MEDIA

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT: Respond Crisis Translation’s unmasking of the dangers and ills of unsupervised reliance on AI and machine translation tools in the U.S. asylum and immigration context was featured in Futurism’s The Byte and on The World from PRX’s Things That Go Boom podcast.

While working tirelessly around the clock to provide life-saving translation and interpretation on the front lines of crises across the globe, Respond has also driven coverage on issues of language justice throughout 2023.

Bloomberg Businessweek describes how Respond has become a primary lifeline for many migrants and advocates at the U.S.-Mexico border, especially as private companies contracted by the U.S. government fail to provide adequate translators and interpreters.

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." …

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.

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…

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.”

An article in Mother Jones covers Respond’s work defending a client who was denied access to an interpreter even in spite of requesting translation support over ten times while critically ill in detention.

Journalist Yula Rocha has written about Respond Crisis Translation in the Stanford Social Innovation Review. She interviewed Respond´s Ariel Koren and Fernanda de Oliveira as well as Respond partners Aida Farahani, attorney at RAICES, and Leticia Morales, Founder of Texas Nicaraguan Community.