Felipe’s first interview a year earlier had been rescheduled because he didn’t have an interpreter with him, he said. He hadn’t known at the time that U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services requires asylum applicants to provide their own interpreters and can throw out their cases if they don’t. So, he was in real danger of deportation if he couldn’t provide one this time around.

At our language Justice Forum at the Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts in San Francisco on Oct. 30, we discuss the targeting on asylum seekers with language violence and language access. It was covered by Mission Local.

Last Thursday, Oct. 30, Respond Crisis Translation held a panel at the Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts in San Francisco to talk about language depravation and it was covered by the SFGATE media.

Ayah Najadat, Language activist, translator and former RCT Arabic team lead, has published in Aljazeera a reflection on her work as an interpreter with RCT and the contrast as many countries recognise Palestine but treats its refugees as stateless, and demands documents before it offers dignity.

Over a year later, Alice Knight-Garcia from independent UK-based West Country Voices looks back on Respond’s feature in The Guardian ‘Lost in AI Translation’, shedding light on the growing concern surrounding the use of Artificial Intelligence, …

Linguists with Respond Crisis Translation participated in interviewing and sharing their expertise in this research article titled “Held Incommunicado: The Failed Promise of Language Access in Immigration Detention.”

Respond Crisis Translation Arabic team feature in THE LINGUIST.
Miranda Moore explores the work of translators both inside and outside Gaza, and the difficulties they face.

Respond Crisis Translation’s Co-founder and Director of Operations Meg Sears recently appeared on a panel hosted by Comma Press at Manchester in Translation on decolonizing translation, alongside UCL Professor of Translation Studies Kathryn Bachelor, writer, editor, researcher and translator Dr Kavita Bhanot.

Rudaw, a major publication in Iraqi Kurdistan, featured Respond Crisis Translation’s Kurdish storytelling project, “One year since the quake: Linguicide and resilience of the Kurdish language.”

Even though the media extensively covered the Turkey-Syria earthquake that killed more than 59,000 people exactly one year ago ...

Respond’s founder and executive director Ariel Koren joined KJZZ, the National Public Radio member station in Phoenix, Arizona, to talk about a new rule requiring asylum seekers to bring their own interpreters during USCIS interviews

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.

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.

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." …

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.

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…

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.”