DANBURY, CT, USA – 8 September 2015 — Translators without Borders (TWB), the US-based charity that uses language to increase access to knowledge, has today announced organizational grant funding from The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. Recognizing the growth and success of Translators without Borders over the past five years, The Hewlett Foundation has agreed to fund the international non-profit charity to transition to a new level, so as to better achieve its mission to provide more information to more people in the right language.
With the two-year grant, TWB will create a more sustainable, better funded organization, and to further develop the organization’s strategic relationships with the non-profit community. The grant will help build out the operational leadership of the organization, adding an Executive Director and an External Affairs Manager. It will also fund two part-time posts focused on programs and delivery.
A very concrete goal of the grant’s statement of work is to make the funded posts self-sustaining and full time in the next 12-24 months.
“Building upon our rich origins as a volunteer community, we have operated as a start-up with just one TWB US employee for the past three years, sustained by the generosity of our many sponsors,” says Andrew Bredenkamp, Translators without Borders Board Chair. “Our sponsors will still be critical to helping us reach our mission and advocate for the importance of translation and language, but now we will have a more stable structure upon which to reach our vision of a world that knows no language barriers.”
This is TWB’s first grant from the Hewlett Foundation. The California-based foundation, which was launched in 1966, helps build measurably better lives by providing grants for charitable purposes related to global development and population, as well as education, the environment, performing arts, philanthropy and the San Francisco Bay Area.
In the four years since TWB was incorporated as a non-profit charity in the U.S., the organization has risen from near obscurity to the internationally recognized leader in local language humanitarian content. Its dynamic and supportive community of volunteers has been at the core of providing more people around the world with the information they need in their own language. Accomplishments include:
• Translating an average of 800,000 words per month for approved non-profit partners focused in crisis, health and education.
• Translating and/or simplifying more than 580 vetted medical Wikipedia articles into 53 languages.
• Partnering with the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), Humanity Road, and other organizations to provide a 24/7 rapid-response translation team to assist search-and-rescue efforts following the 2015 Nepali earthquake.
• Partnering with OCHA to provide linguistic support during the recent humanitarian crisis in Burundi.
• Training a team of community-based translators to provide eight days of 24/7 translation support during the 2015 Nigerian elections.
• Translating Ebola messages, posters, and visual/audio announcements from English into more than 30 languages, including key West African languages, and disseminating to aid workers on the ground.
• Building Words of Relief, the world’s first-ever global translation network designed for real-time support during crises (funded by the Humanitarian Innovation Fund and Microsoft).
• Focusing operations in the developing world with local staff in Kenya who directly understand the importance of information in the right language.
Public awareness of TWB has also grown, with recent coverage by Public Radio International’s The World, the Humanitarian Practice Network and Global South Development. To enhance advocacy of the issue of language and translation in the humanitarian sector, the organization also recently produced a video focused on the need for local language content in rural Kenya: https://youtu.be/nWFVmRGcUFE
How Can You Help TWB? You can support TWB in a number of ways:
By Donating. We are a small team and need funding to help keep TWB operating. Please consider even a small amount. To donate, please visit: Donate
If you are a trained translator, please consider joining our community. On our translation platform, we do ongoing translation work for our non-profit partners. We need more Nepali and Newari translators for that work. To sign up, please complete the Translator application form
You can also follow TWB on Twitter, @TranslatorsWB #TranslationMatters
