Khrystyna Demchenko, a member of our incredible Ukrainian and Russian languages, received the Workers' Educational Association (WEA) Academic Excellence Award for her translation work helping Ukrainian refugees. Khrystyna herself is a refugee of the war, having fled to the United Kingdom from Kyiv after …

On Saturday, November 25, a clip posted by BBC News showed a released Palestinian prisoner describing horrific abuses inside an Israeli prison. She said, in Arabic, that Israel held them in the cold without electricity, "sprayed us with pepper spray" and “left us to die." …

Over seventy thousand Nicaraguans have been forced into exile over the past 5 years. Their stories are stories of resilience and survival, but their journey is far from over. This year alone, 222 political prisoners subjected to torture and imprisonment had their passports revoked, making them stateless and in desperate need of asylum.

A message from Respond’s founder Ariel Koren: “On behalf of the Respond Crisis Translation team, I wanted to say a huge THANK YOU for your ongoing support of our work at Respond. I also wanted to take this opportunity to give you a brief update about our work over the past year, so much of which was made possible by the support of our generous donors and supporters…”

At Respond Crisis Translation we witness that language access is central to the struggle against violence everywhere.

Our team is working tirelessly to address language violence and language gaps that are fueling the ongoing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. One of many examples is the systemic mistranslation of common Arabic words that…

Arabic words are regularly mistranslated or misconstrued in English-language media to stereotype and demonize Palestinians, painting them as terrorists and contributing to racist narratives that pro-Palestinian activism is inherently violent or antisemitic.

Respond tells Context about how “insane” machine translation errors are jeopardizing U.S. asylum claims. Names translated as months of the year, incorrect time frames and mixed-up pronouns – the everyday failings of AI-driven translation apps are causing havoc in the U.S. asylum system, with our human translators left to clean up the mess.

Respond Crisis Translation shared with The Guardian about how the U.S. government’s growing reliance on unsupervised machine translation to cut costs has jeopardized several asylum applications.

Respond Crisis Translation’s Valentina Callari Lewis writes that asylum seekers who speak Indigenous and marginalized languages are regularly deprived of their fundamental human right to quality translation services at the US border.

Over the past year, the Ukrainian team has translated medical documents for over fifty Ukrainian refugees with a wide range of conditions.  These refugees all fled Ukraine to different countries, including England, Scotland, Poland, Czechia, Germany, Sweden, and France, due to the full-scale invasion (war) in February 2022.

The Less Frequent and Marginalized Languages Team works in over 96 languages and includes 371 translators. And I would like to share the Amazing Work This Team Has Been Doing in June. Here are some updates and some projects we’ve been working on this past June.

I am happy to share with you some highlights of this year as we reached the half-way mark!
So far this year, we have completed the incredible amount of 425 projects. We have translated 101,182 words, most of which were in support of Human rights and Asylum cases. We have translated 615 pages, where asylum was also our main focus area.

Respond Crisis Translation Ukrainian and Russian teams have worked tirelessly around-the-clock since the start of the war on Russia in 2022. In this video, the head of our Ukrainian and Russian teams Tetyana Grygor'yeva shares her powerful experience leading this work

It all started with this simple email request. Elizabeth Carlson, a supervising senior attorney at Catholic Legal Immigration Network, Inc. (CLINIC) reached out to our French team seeking French – English interpretation for an asylum case in immigration court in the United States.  The client, who was from Africa, was seeking asylum based on his sexual orientation. 

Late one Friday afternoon in early March, one of our partner organizations, the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti (IJDH), contacted me with an urgent request: to translate and subtitle a video from their Haitian partner organization, the Bureau des Avocats Internationaux (BAI) discussing the fight for justice for victims of sexual violence…

Language violence against asylum seekers on the border is increasing.  All asylum seekers are now required to use the government’s new glitchy CBP One Mobile App in order to initiate the asylum process. It is only partially accessible in 5 poorly  translated languages. As our Haitian Creole Team Lead recounts in the article…

By Valentina Callari Lewis
In addition to responding to the post-earthquake emergency, our Turkish and Kurdish teams continue their everyday work providing language support for asylum seekers.

Machine translation is on the rise. For-profit government contractors and aid organizations are increasingly adopting these tools to cut costs. This not only costs translators their jobs, but is quite literally jeopardizing Afghans’ asylum cases. The error-riddled translations in Dari, Pashto, and countless other languages…

“Machine translations of Pashto and Dari, in particular, are riddled with errors that have introduced confusion into already complex immigration processes, and led to the rejected asylum claim of at least one Afghan refugee.”

Today on #ChineseLanguageDay 2023, 中文日, the Respond team recommits to the fight to dismantle systemic language violence and celebrates all of our dedicated Chinese translators and interpreters and our incredible team lead, Lirong Shi. Their work is tireless and essential.