Since the beginning of the year, the French team has worked on 325 projects — that is more than 1 project per day! It also represents more than 30 % of all projects the French team has ever received since September 2019, when Respond was first created!

2023 has been a particularly difficult year, witnessing many upheavals and crises around the world, and the French Team, as always, has contributed to making the world a better place.

It was also a year of growth for the French Team, ending with a total of 106 linguists based in 30 countries around the world ..

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. 

“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.”

As the Biden administration begins to unravel Title 42 and MPP, chaos at the border ensues as asylum seekers struggle to figure out what is happening with changing immigration policies…

15 translators and 5 project managers on the Respond team worked for months to translate hundreds of pages of Pro Se materials into Arabic, Bangla, French, Haitian Creole, Hindi, Portuguese, Punjabi and Russian in collaboration with our wonderful partners at Southern Poverty Law Center.

As part of an art-based campaign to bring awareness to the issue of gender-based violence in Mexico and the larger Meso-America region, the Las Vanders collective partnered with Respond Crisis Translation to translate flyers and pamphlets from Spanish to both English and French.