Earlier this month, on March 21, Representatives U.S. Representatives Raúl M. Grijalva (D-Ariz.), Jesús “Chuy” García (D-Ill.), and Joaquin Castro (D-Texas), and 27 other House representatives called on the Department of Homeland Security to address serious concerns regarding the CBP One app, the primary mechanism used by U.S. Customs and Border Protection in managing asylum interview requests.

By Leila Lorenzo, Laura Wagner, Ariel Koren, Juan Camilo Mendez

Since its launch in October 2020, U.S. Customs and Border Protection has required asylum seekers at the southern border to use the agency’s CBP One mobile app to schedule their appointments to enter the country.

Respond Crisis Translation’s Co-founder and Director of Operations Meg Sears recently appeared on a panel hosted by Comma Press at Manchester in Translation on decolonizing translation, alongside UCL Professor of Translation Studies Kathryn Bachelor, writer, editor, researcher and translator Dr Kavita Bhanot.

What does it mean to decolonise translation? What steps can a translator take to decolonise a text? Can translation itself be considered a colonizing practice?

Rudaw, a major publication in Iraqi Kurdistan, featured Respond Crisis Translation’s Kurdish storytelling project, “One year since the quake: Linguicide and resilience of the Kurdish language.”

Even though the media extensively covered the Turkey-Syria earthquake that killed more than 59,000 people exactly one year ago, until now, no one has investigated how anti-Kurdish language violence specifically contributed to the disaster.

Respond Crisis Translation’s Arabic Team worked tirelessly in 2023, supporting hundreds of individuals seeking asylum and refuge, partnering with organizations on dozens of projects, as well as raising awareness around key language justice issues, throughout 2023.

The team undertook a remarkable 156 projects over the past year. Out of these, 144 cases have been successfully completed, providing crucial support and assistance to those in need. Notably, 61 cases within this portfolio are asylum-related cases.

In 2023, Respond Crisis Translation’s Portuguese Team worked on 62 cases, translated over 56,000 words, and interpreted for 61 hours. This work mostly concerned the translation of legal immigration documents.

The team also participated in a fascinating project with our partner Ashoka!

Respond Crisis Translation’s Haitian Creole (Krèyol) Team completed hundreds of projects in 2023 – of these, 60 were asylum and/or immigration cases. We also helped mental health professionals provide psychosocial support, worked on several projects related to climate change and environmental justice, and helped recent immigrants access social services and obtain work permits.

2023 has been a particularly difficult year, witnessing many upheavals and crises around the world, and the French Team, as always, has contributed to making the world a better place.

It was also a year of growth for the French Team, ending with a total of 106 linguists based in 30 countries around the world, all working to minimize linguistic inequalities and inequities.

The Less Frequent & Marginalized Languages (LFM) Team made huge strides in 2023 to uphold Respond Crisis Translation’s values in our fight against language injustices around the world, particularly for speakers of marginalized and Indigenous languages! The LFM Team is a truly global collective of language activists, with members across 86 countries representing over 100 languages!

Every project has a story, and most of the lives that we try to improve by providing language support are a true example of survival, resilience, and courage.

Respond Crisis Translation’s Spanish Team worked on a huge variety of projects in 2023 that advances the mission of language justice and language access worldwide.

The Afghan Languages Team accomplished remarkable feats in 2023.

We take pride in successfully concluding 951 projects, offering our assistance to nearly ten thousand individuals. Around the clock, we collaborated to provide language support across diverse areas such as immigration and asylum, legal matters, asylum clinics, education, mental health, medical services, political events involving high delegations, domestic violence, and climate change.

February 24, 2024, marked two years since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Respond Crisis Translation’s Ukrainian and Russian (UA RU) Languages Team has been working around the clock since the invasion to support Ukrainian people fighting for their lives and freedom.

A Respond Crisis Translation client who was politically persecuted in Venezuela was just granted asylum, alongside his family, after a year-long case!

Respond’s founder and executive director Ariel Koren joined KJZZ, the National Public Radio member station in Phoenix, Arizona, to talk about a new rule requiring asylum seekers to bring their own interpreters during USCIS interviews

February 6 marks the one-year anniversary of the Turkey-Syria earthquake that killed more than 59,000 people, one of the region’s largest natural disasters in history.

The earthquake disproportionately devastated Kurdish areas; meanwhile, disaster response was discriminatory toward ethnic minorities, especially Kurds.

By Raman Salah

One effect of linguicide – the calculated destruction of a language – is that during times of disaster and emergency, government response and relief measures like critical information and outreach are not accessible in a language that many of the people most affected by the crisis can understand.

By Leila Lorenzo, Raman Salah

The Kurdish language is the 40th most spoken language among the world’s 7,000 languages.

Kurdish speakers are dispersed across borders, leading to diverse linguistic environments shaped by different state policies. There are an estimated 35 million Kurdish speakers representing linguistic minorities spread across five different countries …

By Raman Salah

Kurdish language is part and parcel of Kurdish identity, for many of the people with whom Respond spoke.

“As we say in Kurdish… our language is our identity.” – Gordyaen Jermayi (emphasis added)

By Raman Salah

“This language is my language. As someone whose language has been restricted, banned, prohibited, and many people went to jail and got punished for speaking or writing in, for publishing in it – yeah, definitely, I feel a personal connection to the concept of language violence.” – Berivan*, Sorani speaker in Bashur

By Raman Salah

While language violence occurs in many contexts, from disaster relief and humanitarian aid to legal, medical, and psychological support, one of the most insidious and intergenerationally significant sites of institutional language violence is the school system.