By Raman Salah

“I can protect my language from being forgotten by reading and writing, communicating with friends and family in my mother tongue.” Tavge*, a teacher, translator, and Kurmanji speaker from Rojava

Kurdish people in their daily lives and in their relationship with their stories, communities, and dialect, are at the forefront of the fight for language justice across Kurdistan.

Respond Crisis Translation is a collective of language activists providing compassionate, effective, and trauma-informed interpretation and translation services for migrants, refugees, and anyone experiencing language barriers. We are looking for an enthusiastic volunteer that can help our team define and implement a strategy for our social media channels.

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.

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT: Respond Crisis Translation’s unmasking of the dangers and ills of unsupervised reliance on AI and machine translation tools in the U.S. asylum and immigration context was featured in Futurism’s The Byte and on The World from PRX’s Things That Go Boom podcast.

Respond Crisis Translation is looking for a committed and enthusiastic Development Director who is passionate about language access. The Development Director will plan and implement a development and fundraising program to provide for the short- and long-term needs of the organization.

While working tirelessly around the clock to provide life-saving translation and interpretation on the front lines of crises across the globe, Respond has also driven coverage on issues of language justice throughout 2023.

Bloomberg Businessweek describes how Respond has become a primary lifeline for many migrants and advocates at the U.S.-Mexico border, especially as private companies contracted by the U.S. government fail to provide adequate translators and interpreters.

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…

Khrystyna Demchenko, a member of our incredible Ukrainian and Russian languages, received the Workers' Educational Association (WEA) Academic Excellence Award for her translation work helping Ukrainian refugees. Khrystyna herself is a refugee of the war, having fled to the United Kingdom from Kyiv after …

On Saturday, November 25, a clip posted by BBC News showed a released Palestinian prisoner describing horrific abuses inside an Israeli prison. She said, in Arabic, that Israel held them in the cold without electricity, "sprayed us with pepper spray" and “left us to die." …

Over seventy thousand Nicaraguans have been forced into exile over the past 5 years. Their stories are stories of resilience and survival, but their journey is far from over. This year alone, 222 political prisoners subjected to torture and imprisonment had their passports revoked, making them stateless and in desperate need of asylum.

A message from Respond’s founder Ariel Koren: “On behalf of the Respond Crisis Translation team, I wanted to say a huge THANK YOU for your ongoing support of our work at Respond. I also wanted to take this opportunity to give you a brief update about our work over the past year, so much of which was made possible by the support of our generous donors and supporters…”

At Respond Crisis Translation we witness that language access is central to the struggle against violence everywhere.

Our team is working tirelessly to address language violence and language gaps that are fueling the ongoing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. One of many examples is the systemic mistranslation of common Arabic words that…

Arabic words are regularly mistranslated or misconstrued in English-language media to stereotype and demonize Palestinians, painting them as terrorists and contributing to racist narratives that pro-Palestinian activism is inherently violent or antisemitic.

Respond tells Context about how “insane” machine translation errors are jeopardizing U.S. asylum claims. Names translated as months of the year, incorrect time frames and mixed-up pronouns – the everyday failings of AI-driven translation apps are causing havoc in the U.S. asylum system, with our human translators left to clean up the mess.

Respond Crisis Translation shared with The Guardian about how the U.S. government’s growing reliance on unsupervised machine translation to cut costs has jeopardized several asylum applications.

Respond Crisis Translation’s Valentina Callari Lewis writes that asylum seekers who speak Indigenous and marginalized languages are regularly deprived of their fundamental human right to quality translation services at the US border.

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.