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!

At Respond Crisis Translation, every win is hard-fought. Working at the frontlines of suffering, injustice, and violence worldwide, we cherish every success and piece of good news we receive about the clients we serve.

Here are two recent success stories that testify to the life-changing impact Respond's work has for these clients.

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.

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. 

By Kate Goldman.
When this photograph of families detained at the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas from 2019 appeared in the New York Times last week (on March 6, 2023), my heart sank. I was immediately taken back to 2018 and 2019, to the previous times, when I volunteered on the ground and remotely at Dilley as an interpreter and …

At Respond, we are providing language support to Ukrainian refugees, and to thousands of asylum seekers, refugees, and other individuals from around the world in violent systems that refuse to provide them the support they need.

We are so grateful to our partners and donors because their funding allows us to compensate translators like Irma, who works relentlessly to help others.

“I wanted to write a story about the earthquake that was also about ordinary people and everyday life. I wanted my characters to have complex interior lives, and have ordinary joys, concerns, relationships, and dreams, because as we all know there’s a kind of flattening and dehumanization that happens in a lot of …

The wonderful translators on our Haitian Creole team worked on several projects in June 2022. Here are some highlights:
The HC team provided oral interpretation services for Las Americas in partnership with VICE News for a piece where they interviewed Haitian asylum seekers. (Publication TBA). They also …

In this video, our Afghan Languages Team Lead discusses the importance of her work and why it is so urgent to fund Afghan language practitioners.