A lot has happened since my last report on the Translators without Borders Health Translation Center in Nairobi, Kenya. The center is doing very well. We have moved into the main building on the BTL campus, which has been our home since July 2012. Our team of Swahili health translators and editors now have around 120 square meters (1300 sq. feet) of office space, which allows for further growth.\u00a0 We have also introduced translation memory technology, and we have installed high-speed internet. These are three very important factors for the further development of the center.<\/p>\n
MemoQ Training<\/b><\/p>\n
A very important event in the development of the center was the memoQ training week in mid-January. Marek Pawelec, who is one of the biggest memoQ experts and a gifted trainer, came over from Poland and spent a full week with the team, and since then all work is only done using this tool. The translators had never before used this type of technology and they just love using it!<\/p>\n
When asked about his perspective, Marek made the following comments:
\n\u201cThe Nairobi team impressed me with their willingness to learn, attention to detail and the number of languages they know – some of them speak six or seven languages. Each task was performed meticulously and they treated translation very seriously, often disputing the best way to translate any particular sentence or phrase. And given the fact that mastering a computer aided translation tool requires assimilating a lot of completely new and complex concepts, the speed with which they learned was impressive. Some of the more complex tasks required repetitions, but others were clear just after first explanation. And I really liked their enthusiasm – as practicing translators they very quickly understood the benefits of using a CAT tool for their work and I was under the impression that they instantly loved the term base feature. \u201d<\/p>\n
At the end of the training week our translation center manager Paul Warambo and our driver Elijah Wambua took Marek to the Nairobi National Park to show him lions, elephants, and giraffes \u2013 animals that do not roam wild in Poland, or anywhere else in Europe.<\/p>\n
After the training week, Marek has been back virtually, providing further training during several Skype sessions.\u00a0 On behalf of the team, and of all of us at TWB, I would like to take this opportunity and the platform of this newsletter to again thank Marek!<\/p>\n
Uchaguzi<\/b><\/p>\n
The most exciting recent project was the Uchaguzi<\/b> project, where our team was involved in a historic moment in the history of Kenya: the 2013 presidential elections. In 2008 over 1,000 citizens were killed during post-election violence. In order to make the 2013 elections more transparent and less violent a web-based platform was set up by the social entreprise Ushahidi<\/b> (which is the Swahili word for \u2018testimony\u2019). They built a web-based platform to easily crowd-source information using different channels, including SMS, email, Twitter and the web. One activity is called Uchaguzi, which means \u2018election\u2019 in Swahili. Uchaguzi facilitates unprecedented collaboration between citizens, election observers, humanitarian response agencies, civil society, community-based organizations, law enforcement agencies, and digital humanitarians to monitor elections in near-real time. All Kenyan citizens were invited to report whatever they wanted to report about, for example when there was violence in their neighbourhood.<\/p>\n
Although Uchaguzi had quite a few volunteers to translate messages from a variety of Kenyan languages into English, they decided that our trained team of translators should take the lead in this project and they worked in 6-hour shifts around the clock for 8 days at a stretch. They translated many thousands of messages into English, which were then evaluated in the Uchaguzi Situation Room. Our translators were very committed and worked hard – when it was busy they ignored the fact that their shift had ended and just carried on, even during the night.\u00a0 They were excited about being involved in this project and in making a valuable and very relevant contribution during this historic moment in their country. I was in the translation center the 2 weeks before the project started, and was happy to have been able to help prepare and organize it. I could really feel the excitement for this project, but also the anxiety and concerns about what might happen. The project went very well. Uchaguzi played a role in increasing transparency and, as a result, reduced violence. The team deserves a very big compliment for their commitment and dedication to this very special project! And for any Kenyans in the diaspora who read this and who feel they should support our efforts, they should visit our website, click on the Donate button, and be generous\u2026<\/p>\n
The HEAT Project<\/b><\/p>\n
The team is currently working on a project called Health Education And Training (HEAT)<\/b>, a volume of half a million words of training materials for community health workers. This material was originally written by the Open University (in the UK) for the government of Ethiopia, where it is already being used.\u00a0 The process is as follows: first the texts are edited by volunteers from Content Rules, the editing company of Val Swisher, one of the members of the Board of Directors of TWB. The editors take out any references that are specific to Ethiopia and make it more general. They also simplify the text. The end result is then translated by TWB\u2019s health translators at our Nairobi translation center. All work is carefully checked and edited, both linguistically and medically. This project is partly subsidized by a grant from the Open University.<\/p>\n
100 x 100 Wikipedia Project<\/b><\/p>\n
Another exciting project the team is involved in is the 100 x 100 Wikipedia Project<\/b>, which involves the translation into 100+ languages of the 100+ most widely read Wikipedia articles on health issues. The project is well under way \u2013 dozens of articles have been translated into a still growing number of languages. All Swahili work is done by our translators. This part of the 100 x 100 Wikipedia Project is funded by The Indigo Trust.<\/p>\n
Other languages
\n<\/b>Of course, Africa is much larger than Kenya, and Swahili is an important language, spoken by 60-100 million people in East Africa, but no less than 2,000 other languages are also spoken in Africa. It is TWB\u2019s mission to create translation capacity by providing training to translators who live in areas with the sorry combination of poverty, poor public health, health information in the wrong language and an underdeveloped translation infrastructure. Our training program, which by now has proven to be successful, is suitable to be used for other languages.\u00a0 Translation techniques are not language-specific, basic medical know-how is also similar across all languages. Of course, any language-specific parts are crucial, and these have to be given by an expert of the language(s) concerned.<\/p>\n
During a recent conference in Tanzania, where I was invited to talk about translation as a vital factor in improving public health, I learned that for example in Uganda we could be quite effective. Four major languages are used in this country and a training session for some people with strong language skills for each of these languages would create translation capacity (or expand the existing translators\u2019 base) and they could then be involved in doing the work that has to be done. In Uganda a lot of health information is available, but mainly in English. It would greatly help the local Village Health Teams (VHTs) to be much more effective if translated information would be available. A relatively small investment in the cost of translation would have a huge return because it will reduce the effort by health workers who can then dedicate more of their time to what they are trained to do: providing health care. It is a bit early, but who knows: Next Stop Kampala?<\/p>\n
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