Category: Uncategorized

Our interviewee for this issue is Donna Parrish, who is one of the key tenets at Translators without Borders. She has served tirelessly on the board, both as a member and currently as a Secretary, helping volunteers achieve their goals within TWB and spreading the word through her magazine, Multilingual.

 

If you were to write a brief wiki article about yourself, what facts and personal characteristics would you include?

I majored in mathematics at college; then I became a computer programmer, which I did for 25 years. Then I went to work for Multilingual, the magazine, and I really enjoyed it. I was mainly hired because of my programming background. They knew I would understand some of the technical difficulties, dealing with languages on computer networking. After a few years, the person who started the magazine wanted to get out of the business so I bought it from them. Now I am the owner of Multilingual. In 2003, I got involved in Localization World and I have been doing that ever since.

What is your role at TWB?

I was part of the forming organization in 2010 when we first incorporated Translators without Borders. I have been involved in TWB ever since. I am the Secretary of the board. I am also investigating how we can restructure TWB so as to take it to the next level; in other words, how we can cope with current demands. We are dealing with people who are all volunteers and everybody has very good intentions, but it is necessary for someone to be around and make sure things are done and that everyone has all of the tools and information they need… so that is my role.

How do you squeeze in time for your volunteer tasks?

Quite often in the morning before I go to work. I usually spend the first hour and sometimes two, in front of the computer with my morning coffee in my hand. As I am normally working in the Pacific time zone, a lot of the day has already gone past by the time I am online so parts of my tasks involve catching up with what has happened, but also that is a good time to do TWB things that I need to do. So it is a good way to begin the day before my regular job, before putting on “my other hat,” so to speak.

What do you consider are the challenges ahead for your role and for TWB?

I think we are addressing the challenges. The wonderful thing that is happening is that we have raised awareness throughout the world in terms of the needs for critical information to be expressed in local languages. This was something that non-profit organizations had not thought of, and they are thinking about it thanks to our efforts, and that is the reason why there is so much demand. So now we need to be able to cope with these new demands. There are many administrative and operational needs. For example, my organization deals with a lot of the technical background of TWB, such as hosting the website and sending e-mails.

To what extent do your professional and personal goals come together with your volunteer work?

It is just a perfect melting. The nice thing about being publisher at the magazine Multilingual is that we can also use the exposure that the magazine brings to spread the word about TWB. So that is another way this all comes together for me. I think a lot of people may have the impression that in order to volunteer for TWB you must be a translator, but there are many needs in the organization for people like me and with the growing number of non-profit organizations that need our help, there are more and more tasks to be done. Of course translation is the core, but there are a lot of other issues to be filled.

Target shooting

In paper: newspapers and magazines

On the web: current trends on the web

Open-air activity: jogging

With friends: dining together, going to a movie

Family gathering: Thanksgiving

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!