries, and was Secretary of the European Dental Solidarity group (EDS). She currently works at Kings Dental Institute in the Acute Dental Care Department, and continues to head Teeth Relief. Her charity’s aim is to make knowledge of oral health a fundamental part of health education. To that end, the charity has created a unique training manual that explains oral health practice in plain English.

Dr. Rankin first learned of Translators without Borders (TWB) in early 2013, from Brian Rushaju, a Ugandan dentist using Teeth Relief’s manual to train nurses and clergy in oral health and emergency dental care for the Ugandan charity RunDental. As she described for us, “Brian met Simon [a TWB board member] at a conference in Arusha, Tanzania and queried whether we could request TWB to translate the manual into Kiswahili for him to possibly use in Kenya and Tanzania.” As the charity had no budget to pay for translations, Translators without Borders’ volunteers were able to provide services that otherwise would have gone unfulfilled.

Teeth Relief decided to first translate their manual into French and Spanish. Dr. Rankin explained: “We used the French version in a pilot scheme in Rwanda this summer, working with another charity so it had an immediate impact. Presently we are getting both the French and Spanish proofread and reformatted so that we can offer free download of the PDF on the website. Hopefully long-term, with fundraising, we can print hard copies too. Our next project would be to find funding so that we can pay TWB translators for the Kiswahili version of the manual. None of this work would have been able to be contemplated without Teeth Relief working with TWB and them providing pro bono professional translators.”

Translations of the manual will help spread the word on providing oral healthcare training to clinical workers in low-income areas without dentists. “Teeth Relief working with TWB has meant that we can focus on the technical aspects of oral healthcare, and they can focus on professional translation. Working together, we produce something that neither of us could produce on our own.”

As Teeth Relief’s website points out: “If good causes were measured against each other in a life and death way, Oral Health would never reach the top of the ladder. But anyone who has suffered with toothache will know that pain in the mouth affects how you feel and how you eat. In resource poor communities, 90% of dental decay remains untreated with a considerable knock-on effect. Oral Health education must become an integral part of all health education as an essential, not as a luxury.” With each additional translation of their manual, Teeth Relief’s goal can become reality for an increasing number of people in the world.

Translators without Borders began over 20 years ago in Paris. Over the years, by far the most translated language pair has been English <-> French. This is partly due to the organization’s origins, but it is also because English and French are the chief languages of development in the world. This is true on both ends of the spectrum.  The biggest international non-profit organizations are based in the US, UK, France and Switzerland. At the same time many beneficiaries have French or English as second languages, making them critical for sharing knowledge.

We have a fabulous group of English <-> French professional volunteers who are approved to work in our Workspace. But despite their hard work,  we often must scramble to cover all the work that comes into the center in this language pair. In fact, the work from English to French has been increasing, and unfortunately, we must turn some away. We are in desperate need of more resources to cover this gap.

Become a Translators without Borders translator

If you are an experienced translator in the English <-> French language pair (or any language pair), it is not difficult to become a Translator without Borders.  The first step is to complete our application on our website – it only takes a few minutes. The questions are quite simple and are intended to gauge your experience. This is very important because we ask our volunteers to work directly with the non-profit partners and often we do not have an editing step.

Importantly, we have partnered with a number of associations and sponsors to ‘fast track’ translators into the system. This means that the volunteer does not need to take a test before being accepted. Be sure to mark on your application if you are certified by one of the listed associations or if you work with one of our fast track sponsorship partners.

If you are approved, you will become a Translator without Borders. This means you will be alerted when a job is available for you. You can decide at that time whether you have time to accept the job or not – we understand that some times you will have time and other times you will not!  That is perfectly acceptable. Once you do start to translate for Translators without Borders, you will get a badge showing your word count that you can use in your email or on your website.

Our charity is only successful because of the hard work of our volunteers. It is only because of our volunteers that we are able to help more people around the world gain access to vital information.  Thanks to all who have helped us – and all who will help us in the future!

 

 

 

Translators Without Borders is thrilled to have a responsive network of donors supporting our mission to help ensure local language availability of critical health, safety and educational information in developing countries. One of our most creative fundraisers is run by language services provider TextPartner sp.j, based in Poland. TextPartner is the driving force behind OnOurBikes, which raises funds for TWB annually, via long-distance sponsored bike rides. Before the latest ride, which has just finished (raising almost $10,000!), TextPartner’s co-founder and Operations Manager, Marek Gawrysiak, shared the OnOurBikes story!

Q: Marek, first can you tell us a bit about your own story and how you started TextPartner?

Sure! I started as freelance translator, typically on my computer at 3am in the morning to meet 8am deadlines. There was always one person I could count on to be available at 3am for linguistic, DTP and programming help, at that was my future co-founder, Lucjan Szreter. He was a chief editor at a newspaper, also living in Poland about 400km away, back in the late 90s. We decided to set up a company together, beginning in a little apartment one floor down from Lucjan’s flat. As more and more work came in, we hired more people full-time and eventually took over the entire floor for office space. Today we have 18 people and are still growing. We started with English to Polish and then German translations and have grown to cover 15 language pairs,  and we’ve added reviewers, DTP and even a print shop, all in the same building. We have a great team, I love being in this business, with all the shades and colors of translations.

Q: How did you and TWB meet?

I first connected with TWB at a conference, where we started talking and I got very interested in their mission. I found it a great intersection of languages and doing good in the world. TextPartner didn’t have a big budget to donate, so we brainstormed internally on other ways to support. Both Lucjan and I like riding our MTB bikes in the mountains. We spoke to John Terninko, the executive director of the European Language Industry Association (ELIA) about doing a fund-raising ride from our hometown of Katowice, Poland, to arrive in Budapest in time for the ELIA conference on October 2. He thought it was a great idea. So Lucjan and I started calling people we knew who were cyclists, including Raymund Prins, a former pro cyclist who runs a translation agency with a similar model to ours. I spoke with TWB’s director of fund-raising, the amazing and resourceful Anne-Marie Colliander Lind, who gave us great suggestions. I set up the OnOurBikes.info website, and we did that first 400km ride, arriving in Budapest after 4 days. We had never before tried riding such long distances, but with just 3 people, one of whom just did one day, we raised $1800. That was just short of our goal of $2000, but we easily made it up at the conference with the help of the ELIA participants. We ended up with 21 sponsors, and had enough to pay for two TWB translators in Kenya for 1 year!

Q: So you kept going with the rides!

Yes, TWB was happy with the result, and so we decided to continue with the idea, with events once per year. Last year in 2013 we tried a longer route, to go across Ukraine, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia and back to Poland, for a total of 600 km in 4 days – our team was getting bigger and we were getting more fit! My wife Ewa, also part of the TextPartner management team, took up MTB cycling especially to join us for the event. We had wonderful support along the way. For example, Răzvan Costache, the founder of Avalon Media, had friends in a Romanian town where we were stopping. We spent the night with them and they welcomed us like part of the family.

Q: What have been the greatest challenges during the rides?

For the 2013 ride, our sponsors donated $5 per km and we got to $3000. We didn’t want to stop there, so we offered, if sponsors would donate extra, then we would ride extra sponsored kilometers in a place of their choice. Sponsors could choose the location on the website, and the majority chose the Alps. On the first day in the Alps, I got carried away and wanted to show off my stamina. I went up a famous pass in Austria, to an altitude of 2000m; then down on easy-to-ride asphalt and back up again to 2300m. Suddenly, the altitude got to me and I completely ran out of energy. Luckily, there was an Austrian shelter hut. A kind guy from the former Yugoslavia shared his schnapps, we told stories and had hot soup. I thought I was okay to go back. But on the way down, my bike tires slipped, and I fell. With the adrenaline, I felt little pain at the time, but later that night, discovered I had broken ribs. I’ll be more careful next time!

Another kind of challenge is more political. During that same 2013 ride, there was a Ukranian rider with us, Egor Agnaev from Promova, Ukraine, who traveled nineteen hours on the train to ride the Ukrainian segment with us. Because Ukraine is not in the EU, it’s very difficult for them to get visas to travel in Europe.  So Egor could only go with us as far as the Ukraine border. It was sad to see him leave our ride, for us personally and for our fund-raising!

Q: What are the plans for 2014?

Our 2014 ride is a “Baltic Loop,” starting April 18 in Poland and finishing May 3rd in Poland. We ride through Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, then take the ferry to Finland, ride across Finland, take another ferry to Sweden, ride south to Karlskrona, Sweden, and take the ferry back across to Poland. It is 2,300 km! We’re asking sponsors to donate $5 for each km. We have 360km sponsored to date, and you can see our sponsors and progress on the OnOurBikes.info site.

Q: How do you publicize your fund-raisers?

We have learned a lot from our previous 2 rides. We’re very focused now on spreading the message about TWB and what the goal is, in as many languages as possible. Having our own print shop makes it easy to print brochures for media purposes. Before the ride, on March 28, there is a translation and localization conference in Warsaw, where we will do a presentation about the Baltic Loop ride and about TWB’s Kenyan training center. In each of the countries we cross, we’ll have an agency partner willing to translate press kits and send to local media. These include Diskusija from Lithuania, Tilde from Latvia, Interlex Translations from Estonia, Maris Multilingual from Finland and Increa.se Consulting from Sweden. We’ll do more media events, and some sponsors will write articles in their  languages for local media. We now have an article in Dutch, English and Slovenian, with plans for at least ten other languages! During the 2013 ride, our riders were accompanied by a car pulling a caravan that had all the comforts of home, and we put sponsors’ logos on it. The Baltic Loop is 2,300 km, so too expensive to bring a caravan, but we are building a toy caravan that can be towed with a bike and will also have space for sponsored logos. TWB’s Anne-Marie will be throwing a party for us when we arrive in Växjö, which will be great fun. During the Latvia part of the ride, we’ll stop in Riga to attend the ELIA Networking Days, and meet with media there. We are planning to post photos as we go along the ride, on the OnOurBikes.info website, and we use Twitter all the time to broadcast updates about changes to the website. In fact, we’ll be tweeting soon about 2 new cyclists joining in from Latvia and at least 4 others from Estonia!

Q: Just curious – why the .info domain for the OnOurBikes website?

Our sponsors are from all over the world, and so we wanted a country-neutral domain. And conveniently, .info is 3 time less expensive than .pl!

Q: What are your hopes for future fund-raising?

We want to keep contributing to TWB as much as possible. TWB gives people knowledge to improve their lives, using the tool of translation. TWB is involved in lots of projects in Kenya which need funding, like the training center, and making Wikipedia content available on mobile phones. It’s so important to make this information accessible in the local language. Through OnOurBikes, we want to support TWB  translators. So we dream of being able to raise more funds as part of an open, international initiative, with possibly mirror events in other world regions. We’ve had some interest from Asian countries, and if we can share our knowledge on how to get organized for the rides, be attractive to sponsors and do the publicity, we can help them join in. We can provide our time, as Marek Pawelec, one of our expert Polish translators did, by going to Kenya to TWB’s center, to train students on CAT tools. We’re also interested in working with more translation industry associations such as GALA and TAUS, to let them know about OnOurBikes. And we hope all your readers will visit our site at OnOurBikes.info and help us spread the word as well.

Thank you, Marek, for sharing your story, and for all that you do for Translators Without Borders!

 

 

Jacek Sierakowski is a medical writer, translator and a journalist. He’s one of Translators without Borders’ top contributors with more than 160,000 words donated in the English -> French language pair.

Hi Jacek! Tell us a bit about yourself and what made you volunteer for Translators without Borders (TWB)?
I grew up in Africa. Later, as a medical student, I was an intern in an African hospital, in a remote bush area. I realized how local people desperately needed help. And I was not even in a war zone. I intended to come back later as a doctor, either in a governmental or a non-governmental context. Life had other plans for me.

Later on, for various reasons, I slowly switched medical practice for medical writing and translating. And it naturally brought me to TWB, as a way of achieving my earlier goal of volunteering in developing countries.

I enjoy translating for TWB. I feel useful, bringing my little contribution to good causes.

The deadlines are usually comfortable, with the understandable exceptions of crisis situations, and the clients thank me. It reminds me of the good old days when I started translating, in another millennium. We did not have CAT tools or internet, not even computers! But the relationships with the clients were human and respectful, and the rhythms slower.

Any particular memorable TWB project?
I am particularly touched by the stories of the field volunteers. I also like translating texts about obstetrics, it was my favorite part of my African medical experience.

What challenges, if any, are you facing or did you face as a Translator without Borders?
The internal abbreviations, acronyms and references are sometimes challenging. And the authors are not always able to explain them, being on a mission somewhere around the world without email connection.

What do you enjoy doing to take a break from translation?
I try to compensate the long computer hours by physical exercise: running, bicycling, Nordic walking, yoga. Or by taking care of the roses in my little garden.