Support Respond Crisis Translation this Giving Season!
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:
In 2023 our caseload increased three-fold as a result of political, economic, and climate crises erupting around the world. These crises have forced tens of millions of people to flee their homes, cross borders, and navigate intentionally complex asylum and resettlement processes in a foreign language.
Our urgent response work over this past year focused on the continued war against Ukraine, ongoing governmental collapse in Afghanistan, earthquakes in Syria, Turkey, and Morocco, floods in Libya, economic crisis and escalating violence across Latin America, Haiti, and Sudan, as well as the currently escalating violence in Gaza.
Your financial support over the last year has directly enabled us to respond to each of these crises by connecting with grassroots humanitarian relief organizations working on the frontlines to provide urgently needed pro bono support of key resources. Because of your gift, we could not only do this work for organizations on the ground pro bono, but also create jobs for more than 470 multilingual members of directly impacted communities. These are system-impacted translators who have accessed consistent dignified income, training, and professionalization opportunities through Respond.
Our teams have translated 13,466 full asylum claims for 53,864 individual asylum seekers and families and orally interpreted over 55 million minutes at the border and on the frontlines of climate and political crisis.
We also intervened and successfully advocated for several asylum seekers whose initial asylum claims had been denied due to language rights violations. For example:
Our client Carlos, an afro-Indigenous asylum seeker from Brazil who speaks Portuguese, nearly died after having been deprived of language access for months in U.S. custody without access to an interpreter or medical care.
Our client Haleema, an Afghan woman refugee and activist, had her asylum affidavit rejected after a machine mistranslated her case, changing all cases of “I” to “we.”
Your support has also allowed Respond to drive coverage on issues of language justice throughout 2023 – particularly around the dangers posed by the rise of AI and machine translation.
On PBS NewsHour, Respond raised the alarm over how the government’s unsupervised reliance on machine translation costs translators their jobs and is quite literally jeopardizing Afghans’ asylum cases. Several of our translators intervening in such language violence went viral.
“It’s almost impossible for a machine to convey the same message that a professional interpreter with awareness about the country of origin can do, including cultural context,” Respond’s Afghan Languages Team Lead Uma Mirkhail told The Guardian.
In Reuters’ Context, we spoke about how the everyday failings of AI-driven translation tools, such as names translated as months of the year, incorrect time frames, and mixed-up pronouns are causing havoc in the U.S. asylum system, with our human translators left to clean up the mess.
Respond’s Valentina Callari Lewis, in an op-ed in Teen Vogue, brought attention to the fact 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.
Respond exposed language violence at the border in RestofWorld, describing how asylum seekers are now required to use the government’s new glitchy CBP One Mobile App in order to initiate the asylum process – which is only partially accessible in 5 poorly-translated languages.
Thank you for making it possible for Respond to raise awareness about systemic language injustice and our network’s vital role in fighting it. Visit our blog to read more coverage about our work.
It is hard to emphasize enough how under-funded and invisibilized language access work is, or how far your financial support has gone towards helping us stay afloat in the midst of global recession and climate crisis as the need for language support only continues to grow.
This Giving Tuesday, support our work mobilizing around the clock to provide trauma-informed interpretation and translation services for migrants, refugees, and all for whom language is a barrier to accessing safety and dignity. We need your support to continue to offer language access services in 165+ languages on the frontlines of crises worldwide.
Donate here to support our work.
Our entire team sends immense gratitude!
With gratitude and solidarity,
Ariel and the Respond team
