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.

Respond Crisis Translation Ukrainian and Russian teams have worked tirelessly around-the-clock since the start of the war on Russia in 2022. In this video, the head of our Ukrainian and Russian teams Tetyana Grygor'yeva shares her powerful experience leading this work

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. 

Late one Friday afternoon in early March, one of our partner organizations, the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti (IJDH), contacted me with an urgent request: to translate and subtitle a video from their Haitian partner organization, the Bureau des Avocats Internationaux (BAI) discussing the fight for justice for victims of sexual violence…

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…

By Valentina Callari Lewis
In addition to responding to the post-earthquake emergency, our Turkish and Kurdish teams continue their everyday work providing language support for asylum seekers.

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.”

Today on #ChineseLanguageDay 2023, 中文日, the Respond team recommits to the fight to dismantle systemic language violence and celebrates all of our dedicated Chinese translators and interpreters and our incredible team lead, Lirong Shi. Their work is tireless and essential.

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 …

This asylum ban is yet another example of the government weaponizing language to limit freedom of mobility.  Under the proposed ban, asylum seekers must undergo their process via the CBP One mobile app. The app is only available in English and Spanish, in spite of the fact that dozens of languages are spoken by asylum seekers at the border. 

Our incredible team has been mobilizing to support victims of the devastating earthquake, translating resources and services into Kurdish Kurmanji, Sorani, Arabic, Armenian, and Turkish, as highlighted in this powerful piece written by Respond community member Leila Lorenzo.

“Immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers are particularly vulnerable to a range of human rights violations, including violations of the right to adequate housing. Displaced persons are also particularly vulnerable to discrimination, racism, and xenophobia, which can further interfere with their ability to secure sustainable and adequate living conditions.”

Language is an access and social justice issue. And there are so many challenges that emerge around it. I’ve already talked about the importance of humane and sensitive translation. But another is the constantly changing nature of fieldwork. To this end, I am deeply grateful for …

Respond Crisis Translation is committed to bringing vital information. According to ACOG, roughly one-quarter of women in the United States access abortion care in their lifetime. In Respond, we know that barriers to abortion exacerbate existing societal disparities, and we strongly believe in translating any …

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.

Respond works with 382 asylee, refugee, deportee, and other system and financially impacted people, to guarantee they can earn a dignified wage and support themselves and their loved ones.

“We try to find the best way to support each case with the human kindness and warmth that is often denied to language minorities,” Tatiana said when asked to talk about what she values most about her work as the Spanish Team Lead at Respond.