Respond Crisis Translation has been doing a little bit of restructuring, and part of that has been moving many of our smaller East and Southeast Asian language teams from to a new East Asian languages team, which combines those languages with our Chinese languages team. This will hopefully allow for even more care and attention to each of our language teams, and we are so excited to get to work with everyone!
Team Leads:
Anna is one of the leaders of the new East Asian Language Team alongside Lillian! Previously she was one of the project managers for the Chinese team, and have been helping with general outreach and recruitment for Respond for the past year (ish). Anna is a native English speaker and also grew up speaking Spanish, she started studying Mandarin when she was in high school. She went on to study Chinese, Linguistics, and French in university, and recently graduated and is now moving from Texas, USA to Paris, France to work!
Lillian first joined the Respond team as a Chinese translator and now leads the Chinese team. She is a PhD student in Sociology and Social Policy at Princeton University. She studies how immigrant experiences intersect with the housing crisis in the United States and, subsequently, shape markets, neighborhoods, and cities. Originally from Hong Kong, she is now based in New York City, where she reads, climbs, or plants in her free time.
Statistics!
Since the start of 2024, the East Asian Languages team has done A TON of amazing work! We wanted to highlight some of that work here!
Currently our team is made of 17 languages with 124 linguists!
Mandarin- 45 linguists / Burmese- 11 linguists / Cantonese- 11 linguists / Korean- 10 linguists / Vietnamese- 10 linguists / Tagalog- 9 linguists / Rohingya- 7 linguists / Indonesian- 6 linguists / Japanese- 5 linguists / Thai- 3 linguists / Hmong- 1 linguist / Karen- 1 linguist / Khmer- 1 linguist / Lao- 1 linguist / Mongolian- 1 linguist / Pangasinan- 1 linguist / Tibetan- 1 linguist
The main themes we have worked on this year are Immigration (a theme in 36% of our cases), Language Accessibility (a theme in 29% of cases), and Asylum (a theme in 20% of our cases). We have also worked on many cases involving Mental Health Support, Disability Rights, Social Services, and Refugee Support. Amazing job team!
Look at our blog posts
Many of our amazing team members add blog posts to our website, and I wanted to highlight a couple of interesting and insightful reads!
Interested in getting even more involved?
Once again, we are a mostly volunteer organization so we are so grateful for each and every one of the team for helping us support our mission of creating a more equitable world! Right now we have fluctuating workloads for each group, so if you are interested in volunteering more time and getting more involved with Respond, there are a few ways you can do that!
Proofreader: We love having an extra pair of eyes on all of our translations to ensure the utmost quality and care for all of our work. If you would be interested in volunteering a little bit of extra time to proofread documents before they are sent to our partners, send me an email!
Project Manager: Right now Lillian and I are tasked with sending out all requests in all East and Southeast Asian languages, recruiting new translators and interpreters, and screening new translators and interpreters. We would love to have more language specific project managers, who can oversee their specific language team and help with screening and recruiting more translators and interpreters!
Recommend Us New Partners! We are always looking for new community partners who we can offer our services to! If you know of any organization anywhere in the world that is working to support refugees, migrants, domestic and/or sexual violence survivors, or any other marginalized group that could benefit from langauge support services, send me an email and we’ll get in contact with them!
Thank you so much and have a wonderful week!
Anna
