Ukraine, Afghanistan, Haiti, U.S.-MX border: Eliminating language barriers on the frontlines by creating jobs for crisis-impacted interpreters
Below is the transcript of a panel event hosted by Respond Crisis Translation and leads across our Ukrainian & Russian, Southwest Asian and North African, Haitian Creole, Spanish, and Indigenous & Marginalized Languages teams.
MEG SEARS, RESPOND CO-FOUNDER
Thank you all so much for being here with us today.
For the next hour, we’re going to dive into some of the crisis contexts in which our teams work – from the wars in Gaza, Sudan, and Ukraine; to political and humanitarian crisis in Haiti; earthquakes in Turkey, Syria and Morocco; to crackdowns on queer communities in Nicaragua, Senegal and Russia.
We’ll get to hear from the team leads of some of our busiest language teams leading on the frontlines of these crises. They’ll explain how the work they’re doing, and the people on their teams doing it, are often the linchpins across the contexts I’ve mentioned, making the difference between life and death for some of the most vulnerable people navigating and fleeing crises and conflicts worldwide.
Though we hear more about some of these contexts than others, in general, our public understanding often fails to capture the absolutely central role that language plays in both short and long term crisis response. Filing an application for asylum requires that all evidence (sometimes hundreds of pages) be translated into English, and navigating immigration and asylum court systems can take months if not years. After arriving in a new country, folks need language support to find housing, get medical and psychological care, get their kids enrolled in school and communicate with teachers, access job support programs and basic social services. Building a new life after being forced to flee takes years, and every step of the way language access support – having an empathetic, trauma-informed translator or interpreter by one’s side – is absolutely essential.
But the reality is that this essential language work, on which so much of crisis response, migration and resettlement systems depend, is systematically undervalued. The lack of prioritizing funding to pay language practitioners a just wage for their essential labor drives a systemic translation shortage. The absence of talent-to-career pipelines makes it almost impossible for many linguistic minorities to access professionalization opportunities and earn a living as interpreters, despite the fact that the demand for their work is overwhelmingly increasing. Governments and other institutions think they can rely on machine translation to process the ever-mounting refugee crises, but we’ve seen in our work time and time again that there is no substitute for compassionate human language practitioners.
This is the reality Respond intervenes in every day and works to change. So, in the second half of our panel, our leads will explain why job creation, just wages and building talent-to-career pipelines are so crucial to the sustainability of the work of their teams.
I’d like to introduce you to our team leads before we jump into hearing about their work:
Tanya Grygoryeva leads our Eastern European & Post-Soviet languages team, which represents more than 25 different language combinations, including Ukrainian and Russian. Tanya joined the Respond team just after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. She was forced to leave Ukraine months later. Over the last two years, she has built out a team of more than 830 linguists who have supported more than 1300 cases for Ukrainian, Belarusian, Russian and Georgian asylum seekers and refugees fleeing across Europe, Latin America and the U.S.
Tatiana García leads our Spanish team and co-leads our training program. The Spanish team is the busiest team at Respond, supporting more than 30 cases per week almost entirely pro bono. Tati’s Spanish team has translated over 7,500 cases in support of more than 130,000 Spanish-speaking asylum seekers and refugees from across South and Latin America.
Laura Wagner co-leads our Haitian Creole team, and she is standing in for our other lead Ralph Olivier Pierre, who could not be here today. Under their leadership, the team has supported over 1200 translation and interpretation cases supporting Haitians forced to flee Haiti, both before and after the assassination of Haiti’s authoritarian, US-backed president in 2021, which has only deepened the country’s political and humanitarian crisis.
Leila Lorenzo founded our Afghan languages team just before the collapse of the US-backed Afghan government to the Taliban in the summer of 2021. Since then, our Afghan languages team has supported more than 2200 asylum cases and legal support cases for more than 30,000 individuals. Now, Leila is our Policy Co-Director, and today will speak about the work of our Afghan Languages and Arabic Teams.
Valentina Callari Lewis leads our Indigenous and marginalized languages team, a vast network of language practitioners working in more than 160 languages. Val’s teams have both experienced themselves and provided support in crisis situations around the world that haven’t even made it into the headlines, or if they did, were mere blips on the worlds’ radar – like the ongoing violence and instability in the Tigray region of Ethiopia, instability in Mauritania, flooding in Bangladesh, the list goes on. Val’s teams have supported more than 2,500 cases for more than 441,000 people.
Could each of you please give us a broad overview of your team’s work and the contexts of crises to which you have responded. How do you see in your work that language access can literally be a matter life or death?
TANYA, EASTERN EUROPEAN & POST-SOVIET LANGUAGES
Thank you, Meg. Our team has been in crisis-response mode since Russia launched its Large Scale invasion of Ukraine two years ago, so I see every day how our language work makes the difference between life and death for thousands of people.
Back when the war started, my team sent Ada, a volunteer, to the Ukraine border to hand out leaflets with Respond’s information. These leaflets advertised that Respond was available and willing to help with language access needs for people fleeing the violence. At that point, there were thousands of people full of fear and despair on the border, some people waiting for three days to cross. They didn’t know where they were going, they didn’t have clothing or any basic necessities. It was crucial to provide language support at that particular moment, when they were most vulnerable.
Since then, we’ve had hundreds upon hundreds of cases showing the need for our intervention. Let me tell you some of the stories of refugees we have worked with:
A Ukrainian refugee is requesting interpretation for a visit to the hospital in Berlin, Germany as she is suspected to have breast cancer. She is scared, and she has no one who speaks her language who can help her and the doctor communicate with one another. In cases like this, an interpreter is a crucial link, who can help someone understand and navigate an immediate life-threatening situation. I reached out to my team to find someone qualified to interpret medical information between Ukrainian and German who could help her. Amazingly, one of our project managers, who is a refugee herself who fled to England, specializes in medical Russian, Ukrainian to English and German translations.
Another Ukrainian refugee who arrived in England already has stage 3 cancer. She has scheduled a visit to a medical center, and has a big file of medical documents that need to be translated for the doctor to look at it. She is also scared and her life depends on the translation of this file. I reached out to the team looking for medical translators who are able to read the doctor’s handwriting in Ukrainian and Russian, as these are different sets of skills. I also found a proofreader to proofread the documents from a medical perspective.
There are a few requests from individuals from Ukraine asking to translate documents for registration in Germany and Poland and employment documents. One refugee is looking for a house and we provide the interpreter for the meetings. After fleeing the war they need to find a new home and a new job, and the translation is crucial here.
Recently, my team did something a little different from our usual work in asylum, legal, and medical contexts. We translated the standards for the Cambridge exam book for the Ukrainian school Bazis for their Cambridge certification. This allows the school students to qualify to enter Cambridge based on the school exams. This project is prominent because it is for the Ukrainian children, affected by the war. They are the future of a rebuilt Ukraine and a new democratic world.
TATIANA, SPANISH AND TRAINING
I think everyone remembers the family separation policy under Trump during which children were separated from their parents and kept in cages in detention centers. There’s a public perception, due to the media, that this has improved under the Biden administration, when in fact it has gotten worse. That’s often the case in the Spanish team, we tend to think of Latin America as a monolith and if we don’t hear about it on the news everything must be going well, when in fact we still receive tons of cases every week. We have humanitarian crises in detention centers in the US, Guatemalan and Honduran LGBT crises, Nicaragua’s and Venezuela’s dictatorships, armed groups threatening populations in Colombia and Mexico… Thousands of people remain stuck at the border or in detention centers, waiting for months or even years to get someone to listen to their stories.
There are individual stories behind every asylum claim -
There was a Venezuelan family who was denied their food boxes because they protested the socialist regime.
We supported the case of a Colombian civil rights advocate who was threatened into leaving his country for defending and providing a shelter for gay kids who are kicked out of their homes.
We worked with a Guatemalan woman who had to flee her home because her husband escalated the abuse so much that she was scared for the lives of her children.
We are currently supporting 222 Nicaraguan opposition members who were tortured and imprisoned for years and then had their passport revoked by the dictatorship, left without a citizenship of their own, stateless, because they dared fight back against a totalitarian regime.
If we had not translated their evidence, all these individuals wouldn’t have received the support they needed to survive and found the resources to move on with their lives in a new country.
Then in the training team, we make sure that our translators and interpreters are sufficiently prepared for their tasks because we know how dangerous translation mistakes can be in these situations. I focus on interpreting training and I see how Policies like Biden’s “Bring your own interpreter” ruling do not require interpreters to have any prior training. The guidelines even suggest that you bring anyone you know who is fluent in your language and that they must “translate what you say word by word”. When dealing with difficult and delicate cases we have to think critically and be culturally aware. We will see more about this in the machine translation workshop, but just as an example, if I were to testify that my “cucho” died, for a Chilean interpreter this would mean my cat died, but for a Colombian interpreter it would be clear that it was my dad who died. This word can mean either, so you need a real interpreter to discern what is being said in this context. Mistakes like this can result in inaccurate testimonies and lead to removal of asylum seekers who are rightfully looking for protections.
LAURA, HAITIAN KREYOL
The Haitian Creole team supports Haitian asylum seekers at the border and beyond, as well as the organizations that serve them. If migrants and asylum-seekers are deprived the opportunity to tell their stories – thoroughly, in their native language – it can mean the difference between life and death. Respond's interpretation and translation work makes it possible for organizations like Haitian Bridge Alliance, Al Otro Lado, RAICES, and so many others to assist, protect, and advocate for Haitian migrants.
Haiti is in crisis: people are fleeing gang violence, displaced from their homes, being kidnapped and killed, unable to make a living or have ordinary lives because of the gang violence and instability that have overtaken the country. Based on those undeniable facts, you would think that Haitians had a compelling case for asylum. But U.S. asylum policy isn’t based solely on whether someone’s suffering is real. It’s based on whether that suffering is the result of – among other things – political persecution. And, legally speaking, a general climate of violence and insecurity is not enough to justify a claim of political asylum.
It’s also important to underscore that this so-called “gang violence” is in fact political violence. The gangs are not autonomous entities that exist in a vacuum, and they are not separate from the Haitian government (and the international community that selected and supports the Haitian government). News reports of Haitian “gangs” tend to focus on young men from poor backgrounds, carrying guns, wearing masks – not on the “gang ak kravat,” the gangs who wear ties – meaning the politicians and elites who fund nd arm these gangs. And while asylum law focuses on individual persecution (someone being personally targeted because they are part of a specific population, or because they have a certain belief), the very arbitrariness of the violence in Haiti is the point – the idea that anyone, regardless of who they are, could be a victim at any point, for no reason at all.
A story from Ralph: Even though I am from Haiti, interpreting other people’s experiences has given me a new perspective on the situation in the country. I often think of a client I interpreted for, whose family fled Haiti because a certain political party – and the gang they had paid and armed –were threatening his life. The gang killed the client’s neighbor, who had been trying to protect the client by denying that he was home. Killing the neighbor was a message to the client – “you’re next” – and it shows how anybody, even someone without any political affiliation, could become a victim of political violence. Eventually, this client and his family fled the city and eventually the country – they went to Chile – but gunmen employed by the political party found him even there. All of this shows how pervasive this violence is, and how important our work is – translating not only people’s words, but also the specific context of their experiences and struggles.
LEILA, SWANA LANGUAGES
In terms of the life and death nature of the work of our teams that span the Southwest Asian and North African regions – or SWANA – I want to begin by telling you about the response work that our Kurdish language team did in the aftermath of the 7.8 magnitude earthquakes that struck Turkey and Syria in February of 2023. It is little known that areas impacted were predominantly Kurdish-speaking, but despite this, emergency resources – for example, where to find shelter, food, how to charge phones, and how to get emergency healthcare for those injured – were translated into 7 languages except Kurdish. This language violence is occurring in a political context where Kurdish has been functionally banned in the four countries in which the Kurds reside – Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey – and where mass executions of Kurds have been routine throughout the last century. It is certain that the lack of language support after these earthquakes was a matter of life and death because the language and humanitarian aid deprivation is intentionally state inflicted. The people impacted by the 2023 earthquake, many of whom ONLY speak Kurdish, were left without any information about how to get support. Our Kurdish team plugged in to translate these key resources into Kurdish, which allowed hundreds of folks injured in the earthquakes to access the resources they needed.
Meanwhile, over the last 7 months, the war in Gaza has escalated to an almost unimaginable level of atrocity and humanitarian crisis, . There has been a full blockade on Gaza for 17 years, making it nearly impossible to leave the Gaza strip. Those who are able to leave are often rendered stateless. Thus, having skilled interpreters doesn’t just allow communication, it also provides crucial political, historical and cultural context which can make or break asylum cases.o Our Arabic team has been supporting Gazans and Palestinians in myriad ways.: Since October 7th, we’ve translated over 1 million words for Gaza, translated over 100 humanitarian parole and asylum applications, interpreted Know Your Rights workshops for folks facing political persecution, translated political education resources and translated for Gaza journalists reporting on the siege. We are continuing to work with 7 US-based legal aid organizations to translate supporting evidence for humanitarian parole applications into English, and to interpret between attorneys and Gazan asylum seekers.
We’ve also heard from partners on the ground that the biggest need for Gazans who have made it to Egypt (which is where ALL Palestinians who manage to leave Gaza arrive) is for interpreters to support in hospitals, facilitating communication between foreign (non-Arabic speaking) volunteers and Gazans in need of medical care. In June, contingent on funding, our Arabic team lead and operations director will travel to Cairo to coordinate an in person interpretation network to support. They will recruit translators, lead live trainings in medical interpreting and trauma-informed language practice for talented, multilingual Gazan and Palestinian interpreters based in Egypt, and pay these interpreters for their work.
Finally, as for our Afghan languages teams, since the Taliban takeover of the Afghan government in 2021, our Afghan languages team has been working to support tens of thousands of Afghans seeking asylum in the U.S. Last year, Respond’s life saving language access was centered in an article titled “AI translation is jeopardizing Afghan asylum claims” in an outlet called Rest of World. This article explains how governments and refugee aid organizations are increasingly relying on machine translation to cut costs. This is not only costing translators their jobs, but endangering countless asylum cases. Respond’s Afghan Languages Team has been able to intervene in life saving ways here, for example, asylum claim was rejected due to the machine switching all “I” pronouns to “we.” It’s likely the translator used the machine translation available for the Persian of Iran, known as Farsi, not the Persian of Afghanistan, known as Dari – currently there is no machine translation for Afghanistan’s major languages, Dari or Pashto. This is one of countless examples of Respond’s community-centered approach counteracting a life or death situation because the rejection of this case could have sent the female client back to Taliban-ruled Afghanistan.
It is also well documented by numerous watchdog organizations that USCIS has failed to process Afghan humanitarian parole applications in a reasonable timeframe. For example, from January 1, 2020 to April 6, 2022, USCIS received about 45,000 applications from Afghans – and only approved 114 applications, or less than 0.3% of all applications. This bottleneck has de facto rendered this pathway for Afghan refugees closed, making it vital that the cases that are successfully undergoing adjudication do not face additional language access barriers and do not further endanger Afghan refugees and asylees. Thank you.
VAL, INDIGENOUS & MARGINALIZED LANGUAGES
Every team at Respond does work that demonstrates how critical language access and justice are, as you can see from the answers before me. But I think the Less Frequent and Marginalized Languages Team has a special insight into the role language practitioners play for people who are dealing with the consequences of different political and social crises across the world.
On a daily basis, I am generally working to pair interpreters and translators with someone who is in a crisis situation and speaks a rare, marginalized, Indigenous, or otherwise less frequently requested language. Violence across the world against linguistic minorities and speakers of Indigenous languages means that often the people who are the most victimized or need the most help also have the hardest time accessing it in their language. I actually wrote about this unique double bind in a Teen Vogue op ed last year.
I’ll just give a few examples of the kinds of cases my team has intervened in.
I work daily with Indigenous language speakers from Guatemala who are fleeing their country due to gang violence. Last year, for example, we provided Kaqchikel interpretation for a child and his parents. The child fled Guatemala after witnessing a violent event before going to school. The child made his way to the U.S. on his own, without speaking English. He was taken in by a shelter, and had a hearing so that he could be emancipated from his parents and remain in the US, where he would continue his education. We were able to provide a qualified Kaqchikel interpreter who provided interpretation for the parents.
I also work daily on cases of violence and persecution, either due to political reasons or sexual identity. For example, some of our asylum clients come from Ghana, where LGBTQ+ communities are criminalized, and speak Hausa, a Chadic language spoken in the northern parts of Nigeria, Ghana, Cameroon, Benin and Togo. So we have interpreters in Hausa working closely with the clients and the attorneys on their legal preparation in advance of their asylum hearing. Recently we actually won one of these cases.
We have recently supported many detainees who are speakers of Garre, a Somali language spoken in southern Somalia, Ethiopia and northern Kenya. Finding Garre interpreters is extremely difficult, but we did eventually build a small Garre team able to support these cases. Thanks to the skills of our interpreter, one of these clients was recently released from detention and now is able to continue their immigration process outside of a detention center.
We also help speakers of Bissa, a language spoken in Burkina Faso, northeastern Ghana and the northernmost tip of Togo, who are attending therapy. These patients are torture and armed conflict survivors.
In each of these cases, having an interpreter or translator in these marginalized languages not only makes our clients’ experiences in these medical, legal, immigration, and other systems better. Having language access that we provide actually gives them the ability to go through the processes and structures in the first place.
MEG
Thank you all so much for making it clear how high stakes the work of your teams is. I’d now like to talk about our vision at Respond as a workforce of trained and trauma-informed human language practitioners getting paid dignified wages and afforded professional development, and how we are actively building toward that vision on your teams.
Can you tell us a story about a member of your team for whom getting paid for this work or having this workforce development opportunity is important? This could also be about yourself.
Can you also provide some context about the specific circumstances that make it difficult for people on your language team to access professionalization opportunities or paid translation work, and how Respond helps fill in that gap?
TANYA
I’ll speak a bit about how Respond has given me and other refugees or war opportunities to translate our skills and experiences into meaningful impact for others who are similarly affected.
I joined Respond being a translator in Kyiv after the full scale Russian invasion started. I was emotionally destroyed at that time and felt helpless and in despair. When I found Respond, I was relieved because I felt I could do something to be active and help my people to survive.
I remember what it felt like back in Kyiv in December 2023 before I fled to Mexico, where I now live. I woke up in the middle of the night sleeping on a yoga mat in the corridor on the floor. There was an air alert and I needed to stay between the two walls – the new missiles arrive too fast, sometimes in seconds, giving no time to run to the shelter. There is no electricity, it's cold in the apartment as Russia is destroying energy infrastructure. The heaters and water pumps are also connected to electricity, so we have no running water. I go by foot to get drinking water. I live on the 9th floor and the elevators are not working.
Finally the electricity comes back and my Internet is working again, and I’m able to open my emails and check the latest translation and interpretation requests for Respond. This work kept me going.
Many members of the Ukrainian and Russian team have had similar experiences. One of our current project managers, Khrystyna, fled to the United Kingdom from Kyiv after Russia launched its war against Ukraine and four missiles hit near her house. She joined Respond in 2022 and translated more than 50 medical documents for Ukrainian refugees living in different countries. Recently, she won a prestigious award from the Workers' Educational Association for her continued education that has helped her build her language skills she uses with Respond.
Among the asylum cases we helped to win is the case of our Belorussian project manager Aliaksnder, who was prosecuted in Belarus for his anti war activities and had to flee with his family to Poland. After we translated his full asylum claim and he got asylum, he joined our team as a project manager.
Anastasiia is our translator, interpreter, volunteer screener and outreach specialist, she is originally from Donetsk, same area as I am from, that has been occupied by Russia in 2014. Anastasia fled to UK and now is studying acting.
Finally, we have 4 Ukrainian translators working from Ukraine and 5 Ukrainian refugee translators working from England, Canada, Germany and United States.
Lucy Boris, our active ukrainian interpreter and translator had fled to Germany but had to return to Ukraine to support her older mother. Lydia Novinska is 74. She is the most active Ukrainian translator and taking care of cats shelter, her life depends on the earnings she receives from Respond Crisis Translation.
TATI
A big piece of what I do is leading training for system-impacted translators and interpreters, meaning folks who do language work and have had less opportunities because of the failures in our systems. We noticed from the beginning of our work at Respond that training programs for translators and interpreters included no information on the emotional and psychological impacts of translation and interpretation work in crisis and trauma contexts. I know that I was not trained in this aspect in university, and it was only when I started interpreting for victims of the civil war in Colombia that I learned about vicarious trauma and realized how at risk we are as language workers of absorbing the trauma that we are exposed to.
So, we created Trauma Informed Trainings for translators and interpreters working in crisis and trauma contexts. These trainings are designed to create awareness around, and teach skill sets to address, the vicarious trauma experienced by language practitioners, so that we can learn how to protect our mental health and that of the people we serve.
We also coordinate and lead best practices in translation and interpretation trainings, asylum, LGBT sensitivity, and psychological-evaluation specific trainings, 1:1 trainings. These are the first steps we are taking towards building our development opportunities for translators and interpreters who might not have been able to access professional training, mainly in Indigenous languages from Africa, Asia and South America.
Because of the history of colonialism, language practitioners working in these languages do not have access to the same training, education and professionalization opportunities that linguists working in more globally dominant, European languages have access to. Despite the lack of training folks can access, there is a huge need for trauma-informed support in these languages, particularly in high stakes and complex asylum, legal and medical contexts. This work requires tremendous expertise, delicacy, and emotional resilience, and we cannot ethically expect the work they do to go uncompensated.
A story that comes to mind is of the Nicaraguan translators Lucía and Irene, these are pseudonyms by the way because it is very dangerous to be a translator in Nicaragua right now, who we coached through the process of translating testimonies from asylum seekers from Nicaragua, and now Irene is working with another organization helping refugees and Lucía is working to start her own interpreting business where she actually makes a family sustaining wage whereas before she was making under $3/hour in a language line company.
VAL
Sometimes, the Indigenous and Marginalized Languages Team receives requests for interpretation and translation in languages in which we’ve never provided services, so we have to go out looking for speakers who might be able to join our network and support these cases. We look in unconventional ways and to unconventional sources, such as through social media. For extremely marginalized languages, like Garifuna, a language spoken in the Belize, we ultimately had to get in touch with a radio station, who then connected us with a Garifuna language activist and influencer, who then connected us with an interpreter who could support this case. This keeps my job really interesting, but the fact that it’s so hard to find professional linguists in these languages also shows the critical and dangerous gaps in our workforce pipelines.
This gap comes from a lot of things, including that there are few resources for Indigenous language speakers and speakers of other marginalized languages have few opportunities to train as professional interpreters. This is something we are addressing through our talent-to-career pipeline that we are continuing to expand.
I’ve seen how Respond’s workforce development opportunities have made a huge difference for individuals on my team. One interpreter on our Amharic and Oromo teams left his country, Ethiopia, and relocated to Malaysia. He took a lot of Respond assignments in Amharic and Oromo as he was paying his education bills. With the money he earned through Respond Crisis Translation, he was able to complete his degree. Now he wants to give back and has become a team lead of our Amharic and Oromo teams.
In turn, Respond’s policies and practices of building the capacity of people who are from these frontline communities or are system impacted themselves actually contributes to better language access for our clients. For example, many of the interpreters on my team are based in refugee camps. They are doing translation and interpretation work for the asylum cases of others like them. They have a sensitivity and empathy and a contextual understanding that makes them even more expert translators. They connect with people who receive our services on an even deeper level, and that also helps our clients.
LEILA
Thank you, Meg.
Here at Respond, we understand that trauma-informed and paid language work is a very important lifeline for people from marginalized communities as well as a vital economic stopgap measure in contexts of political collapse.
During the U.S. Afghanistan evacuation, when I worked on the Iranian and Afghan languages teams, I found myself receiving numerous pleas for urgent financial and visa assistance from translators in the Respond community and their networks. In the wake of state collapse, including a complete collapse of the financial system, where virtually all peer-to-peer payment applications completely ceased operations overnight, we led around-the-clock mutual aid efforts for Afghan translators at risk under the Taliban. We mobilized to not only provide our translators with access to trauma-informed therapy but also raised $7000 to provide our Dari and Pashto translators with mutual aid in addition to their paid incomes to sustain themselves during an economic crash that has resulted in mass deaths by starvation in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan.
I’d like to read a testimonial from a Dari and Pashto translator on the team that attests to this work:
“After the collapse of Afghanistan’s banks, international agencies gave up on paying Afghans. But Respond went the extra mile. I was contacted by Respond the same day the system collapsed. They asked me what I needed at that moment. They raised a fund for us translators and they have not abandoned us since. I am proud to be a Respond translator.”
You probably have all heard about how the Taliban has forbidden women and girls from accessing higher education and paid work. In the months following the collapse we did massive outreach to recruit women, queer interpreters, and interpreters from Shia Muslim minority communities such as the Hazara and the Pamiri (many of whom had not left their basements in months out of fear of literally being killed in the streets), so that we could provide training and income opportunities to them. In the 3 years since the government collapse, almost all of our translators have left Afghanistan, and Respond has translated their asylum applications and provided emergency support stipends to them to facilitate their evacuation. So far, we have paid out over $230,000 to Afghan translators and interpreters on our team for their life-saving work on asylum cases for Afghans. Certain translators on our Afghan languages team are supporting on average 11 family members on the income they earn from work with Respond, including family members living with complex illnesses such as type one diabetes and neurological conditions like essential tremor, for which there is limited treatment in Afghanistan. Our Afghan languages team lead Uma herself is a refugee from Afghanistan.
In addition, professionalization opportunities and paid work is utterly essential to the work of our Afghan languages, Kurdish and Arabic teams. The work load for both Afghan languages and Arabic is so vast that it’s entirely unethical to not pay people. Additionally, linguists working particularly in Dari, Pashto, Arabic and Kurdish have little to no access to translation/interpretation training in their languages. English language education generally is also very difficult to access in Afghanistan and Palestine. Further, languages like English are quite different from the various languages spoken throughout West and Central Asia, making it hard to learn, so professionalization opportunities are a top priority for us.
Our training leads Tati and Ayah have built out a number of essential trainings in basic skills translation and interpretation, trauma-informed language practice, translating legal english, as well as trainings specific to the difficulties Afghan languages practitioners face when translating in legal, asylum and medical contexts. These trainings have been absolutely instrumental in ensuring that our translators and interpreters can continue to improve their skills. This is especially critical to the languages of the SWANA region, given that access to English language training and translation work is one of the few avenues for economic stability and mobility in otherwise economically corrupt, remittance- and aid- dependent Central Asia. Finally, we note that the trauma-informed work is also critical to peoples coming from the SWANA region, whose political contexts expose both our clients and our system impacted translators not only to post-traumatic stress, because it’s not merely post-, but also to ongoing, complex and unrelenting trauma without mental health infrastructure to address these issues, making it all the more necessary that we provide these trainings to best serve our clients and our translators.
LAURA
All the translators and interpreters on the Haitian Creole team are paid. Some are based in Haiti, where the cost of living is skyrocketing, the currency is weak, and the security situation makes it hard for people to leave their homes to go to work. Some areas of the capital are no-go zones so people are losing their jobs simply because they can’t go into, or pass through, certain areas. In addition, because Haitian Creole is marginalized and stigmatized even within Haiti, even though Creole is the language 100% of Haitian people speak, there are few professionalization and workforce development opportunities for Haitian Creole language practitioners.
Dahlia’s story: I am one of the interpreters on the Haitian Creole team as well as a medical school student in Haiti. Working with Respond Crisis Translation has allowed me to give back to my community in a unique way and work during my rigorous medical training. I have been interpreting and doing translations for over 7 years now and my favorite thing about Respond is the trainings and assistance they offer the interpreters. The Haitian community is in need of people who can effectively communicate in our native tongue while helping them navigate new environments and gain opportunities. By supporting Respond, you are directly supporting people such as myself still living in Haiti all the while helping the Haitian community at an international level.
One Haiti-based translator told us, “Receiving payment for doing something I love is great, especially in a country where it is very hard to get a decent/respectable job... Respond has given me a great opportunity to get my life back on track after voluntarily deporting myself from the U.S. due to not having papers. Once I started getting paid for my labor, I was given another chance to survive in a country where finding work is almost insurmountable.”
Many of our other language practitioners are Haitian immigrants in the US, Mexico, and elsewhere. One Haitian immigrant living in the U.S. explained that after losing her job due to the pandemic, “I rely on getting paid work from Respond to help sustain myself and my son and continue helping my community.”
Ralph’s story: Respond has helped me as a Haitian medical student studying in Mexico – because of the situation in Haiti, my parents can’t always send U.S. dollars for us to convert to pesos. There was a time in Haiti when even if you had U.S. dollars in the bank, the bank would not let people have more than a small amount of U.S. dollars. So working for Respond allows me not only to support myself but also my siblings, who are also in Mexico.
Another interpreter told us: “A lot of interpreters are immigrants too. It is good to see that the job they are doing is valorized not only with words, but with a salary that some of them never had before.”
Another interpreter explained that being compensated allowed her to devote more time to Respond than she could if she were a volunteer. "Being an immigrant, and having moved to the States in my forties, I had to work harder to achieve some type of stability." For her, the fact that she is able to help other Haitians is key. "It gives me a feeling of satisfaction to be able to help people in need and I feel grateful for my fellow Haitian people to have access to an organization like this.
Another interpreter explained that compensation "helps support a translation practitioner’s career, enabling them to make a living on a craft [they] are passionate about while serving a great cause for human dignity."