Here 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.

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 …

Respond’s Afghan language interpreters and translators have become a lifeline for refugees and asylum seekers.

Over the past four months, Respond’s Afghan Languages Team Lead Uma Mirkhail and her team have taken on nearly 300 individual projects, offering their trauma-informed services to over 7,508 Afghans seeking asylum in…

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.”

Without the help of interpreters like those who stepped forward at Respond Crisis, we would not have been able to do our part of this community wide effort. Respond has truly allowed us to respond during this crisis.

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.

This is Leila Ehsan, Respond’s Iranian Languages Lead. I am reaching out with an urgent update from some of our Pashto and Dari translators based in Kabul and with ways we can support them.