How we work Archives - Page 4 of 5 - Translators without Borders Blog

The first Humanitarian Interpreter Roster deploys in Greece

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

How Translators without Borders responds to crises around the world

The TWB Mission: breaking down language barriers

The Mission of Translators without Borders is to create a world where knowledge knows no language barriers. To achieve that mission, TWB works with partners globally to respond to challenges related to communication and language. This video shows the crises that Translators without Borders has responded to in an effort to improve communications between humanitarians and affected communities. Communication in the right language is effective humanitarian response. Achieving the TWB mission is therefore dependent on our dedicated volunteer translators.

joining the Rapid response team

Do you want to join the TWB Rapid Response Team? Sign up at the TWB website.

Words of Relief takes flight: Pilot of translation crisis relief network begins

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.

Words of Relief Global Coordinator, Grace Tang

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.

Words of Relief Project Manager, Jane Nduta Mwangi

And now with our Words of Relief translation crisis relief pilot in Kenya, funded by the Humanitarian Innovation Fund, 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 with Communities (CwC) activities 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. Jane Nduta Mwangi, the new Words of Relief Project Manager, holds a degree in International Relations/Political Science, sociology and law and brings to the table experience in establishing and managing teams and establishing structures. We are very excited to have Grace and Jane on board!

One of the first tasks of our team is to develop a monitoring and evaluation plan that will inform the pilot and, importantly, the eventual global scale-up. We are beginning that process this month, working with Nicki Bailey of the CDAC-Network, who is an MEL expert. More to come on our monitoring and evaluation plan in the coming months…

The team is also preparing for our first big pilot activity: A workshop with Nairobi-based aid workers that will focus on the type of disaster and crisis messaging that should be available in local languages before, during and after a crisis, and the way in which they would like to work with our translation crisis relief network. This workshop, to take place the beginning of March, will include professionals from a wide array of aid organizations, and we are currently sending invitations and encouraging involvement. Our March blog will report results from the workshop.

Stay tuned for more news as the Words of Relief build momentum.

Translators without Borders response to the Philippines Typhoon

Thursday (November 7) night at the tcworld Conference this year was like none other for me. Normally a relaxing second moment in the middle of this particular conference, this time I had only one thing on my mind: an enormous typhoon was barreling toward the central Philippines, and Translators without Borders was being asked to activate a team to help deal with the chaos that was bound to ensue.

After dinner I worked through the night assembling our team, putting communications pieces in place, and keeping the vast and wide network of humanitarian aid responders with whom we partner apprised of our capabilities. Meanwhile, I watched as the typhoon made landfall and the area of greatest impact went dark. Mother Nature reminding us who is in charge: A circumstance that has become more familiar over the past four years but, fortunately, one that we are learning to address more quickly in an attempt to use language to save lives.

It was almost four years ago now since Haiti was ravaged by an earthquake. That crisis was a wake-up call for the translation industry—and, more importantly, the international aid organizations—regarding the vital role translation plays during such a crisis. The silver lining to that disaster was the growth of Translators without Borders, with a dedicated board and a committed advisory committee. We now handle more than 750,000 humanitarian words every month through the Translators without Borders Workspace (powered by Proz.com) and we have a vast network of translators ready to help out. This infrastructure was critical in setting up our response to last week’s typhoon. Tagalog (or Filipino) and English are the national languages of the Philippines. There are also eight major dialects; in central Philippines the most important being Waray and Cebuano. We were able to quickly assemble a team of Tagalog translators who could also handle the major dialects. A key factor was that the members of this team of dedicated volunteers were geographically dispersed, allowing us to offer assistance quickly at any time of the day.

With the team assembled, the real work began on Friday, November 8. The initial activation came from UN OCHA via the Digital Humanitarian Network (DHN). As a member of DHN, we work with a wide array of committed aid response organizations that help the major responders to quickly put together a picture of the situation, often using micro-mapping and big data to assist. Social media is mined for this work, and our initial role in this activation was to handle the non-English Tweets and public Facebook messages. Additionally, we created a list of key terms – everything from ‘flood’ through ‘damaged’ and ‘injured’ to ‘dead’ – in Tagalog and Cebuano in order to help data miners sort through and prioritize the mountains of information being generated.

As the activation continued and responders on the ground gained a clearer picture of the devastation, we were called in by other partners to be ready to respond. One of our translators worked directly with Humanity Road, a DHN partner that educates the public before, during, and after a crisis. We are also a full member of the CDAC-Network (Communicating with Disaster-Affected Communities), which was created by major aid organizations, including UN OCHA, Save the Children, WorldVision, Internews, the International Federation of Red Cross, and Red Crescent Societies, to improve ‘Communications with Communities’ (or CwC). CwC is being recognized more and more as critical factor during a crisis. While it might seem obvious, it is not simple when all telecommunications are down, cell phone batteries die, and people speak an array of different languages. Through CDAC-N we are on call to assist with communications from aid workers to the affected populations as they work feverishly to get materials and information out. Finally, we are on call with UNHCR, which is the lead organization for refugees, to provide translations of more long term and longer format materials for refugees who will not have proper shelter for many months to come.

Throughout the process, our team of translators has been engaged and committed to help. Unlike many of the other responders to a crisis, Translators without Borders volunteers are intimately linked to the affected communities. In many cases, they have friends and family in the middle of the crisis. Language is the ultimate connector – and once our team members know their loved ones are safe, they use language to make a difference, helping responders save lives. In fact their knowledge of the community and the geographic region allows our team to be supportive in other ways as well, including giving CwC responders contacts in the local media and assessing the on-the-ground communications situation. I am so proud of our team of translators – they are making a difference every hour.
We are also documenting what we have learnt from this latest crisis to improve our own response to the next that will undoubtedly come, and to provide important input to our Words of Relief pilot project, due to kick off in Kenya next month. With that project, funded by the Humanitarian Innovation Fund, we will be testing the concept of a spider network of responders in regional and local languages as well as an interactive, collaborative and mobile translation system to engage people now living away from their homelands quickly and in a meaningful way. Stay tuned for much more on Words of Relief.

Finally, we could not do this without the support of our donors and sponsors. We have a vision to use language to increase access to knowledge and to save lives. Communications IS aid (#commisaid). And in communications, language is key. We will keep telling this story, and we ask you to keep supporting us in our efforts.

By Rebecca Petras, Translators without Borders Deputy Director and Head of Innovation

Our translation center in Nairobi: An update

Swahili Translations

July saw the completion by our Health Translation Center in Nairobi, Kenya, of the translation of some 250,000 words of high-level health information. The content was written by the Open University (UK) to train community health workers in the Swahili-speaking regions of East Africa. The completed modules are Prenatal Care, Labour & Delivery Care, and Postnatal Care. Other modules are in the pipeline, and these are about topics such as Infant Care Nutrition and Family Planning.

The team also recently completed the Swahili translation of ten videos on New Born Care. These instructional videos have been conceptualized and produced by Deb Van Dyke’s Global Health Media. In total the team has translated more than 20 videos. The work involved the translation of the English captions (subtitles) and putting the Swahili subtitles in the video, as well as recording the narrative, with Rodha Moraa, one of the translation team members, serving as the ‘voice actor’.

The translation team, recruited and trained in the summer of 2012, has now developed into a super group of experienced health translators. The team is also rather unique, as in East Africa there is no other group of experienced linguists and health workers whose skills and educational backgrounds are combined to work on the translation of such material. We are speaking with international as well as local NGOs about involving our translation team in their projects.

Training-In-A-Box

During the coming months we will be investigating the possibility of a program called ‘Training-In-A-Box’. All training material, lecture notes and exercises will be evaluated, and if relevant, updated. The material will then be organized into one package – one ‘Box’ as it were – which TWB can use to support the translator training of linguists and health workers all over the world.

The medical modules concern 15-20 ‘Africa-relevant’ topics, including pneumonia, diarrhea, malaria, bilharzia, as well as topics from the social medicine field, such as malnutrition, unsafe abortion, female genital mutilation, and more. Each module has between 15 and 50 slides, and we are in the process of typing in the narrative. The material also includes a large section about the profession of translation.

“The Training-In-A-Box program is an attempt to bring together our know-how and best practices from years of training a host of translators in many different countries,” says TWB President Lori Thicke. “I’m sure it’s going to make the starting up of new teams in the future a whole lot easier.”

Thank you Fund-A-Translator Charity Ride Sponsors!

The second Fund-a-Translator Charity Ride, developed and organized by TextPartner in Poland, took place earlier this summer. Our dedicated cyclists organized a ride through five countries in eastern Europe for a total of 589 kilometers! Each kilometer was available to sponsors for $5. The purpose of the annual ride is to raise funds and awareness for our trainees in Kenya. Each $1,000 raised helps us train a translator for a year.

This year the event was so successful that the team raised the $2,945 for the ride and then kept going beyond $3,000, ending up with a total of 652 sponsored kilometers ($3,260). As promised, they rode the additional kilometers in an extra ride to make sure every sponsored kilometer was cycled.

The TextPartner team conceived of the charity ride in 2012 and did their first ride that year to the ELIA conference in Budapest. Plans are underway for the 2014 ride and the route will be announced soon!

By Simon Andriesen, Board President of TWB Kenya and CEO of MediLingua

The fast-track path into Translators without Borders

Volunteer translators form the very core of Translators without Borders. They donate their time, efforts and expertise to help doctors, nurses and other volunteers working in humanitarian organizations to make the world a better place.

Since translations related to humanitarian emergencies leave no time for reviews or mistakes, there is a strict procedure in place to ensure that all members of our team are experienced and solid translators, able to do it right the first time. Applications from potential volunteers are reviewed and, if approved, a sample translation is requested and then evaluated by at least two editors before a new translator is welcomed onto the team.

There is a second way, called the fast track, opened back in early 2011 when Translators without Borders was contacted by the organization GoodPlanet with the request of translating their new website into as many languages as possible. Since at that time the pool of volunteers was concentrated in the pairs of English to and from French, a decision was made to contact members of ProZ.com’s Certified PRO Network.

With over 3,400 members, the ProZ.com Certified PRO Network is an initiative of the ProZ.com community to provide qualified translators and translation companies with an opportunity to network and collaborate in an environment consisting entirely of screened professionals.

To enter the Certified PRO Network, ProZ.com members must complete an online application and submit it for review to prove they meet or exceed minimum professional standards based on the EN15038 standard for quality in translation and in three screening areas: translation ability, business reliability and online citizenship.

Since the screening of translation ability is essentially the same in both programs (and in both cases done on a platform powered by ProZ.com), a fast track was created whereby any translator who is part of the ProZ.com Certified PRO Network is automatically accepted as a Translator without Borders without the need of any further testing.

The fast track proved very powerful, and currently some 40% of the professionals approved by Translators without Borders were accepted because of their ProZ.com Certified PRO Network status.

The experience led to the decision to extend this approach to other industry certifications that involve active testing of translation abilities. In particular, the fast track benefits are also available to all ATA-certified translators—an opportunity that we would like to advertise better. We are working on identifying similar certification programs and announcing those fast track opportunities to potential volunteers.

There is good room for growth here. Feedback and advice will be very welcome.

By Enrique Cavalitto from ProZ.com

Translators without Borders changing the world

Sometimes I get really discouraged about all the stuff that’s wrong with the human race… the arguing, the senseless violence, the control-freak posturing and the corruption in every direction. Why don’t people see how stupid all of that is? Why don’t they listen more, put themselves in the shoes of their fellow human beings, try to do better?

Well, the thing is, they do. For every act of senseless violence, there is an act of selfless love. You know, the mom who gets up to take care of her crying baby — not because she has to, but because she wants to. The man who stops to change a stranger’s tire. The couple who offers hospitality to a foreigner. Naturally, the larger and more public any of these acts get, the more likely it is that corruption will find them, too; that they will be done for show rather than for mercy. And perhaps it’s impossible to really and truly do anything selfless. As they say, virtue is its own reward, and that great feeling you get when you’ve done something good is a measurable emotional return on investment.

But I’ll take it. And this fills me with hope. I’ve been tracking an organization called Translators without Borders since before its inception — it was a French company before it became a US-based nonprofit. For a long time, it ran in the background, without any contributions other than the time of translators and project managers. Over the years, it donated about $1,000,000 worth of translations to nonprofits such as Doctors Without Borders, and then the Haiti crises happened. Because I’m the managing editor for the industry magazine, I got carbon copied on a whole lot of e-mails that suddenly surged between CEOs of translation service providers, translation tool vendors, web-based translation platforms. And it was like, overnight, almost, the thing blew up. The industry coordinated itself with zero outside donations; it set up a web-based platform where translators around the globe could log on and use what they were good at to help out. This seemed incredible to me. And the momentum continued; using the same (improved) web platform, translators can still log on and find life-changing texts to translate. It’s almost like a dating site for NGOs and translators.

But here’s the thing: this only works with languages for which there are established translators, and for which there is a mode of dissemination in place. You can make health posters, for example, in English or French, but what about the first languages of the diverse people groups of rural Africa or Southeast Asia? As it happens, they often have health materials available, but they’re typically not in minority languages. Given just how understaffed most of these regions are in terms of health care professionals, this means that people may have no way of knowing what to do when they get sick. And this means that up to 90% of childhood deaths in these regions are totally preventable.

Yeah, that’s right. 90%. The most common killer of children in certain regions of Africa is diarrhea. A high percentage of mothers in these areas think you’re actually supposed to withhold liquid when your child has diarrhea. And their babies die with everything they need to survive — water, sugar, salt — in the same room.

Once Translators without Borders figured this out, they started a translator training program in Kenya. And, in conjunction, they collaborated on what they call the 80 x 80 project: simplify the 80 most accessed medical articles into easy-to-understand English, and translate them into 80 languages. I hosted a session last Thursday at Localization World where Val Swisher of Content Rules described how her content-creation company has been re-crafting the articles, which are vetted by physicians and then uploaded onto Simple English Wikipedia. Already, translators are transferring these to crucial minority languages. But, of course, this would be pointless unless minority language speakers have some way of accessing the articles. And here’s another interesting thing: most of the developing world has access to mobile phones, so the 80 x 80 project has convinced mobile phone companies to allow individuals in the developing world to log on to Wikipedia free of charge via mobile.

Right now, Translators without Borders has one paid employee, and is funding translator training. Everything else has been done by volunteers. I’m one of them — and I’m not a translator. I’m an editor. So I edit their newsletter, which is something of a work in progress. And if you want to volunteer as well, you probably can — from wherever you are in the world.

By Katie Botkin, Translators without Borders volunteer

Five Success Strategies for Non-Profits Needing Translations

Volunteer translators dedicate only a part of their time to unpaid humanitarian activities, and this scarce resource is also demanded by other projects and organizations. This means that there may be translation requests that will not be fulfilled.

To improve the odds that your requests for help will be accepted, you should do your best to make the projects attractive to the volunteer translators. Some success strategies are presented in this article.

You need an appealing project

You are asking for a donation of someone’s skill and time, and you need to explain why it is needed. To do so, you should create a project name, summary and description that all explain why the translation will make a difference by helping mitigate damages or risks, by improving education, and so on. Whenever possible, include details such as the nature of the “event” behind the need (earthquakes, tsunamis, floods, civil war outbreaks), the location, the people that will benefit by the project’s deliverables, and so forth.

Provide a reasonable deadline

The choice of the right deadline is a critical factor for project acceptance by the volunteers. In general, more available time means a more likely acceptance. A week is reasonable for documents of up to 2,000 words, but longer times should be considered for larger files. If shorter deadlines are really needed it may be helpful to explain the reasons behind the urgency.

Format should be user-friendly

Format is paramount for a translator. Protected documents are not translatable. PDF files are not compatible with translation tools. PDF files can sometimes be extracted into other formats but this extraction is extra work, and most probably the page layout will be affected, sometimes severely. If you locate the editable document used to create the PDF, you will greatly improve the chances that your translation request will be accepted by volunteers. You will also improve the quality and delivery time of the translation.

Instructions should be complete

Clearly state your needs when you create the translation request. Remember to include all relevant information, such as local variant of the target language to be used, register, and educational level of the people who will use the translation. Most translators working into Iberian Portuguese will decline a text that is supposed to be translated into Brazilian Portuguese, so this information should be available from the start. Also consider adding reference material that could be useful to the translators. Glossaries, similar translated documents, common acronyms and the like will make the translators happier and will result in a better translation.

Build a relationship

Volunteer translators are generous individuals willing to donate their time and professional expertise for a humanitarian cause, and they should not be taken for granted. Remember to thank them. Be quick to answer their queries and to share any good feedback received about their translations. Whenever possible, acknowledge their work within your organization, on our Facebook page and in social media. In short, build a two-way relationship — the best success strategy in Translators without Borders as well as in life.

By Enrique Cavalitto from ProZ.com

TWB Translator Training Session in Nairobi, Kenya

Meet Translators without Borders trainees in Nairobi, Kenya.

When the trainees have finished this module, they will begin translating a healthcare application into Swahili that can then be accessed via cell phones.

Translating For Humanity

In response to the demand for pro bono translation services worldwide…

Founded 18 years ago in Paris by Lori Thicke (CEO of Lexcelera) and Ros Smith-Thomas (co-owner of Lexcelera), Traducteurs sans frontières was established as a charitable organization in France. The name Traducteurs sans frontières was selected because the organization’s first client was Médicins sans frontières/Doctors without Borders, the medical disaster-relief NGO (non-governmental organization) that later won the 1999 Nobel Peace Prize. In 2010, Lori Thicke founded Translators without Borders, a sister organization in the United States with non-profit 501©(3) status. Until fairly recently, Traducteurs sans frontières brokered pro bono translation services of approximately 1 million words per year to NGOs, representing about $250,000 of donated services per year. In 2011, however, with the foundation of Translators without Borders in the US, this number doubled, with 1 million words already translated as early as June; a 10-fold projected increase within the next few years was envisioned. (For the most up-to-date figures, see the counter displaying the number of translated words at theTWB Translation Center.)

For all languages

Translators without Borders is equipped to provide pro bono translation services in any language combination. For the first half of 2011, the highest demands were: French to English (34.6%), English to French (16.7%), English to Spanish (9.84%), English to Arabic (3.87%) and English to Russian (2.07%), with the balance (32.92%) consisting of another 40 language combinations, including English to Yoruba (0.33%), English to German (0.90%), English to Turkish (1.13%), English to Persian (1.13%)*.

Translators without Borders vets any NGO requesting its services. This means that all NGOs with which it works are verified in terms of their status as charitable and non-profit organizations. It also means that translators may rest assured that their pro bono services are received for legitimate non-profit causes. The requesting organizations are also vetted to ensure that they do not advocate extreme religious or political views. There are currently 53 NGOs registered with Translators without Borders, and the organization has the capacity to take on 100 more. (Browse the list of NGOs and their descriptions at the TWB Translation Center).

In the immediate aftermath of the 2010 earthquake that devastated Haiti, Translators without Borders partnered with ProZ.com, an online community of  professional translators and adopted their networking tools. Inundated with requests for translations in Haiti, where an international rescue effort was underway, Translators without Borders initially turned toProZ.com for more volunteer translators, and then to screen translators, because of the spectacular number of responses (800!) from the ProZ.com community of translators. Moving forward, this partnership, born in a crisis of catastrophic proportions, led to the development of the TWB Translation Center, an automated service and delivery platform, donated 100% by ProZ.com. It is this invisible technology quietly empowering Translators without Borders that explains the quantum leap in the number of pro bono translated words in response to an increased capacity to process NGO requests.

As Lori Thicke puts it:

“The idea is that with a huge pool of talented volunteers on one side, and an enormous demand from non-profits on the other, the only bottleneck is getting those two groups together. Our guiding principle has been that we don’t need to be in the middle of this process. All we need to do is set certain standards for both translators and charities then put the technology in place to help them work together.” (Lori’s blog, posted May 30, 2011)

At the end of the day

To become listed in the Translators without Borders database of translators, linguists are required to submit an application at the Translators without Borders website (click on Translators>How to volunteer). Only professional translators are finally admitted. Translators are then evaluated via the automated ProZ.com testing platform using a series of Translators without Borders tests that the translator selects in his or her area of specialization and language combinations. A committee of three Translators without Borders translators then evaluates the tests. Once accepted, the translator’s name is registered in the Translators without Borders database of translators, and the translator is supplied with a login ID and password to gain access to the NGO requests via the TWB Translation Center. Once a translation request is fulfilled, it is uploaded to the TWB Translation Center for delivery to the NGO and pick-up. The turnaround time for projects is slightly longer, because this is pro bono work and translators are not expected to spend their entire week on a project.

There are currently 640 approved translators in the Translators without Borders database, and many more have recently submitted test translations. (See the list with photos, and query the database by language combinations and fields of specialization at the TWB Translation Center.) During the month of June 2011 alone, 319 translators were active, translating a total of 186,926 words. Among the 319 active translators, the top 10 (most active) volunteer translators averaged 6186 words of donated translation services, with jobs ranging on average approximately 1000 to 1600 words. As Gail Desautels, Translators without Borders super-superstar with 25 jobs and 16771 words to her credit during the month of June 2011, puts it:

“…translating for TWB is the redemption in my day. Not only do I get to travel to countries around the world, but I can also say at the end of the day that I have done something very worthwhile.” (Gail Desautels, from a personal email communication, August 20, 2011)

Even if pro bono work hardly pays the rent, here is how the process completes for Corinne Durand, another Translators without Borders top contributor with 4 jobs and 6795 words to her credit for the month of June 2011:

“I had often wondered how to go about bringing my personal contribution to the relentless work of NGOs. TSB/TWB has provided me with a way to do it that fits perfectly both with my personal and professional life. Indeed, I feel very privileged to be allowed to make a little difference by doing something I love.” (Corinne Durand, from a personal email communication, August 21, 2011)

In many fields

The types of NGO translation requests span such domains as legal, medical, healthcare, epidemiology, educational, and agricultural, including the following kinds of requests: translation of eyewitness or awareness reports in conflict areas; documentation for a campaign against child labor; field reports on urban violence; NGO web pages (see, for example,Goodplanet.org); instructions manual for dealing with child trauma victims; manuals for childcare of orphans developed in collaboration with local professionals; requests for micro-funding, directions for coordinating international disaster-relief teams; medical training manuals; medical information for childbirth, childcare, and first aid instructions. Projects range from one page to several hundred, with the larger projects divided among several  volunteer translators so that no one is asked to translate more than 10 pages.

Translators without Borders clients i nclude Doctors without Borders, Action Against Hunger, Zafèn, Trickle up, Oxfam, QuakeSOS, Make-a-Wish, AIDES, Handicap International, Partners in Health, Fair Start Training, Medical Aid Films, and many more. During the month of June 2011, the most active organization was Zafèn (representing 28.57% of the TWB Translation Center activity), an organization that organizes micro-financing opportunities in Haiti.

The Translators without Borders motto is “Every dollar we save for an NGO is another dollar that can be spent caring for people in the field.” At a rate of 1 million words (valued at $250,000) each year for 17 years, and the capacity for a projected 10 million words per year, with the empowerment of ProZ.com technology, this is indeed “changing the world, one word at a time” and is truly an impressive feat on more counts than one.

To get involved

If you want to get involved… this is the place to start. Despite moving mountains, Translators without Borders barely covers 1% of the translation needs of NGOs. As Lori Thicke has pointed out, it is not only diseases that kill. The absence of information, or misinformation, is also a major killer—for example, when mothers believe they must withhold fluids in case of diarrhea,  when boiling milk becomes a cure for malaria, or when smoking is believed to be a cure for migraines and protection from stroke. The organization’s mission is to increase access to information through translation. As Lori puts it:

“The elephant in the access to information room is translation.” (Lori’sblog, posted May 16, 2011)

Stay tuned—because Translators without Borders has taken yet another step forward, securing funding to open, as early as February 2012, a Translation Training Center in Nairobi, in the Horn of Africa, that is designed to train healthcare translators. This center is envisioned as a pilot for future Translators without Borders training centers across the world “…wherever there is a devastating mix of extreme poverty, poor health and a non-existing translation infrastructure,” according to Simon Andriesen, Translators without Borders Board Member. This center is envisioned to fulfill some of the tremendous needs for translation in local languages: in Swahili, spoken by 5 to 10 million people as a first language and 100 million people as a second language, and in other local languages such as Maasai, Kikamba and Luo.

Similarly, stay tuned for more exponential ProZ.com community-building activity, linking professional service providers and the demand for services, since the pro bono TWB Translation Center has proved an extremely rigorous field test of ProZ.com technology and its amazing and beautiful capacity for vibrant empowerment.

Now, that’s worshipping Ganesh! **

*All statistics are courtesy of Enrique Cavalitto atProZ.com.

** Hindu deity—Remover of obstacles—represented as an elephant.

AT A GLANCE –  GUIDELINES FOR GETTING INVOLVED IN PRO-BONO TRANSLATION FOR HUMANITARIAN CAUSES

1. Translators without Borders (requires enrollment and registration to evaluate your credentials and capacities). This is the largest network of humanitarian translation opportunities and services. The non-profit status of the NGOs (non-government organizations) requesting translations, is verified, as well as their causes.

2. Work directly with an NGO or non-profit organization. In this case, verify the status of the requesting organization yourself with a non-profit watch organization such as Charity Navigator.

3. Regular translation agencies sometimes provide humanitarian translation services. In this case transparency is paramount and the best practice. Normally, if an agency accepts a pro bono translation project, it is the agency’s contribution and gift.

AT A GLANCE – HUMANITARIAN CAUSES IN 2011

Famine
Drought-stricken Horn of Africa—12.4 million people affected. (UN WFP)

Famine officially declared in Somalia, Ethiopia, Kenya, Djibouti and Uganda with catastrophic proportions in Mogadishu.

Water & sanitation
Even without drought 300 to 500 million people in Africa do not have access to sanitation and safe drinking water. (UN WFP)

Japan: March 2011 Earthquake and tsunami resulting in a nuclear crisis—500,000 people homeless, 20,000 perished.

Haiti: Cholera epidemic following the 2010 earthquake that claimed 250,000 lives and displaced more than 1 million people. (PIH)

HIV/AIDS
40 million people estimated living with HIV worldwide, with 95% in developing countries, two-thirds in sub-Saharan Africa. (PIH)

Tuberculosis
Curable lung disease killing 2 million people each year. (PIH)

Childbirth & labor
1000 women die from childbirth or the complications of labor each day: 300 in Asia and 570 in Sub-Saharan Africa. (WHO- UNICEF)

Childhood
22,000 children estimated to die each day from preventable diseases. (UNICEF)

Acknowledgements:

Many thanks for the information they have so kindly supplied for this article in a series of phone conversations: Lori Thicke (CEO Lexcelera), co-founder of TSF and TWB, located in France & Simon Andriesen (CEO of Medilingua) located in Holland, TWB Board Member in charge of Operations, and Enrique Cavalitto, ProZ.com Manager, located in Argentina, in charge of the ProZ.com ”white label” technology for the TWB Translation Center.

WEBSITES:

TWB

TSF

Translation Center

Lori Thicke Co-founder of TSF/TWB 