Category: Uncategorized

Asian Absolute has been a valuable In-Kind sponsor for Translators without Borders (TWB) since 2011, offering technical support and expertise for the organization website. We spoke to Henry Clough, Managing Director of Asian Absolute who told us about his experience collaborating with TWB.

“In 2011 I became aware of TWB through its presence at the Association of Translation Companies conference. We had been discussing within Asian Absolute how we could give back to society in a meaningful way, and I was immediately drawn to TWB – both its impressive achievements with the obvious commitment of the people involved, and also its relevance to what we do at Asian Absolute.

After a couple of email exchanges with Lori Thicke (founder of TWB) it became apparent that there was a need within TWB which lay within Asian Absolute’s core expertise and I offered to put our web engineering team at the disposal of TWB.”

“We provide maintenance and updates for the website.  Primarily this involves adding press releases and other external communications to the site, as well as updating the details of NGOs, sponsors and volunteers, and there’s some creative work from time to time developing new pages and functionality. The TWB team is very easy to work with and Asian Absolute is given the opportunity to contribute ideas towards the development of the digital presence, most recently during the planning for the new website.”

Henry also talked a little about TWB’s new website: “The old site was built in Drupal and we’ve now migrated to WordPress.  Our engineers are comfortable with both systems so for us the switch is just an exercise in developing new processes to reflect the new structure of the site.”

Finally, he describes his experience with TWB as “Very positive – the individuals at Asian Absolute who perform the tasks for TWB enjoy having the opportunity to apply our skills to an endeavour which is making such a positive impact on the world, and our wider team is inspired by TWB’s mission. The people at TWB are great to work with, we are impressed by the professionalism and efficiency which we encounter, reassuring us that the time we put in is well spent.”

The professional support TWB receives from Asian Absolute enables the organization to run one of it’s core outreach activities.

More about Asian Absolute: https://asianabsolute.co.uk/translation/website-localization-services/

In March 2016, Eric Ragu became the first Translators without Borders (TWB) volunteer translator to reach the 500,000 translated words milestone. We caught up with Eric to hear about how he did it.
“It means a lot! It means hundreds of hours of hard work, research and sometimes struggle to get to the right words.” Eric explained, when asked about his incredible achievement. “Now, my next target is to go beyond the 1 million words limit. I hope that I will get more people engaged with TWB, because currently some people seem surprised when I explain them that I already translated 500,000 words for NGOs.”

In 2011, Eric completed an MA in Translation Sciences from the University of Heidelberg after graduating with a BA in Applied Foreign Languages in France. He now works as a freelance translator from English and German into French with his partner, Annika Rathjens, in their common translation bureau Я & R Language Services near Hamburg in Germany. His passions are newspaper cartoons and non-mainstream progressive and ecology-oriented newspapers. Eric wants to open an alternative newspaper kiosk and organize a free library service as well as debates and cultural events to share this passion with others.

“I found out about TWB in an ad on ProZ.com some years ago. At that time, I didn’t have much money but I wanted to get engaged and make a difference. I was fascinated by the idea and variety of topics covered by TWB so I decided to offer my expertise to organizations, big and small, that are striving to make this world a better place to live in.”

Eric feels proud to play a small part in fighting against diseases such as tuberculosis, malaria and leprosy, something his grandmother, a member of the French Association against Leprosy Foundation, Raoul Follereau, was also very passionate about. Translating for TWB has also been a learning experience for Eric: “I got more sensitized to problems happening in regions that don’t get much media attention, or that affect people whose voice you do not hear in mainstream news channels. When I try to explain to people what’s going on in Nord-Kivu or Haiti, they often ask me how do I know about it. Thanks to TWB, I got more interested in situations that are not widely reported in the news.”

“Some people seem disinterested when I tell them about what I do, but I am confident in what I am doing,” said Eric, with a final quote: “Gandhi once said: At the beginning, they ignore you, then they laugh at you and finally, they imitate you.”

Meena Bhandari, International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies

In response to winterizing messages:

“I just wanted to thank you sincerely for all of your hard work coordinating these translations. They look wonderful and have received a lovely response from people. I hope we can push them out fast enough to refugees so they really make an impact!” “This is GREAT!  Thanks for sharing.  Good to use for winterization programme for Athens, for Idomeni and the other islands as well.”

Translators without Borders will be at the following events in 2016:

Gala Annual Conference

When: March 20-23, 2016

What: Gala Annual Conference

Why: The Globalization and Localization Association (GALA) is the world’s leading trade association for the language industry. This year’s Gala theme is the Language of Business, the Business of Language.

Where: New York, NY, USA

 

World Humanitarian Summit

When: May 23-24, 2016

What: World Humanitarian Summit

Why:  An initiative by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, managed by UN OCHA, the first World Humanitarian Summit will bring together governments, humanitarian organizations, people affected by humanitarian crises, and new partners including the private sector to propose solutions to our most pressing challenges and set an agenda to keep humanitarian action fit for the future.

Where: Istanbul, Turkey

Localization World

When: June 8-10, 2016

What: Localization World (LocWorld) Conference

Why:  LocWorld is the leading conference for international business, translation, localization, and global website management. Attendees include the people responsible for communicating across the boundaries of language and culture in the global marketplace. With a specific emphasis on global business, the conference provides an opportunity for the exchange of high-value information in the language and translation services and technologies market.

Where: Dublin, Ireland

 

Flag Challenge Coastal Treasure Hunt

When: Saturday, June 11, 2016 at 10:00am

What: Flag Challenge Coastal Treasure Hunt

Why: Organized by KantanMT at LocWorld. Company teams will take on the challenge and raise funds for charity.To raise funds for Translators Without Borders.

Where: Howth, Dublin

Participation Fee: Company Teams €1000 per team (Four people on each team), €100 for Individuals – all money raised goes to Translators Without Borders.

 

Activity

Between 2011 and January 2016, Translators without Borders delivered over 30 million translated words to humanitarian organizations. In 2015 alone, our translators delivered more than 7 million words through the Translators without Borders Workspace powered by ProZ.com, which is an average of almost 600 thousand words per month

The graph below shows that in the past four years we’ve had a steady growth of the number of translated words we’ve delivered, averaging around 550 thousand words per month.

Translators

By December 2015, we had 3,130 translators volunteering for TWB, which represents a 15.6% increase during the same period in 2014. Without the commitment of each of these skilled translators, TWB could not deliver the quantity and quality of service to other organizations and to communities around the world.

Delivering this volume of work is not without its challenges. A known problem is the imbalance between volunteer translator availability and the demand for the different language pairs. This means that some translators have few opportunities while others receive more requests than they can commit to.

Our top five volunteers donated over 6% of our total translation output with a combined delivery of 1.8 million words! These volunteers are Eric Ragu (486k words), Ishaklamia (436k words), Ashutosh Mitra (334k words), Raquel Bentué (324k words) and Carine Toucand (258k words).

TWB continuously evaluates the quality of our output, not just the quantity of translations. In 2016 we will place a strong focus on measuring the impact of our work.  For example, translating a short disease prevention poster into many Indian languages might not contribute to a high word count, but it does significantly increase access to important information and makes a valuable difference to the lives of the target audience.

Language pairs

In the last 12 months, our translators accepted volunteer assignments in 139 language pairs. The top language pair was English to French, which represents 24% of translations, followed by English to Spanish (19%), French to English (15%), Spanish to English (5%) and English to Portuguese (5%). Overall, the top three pairs represented 58% percent of the words delivered.

TWB strives to deliver translations in many languages, including hard to source languages of Africa and India. The current demand is strongest for European languages. For example, with our top language pair English to French, demand tends to be higher than our resources can deliver.

Partner non-profits

A record 215 humanitarian organizations requested our services in the last 12 months. This represents a 34% increase since the end 2014. Top partners during that period were Médicos Sin Fronteras de España (764K words), Wikipedia (539K words), Enda Europe (217K words), Acción contra el Hambre de España (193K words) and Smile Train (186K words). The combined words delivered to the top 5 non-profits amounted to 26.7% of the total.    

Lali Foster, Communications Manager at Translators without Borders, responds to the European Refugee Crisis with an update from work on the ground in Lesvos, Greece.

‘Today, a seasoned humanitarian worker told me he had never understood how important language was in humanitarian crises until he started working on the European refugee response. Why? Because refugees travelling through Europe need clear information they can understand at every point in their journey. They need it to move, to work their way through complex asylum procedures and keep safe, healthy and warm. With very few Arabic and Farsi speakers (let alone Urdu, Pashto, Dari) on the ground in Greece and up through the Balkan route, TWB’s remote translation support has never been so urgently needed.

As you can imagine, Translators without Borders Rapid Response Teams have been extremely busy. We are guided by three priorities in managing our workload: 1. Addressing urgent humanitarian messaging widely across the affected population. 2. Expanding the geographical reach of our work to each stage of the refugee journey, 3. Adapting quickly to the ever-changing needs of this crisis. To date, our team of 100 professional translators acting as rapid responders has produced 5,000 words of key health information (including winter and protection info) and 5,000 words of longer-term and asylum information, which has been disseminated through key partners where it is needed the most.
Our teams have been working all day, every day to produce an enormous variety of messages that include over 100,000 words of rapidly changing information translated into Arabic, Dari, Farsi, French, Greek, Kurdish, Pashto, and Urdu. These include, but are not limited to, signage, health advice, guidelines for volunteers and staff, audio messaging, maps, ATM use instructions, scripts for radio, vocabulary lists for volunteers working at shore sites, web content, travel advice, newspaper articles, and legislation. With such critical information, the trust our humanitarian partners put in our speed and accuracy is enormous. I’m really proud to be working with such professional teams because so many humanitarians here now depend on our work to do theirs.’

Introducing additions to the Translators without Borders team

TWB recently appointed two new senior staff positions, Executive Director and Director of External Affairs, making this an exciting and important year for realizing the growth potential of the organization.

Over the past four years, TWB has become stronger and stronger, developed partnerships and continues to steadily expand, and elevating the message that communications in the right language is vital for humanitarian development. Today, more than 3,200 professional translators support the organization, offering their skills pro bono, to spread knowledge worldwide. In early February, TWB reached a major milestone of 30 million words translated for over 500 humanitarian organizations using its web-based Translators without Borders Workspace (check out the map below showing some of the work that kept us busy in 2015). To build on this work and to reach new heights, TWB now has two more staff members to make this happen.

New Executive Director Aimee Ansari said, “I’m very excited to be leading such an innovative organization with so much potential.  There is an ever present need to provide lifesaving information to people in languages they can understand. But seemingly less urgent needs sometimes go unnoticed, such as the need for mothers to understand baby formula instructions or a HIV patient’s need to understand their doctors instructions on how to take their medicine correctly. Translators without Borders will continue to respond to both emergency and longer term needs associated with language and communication barriers.”

“Our volunteer base is the foundation of the organization; we couldn’t provide the services we do, without them.  I look forward to leveraging their valuable work to help the organization grow and to have even greater impact.  Our workspace, donated by ProZ.com, is one example of how I hope TWB can use technology to help people in crises to live with dignity,” said Amy Rose Mc Govern, new Director of External Affairs.

Translators without Borders welcomes our new staff

Aimee Ansari, Executive Director

Aimee brings 20 years of experience in leadership positions in large humanitarian and development organizations.  She has worked in several humanitarian crises from the Tajik civil war to the earthquake in Haiti, the conflicts in the Balkans to the Syrian refugee crisis and the conflict in South Sudan.  Her passion is listening to people and helping them create a future for themselves that allows them to thrive.  She believes in developing and implementing strategies that apply creative approaches to seemingly intractable problems.  Aimee speaks English and French and is conversant in Russian and Arabic.

Amy Rose Mc Govern, Director of External Affairs

Amy Rose has a background in international relations and joins Translators without Borders with over ten years experience in program management and communications in the international development cooperation sector. She has worked with NGOs, governments and institutional donors in Africa, Asia and Europe. Amy Rose is a qualified translator and interpreter (French and Spanish) and holds a degree in International Relations.