Climate
Disaster
Millions of people are displaced yearly due to climate disasters. A predicted 1.2 billion people will be displaced by climate disasters by 2050. Language barriers prevent frontline responders from adequately supporting climate disaster victims and refugees, rendering emergency response ineffective and hindering long-term resiliency efforts.
Respond Crisis Translation provides rapid-response translation support on the frontlines of climate disasters and environmental racism. We train, nurture, and build the capacity of translators and interpreters from regions most vulnerable to environmental catastrophe. We have created hundreds of translation and interpretation jobs for directly impacted community members
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Haiti earthquake
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Afghanistan earthquakes
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Bronx fires
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Turkey-Syria earthquake
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Indigenous climate refugees
Haiti earthquakes
THE CRISIS
Thousands of Haitians were seeking asylum at the border after the August 2021 earthquake that killed over 2,200 people and injured over 12,000. Some of the Haitians at the border had been in exile seeking refuge since the 2009 earthquake that killed 220,000. The U.S. government has subjected Haitians in crisis to mass expulsion, detention, and racist treatment.
OUR INTERVENTIONS
Our Haitian Kreyol Team, co-led by native Kreyol speakers and by a survivor of the 2009 earthquake, translated over 1,000 successful humanitarian parole applications for Haitians hoping to enter the United States following the 2021 earthquake in Haiti (many of whom were Haitians who fled the 2009 earthquakes). We interpreted for thousands of Haitians at the border, enabling them to receive humanitarian aid and emergency medical care.
The Haitian Kreyol Team also proofread and translated sections of a resource by the NYU Global Justice Clinic called Mining Free Haiti (English) or Ayiti Kanpe Min (Kreyòl). This investigation explores the history of metal mining in Haiti; human rights, environmental, and health dimensions of mining; and current grassroots resistance to mining.
Our Haitian Kreyol team has taken 1,276 asylum cases, provided 4,873 hours of oral interpreting, translated 2,481 pages, and delivered $513,405 worth of pro bono Haitian Kreyol language support.
Our team consists of 25 native Haitian Kreyol speakers in Haiti or in diaspora, all paid dignified wages for this work.
Afghanistan
earthquakes
THE CRISIS
Afghans have suffered under 40 years of conflict, natural disasters, poverty, food insecurity, COVID-19, and Taliban rule. Immediately after the collapse of Ashraf Ghani’s government in August 2021 forced over 1.6 million Afghans to flee the country, extreme climate events have worsened the crises plaguing the country. Two deadly earthquakes hit Afghanistan in 2022, each killing more than 1,000 people and exacerbating an already dire humanitarian emergency. More than 7,000 people in Afghanistan have been killed by earthquakes this decade. Flooding in 2022, both in Afghanistan and neighboring Pakistan, Afghanistan’s most important trade partner, in tandem with a harsh winter in 2022, pushed millions of Afghans into famine and starvation, leading to thousands of deaths.
OUR INTERVENTIONS
We mobilized overnight, growing our team from 9 to 40 Dari and Pashto translators. Our team has not stopped mobilizing to interpret for Afghans seeking humanitarian parole since the evacuation. Our Afghan Languages Team is led by an Afghan refugee activist and all team members are paid.
Bronx fires
THE CRISIS
In January 2022, a series of house fires resulted from structural negligence in a West African immigrant community in the Bronx, New York City, killing 17 people and injuring an additional 44. Nine out of ten NYC districts experiencing the most fires are predominantly Black/Latinx, reflecting both environmental racism and racism in urban planning.
OUR INTERVENTIONS
Our West African Local Languages Team mobilized Pulaar and Wolof interpreters to provide immediate support to survivors of the devastating fires.
Our interpreters enabled impacted neighborhood residents to access emergency medical care in the short term. In the long term, Team Lead Doudou Koné has grown our West African Local Languages Team to 29 trained translators representing 15 languages. All earn dignified wages and access training through our work.
Respond now has long-term partnerships with 46 organizations across NYC working in education, housing justice, asylum, healthcare, resettlement, policy/advocacy, domestic violence relief, legal defense, and climate research.
Turkey-Syria
earthquake
THE CRISIS
In February 2023, a magnitude-7.8 earthquake hit Turkey and Syria, killing more than 50 thousand people and leaving hundreds of thousands of others homeless, sheltering in tents and other temporary structures. Another magnitude-7.5 quake struck later that day.
Kurds, alongside Assyrians, Afghan and Syrian refugees, Armenians, and Circassians were the primary victims of this earthquake. Respond learned that critical humanitarian aid documents were intentionally not translated into Kirmancki nor Kurmanji, the dialects of Kurdish spoken by most Kurds in Southeastern Turkey.
Kurds, the fourth-largest ethnic group in West Asia, have faced long standing language rights violations. Turkey banned the use of Kurdish until 1996 and continues to impose strict limitations on its use. Turkey also has a history of anti-Kurdish discrimination in the wake of natural disasters and is responsible for developer-driven structural negligence, which led to thousands of preventable deaths during these earthquakes.
OUR INTERVENTIONS
Respond grew its Kurdish team from 4 to 11 active members representing four dialects (Sorani, Kurmanji, Kirmancki and Gorani-Hawrami) and hired a paid Kurdish team lead who is a directly-impacted community member. We translated our website intake form into four Kurdish dialects, allowing direct support access to Kurdish asylum seekers from several impacted regions.
On the first anniversary of the disaster, Respond published “One year since the quake: Linguicide and resilience of the Kurdish language.” This oral history project represented six months of community research by Raman Salah, Respond’s Kurdish Language Team Lead.
In this series, we feature the testimonies of a dozen Kurdish speakers in Kurdistan and diaspora. We uncover the difficulties of Kurdish language access during the 2023 earthquake and other disasters, alongside the history of anti-Kurdish practices and policies threatening the language and its speakers across Kurdistan.
In this series, we feature the testimonies of a dozen Kurdish speakers in Kurdistan and diaspora. We uncover the difficulties of Kurdish language access during the 2023 earthquake and other disasters, alongside the history of anti-Kurdish practices and policies threatening the language and its speakers across Kurdistan.
Indigenous
climate refugees
THE CRISIS
Storms and crop failures have driven already poor families further into poverty across Latin America. Droughts were a key driver of increases in family migration from Honduras and Guatemala to the United States in 2018 and 2019. An extreme heat event currently ripping through Mexico has been described as "hands down the worst in the country's history." People have been killed and wild birds have died en masse as temperatures approach 50C (122F).
OUR INTERVENTIONS
Alongside supporting asylum seekers at the U.S.-Mexico border in nearly 100 languages, including Indigenous languages and sign languages, Respond has worked to build the capacity of the communities at the frontlines of climate catastrophe. We have built out specialized legal asylum translation trainings for Indigenous language speakers who have been deported from the U.S. back to Guatemala and who are training to become interpreters.