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Purpose: The purpose of this conceptual paper is to highlight the role that language translation can play in disaster prevention and management and to make the case for increased attention to language translation in crisis communication. Approach: The article draws on literature relating to disaster management to suggest that translation is a perennial issue in crisis communication. Findings: Although communication with multicultural and multilinguistic communities is seen as being in urgent need of attention, we find that the role of translation in enabling this is underestimated, if not unrecognised. Value: This article raises awareness of the need for urgent attention to be given by scholars and practitioners to the role of translation in crisis communication.

The H2020-funded (Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 734211) INTERACT project presents recommendations to local, national and international emergency response stakeholders. These policy recommendations promote the consideration of translation and interpreting into all stage of crisis, emergency or disaster response. Translation and Interpreting are seen a disaster risk reduction tools.

During crises, intralingual translation (or simplification) of medical content can facilitate comprehension among lay readers and foster their compliance with instructions aimed to avoid or mitigate the cascading effects of crises. The onus of simplifying health-related texts often falls on medical experts, and the task of intralingual translation tends to be nonautomated. Medical authors are asked to check and remember different sets of plain language guidelines, while also relying on their interpretation of how and when to implement these guidelines. Accordingly, even simplified health-related texts present characteristics that make them difficult to read and comprehend, particularly for an audience with low (health) literacy. Against this background, this chapter describes an experimental study aimed at testing the impact that using a controlled language (CL) checker to semi-automate intralingual translation has on the readability and comprehensibility of medical content. The study focused on the plain language summaries and abstracts produced by the non-profit organisation Cochrane. Using Coh-Metrix and recall, this investigation found that the introduction of a CL checker influenced some readability features, but not lay readers’ comprehension, regardless of their native language. Finally, strategies to enhance the comprehensibility of health content and reduce the vulnerability of readers in crises are discussed.

When a sudden-onset emergency occurs, the language needs of those affected and those involved in the relief efforts cannot be foreseen. Provided that access to online communication is still available, it is not unlikely that many involved in the crisis will resort to language technologies such as machine translation and initiatives such as crowdsourcing to assist in the urgent need for multilingual communication. This may be done in an attempt to understand the key messages from official bodies, or relief organisations, when there is a lack of professional translators to assist in the multilingual communication process. This approach - machine translation and crowdsourcing - was successfully used in a previous crisis, i.e. the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. However, the use of technologies cannot be taken for granted. Even if they are supposedly used for good, a number of ethical issues should be given consideration before using these technologies, when using them, and in the aftermath of a crisis. In this chapter, we describe those issues by having a closer look at potential crisis translation workflows which rely on machine translation and crowdsourcing.

Assessment Focus During major social disruptions, such as civil conflicts, natural disasters, or other crises, access to information is of fundamental importance to response and recovery operations. Ability to understand the language in which information is disseminated is a key marker of social vulnerability to disasters or crises. Assessing the degree to which the service efforts of organizations involved in the humanitarian sector are informed by commitment to multilingual communication and language translation is important to understanding how these organizations contribute to risk reduction and improved community resilience. This short report provides an assessment of the current state of practice and key language access issues in the humanitarian sector. Guiding Questions Assessment of the efforts in the humanitarian sector in crisis relief and recovery work can be understood in the context of the 2016 World Humanitarian Summit’s Grand Bargain commitments to reform aspects of humanitarian organizations’ relief work. Among those goals are key pronouncements on accountability, localization, and participation; language is integral to each. Because of the importance of language access to risk reduction and resilience in crisis situations, the assessment here attempts to address three questions: (1) what is the significance of language access to international humanitarian assistance efforts?; (2) what constitutes effective practices or key challenges at present?; and (3) what is the prospect for humanitarian organizations’ managing language access needs in the future? Key Findings  Study subjects voiced near unanimity that providing language access is fundamentally important to humanitarian operations, but, at present, the capacity to formalize or routinize such efforts is limited;  There was wide-spread consensus that accommodating language needs is necessary for achieving the Grand Bargain’s aim of two-way communication for greater accountability of operational

Crises are often transboundary and, even if they are not, culturally and linguistically diverse communities may be caught up in them, whether they are migrant workers, refugees, or tourists. Experts from multiple fields recognize, explore, and challenge our current limitations in engaging with communication issues in multilingual situations of crisis. Understood broadly as both written and spoken acts, translation saves lives and reduces property damages and loss, if it is not a last-minute add-on to crisis management plans. A crisis is not a simple geo-spatial, cultural, legal, humanitarian, medical, logistical, and political tipping point, it is a major concatenation of causes and effects that cascade in many and often unpredictable directions. Yet even where effective, accurate, and specific information is available to be disseminated in different ways through an ever-growing array of technologies, too often the language barrier remains in place. This chapter explores the concept of cascading crises and the role translation could and should have. It positions crisis translation at the intersection of disaster risk reduction, risk communication and translation and interpreting studies. It concludes by highlighting the diverse topics in the volume that start to paint a picture of a diverse field that is opening up for research and development.

Cochrane is a global, non-profit organisation that synthesizes health-related research evidence. It established a translation strategy in 2014 to increase the significance of its information beyond the English-speaking world. Under the strategy, translation at Cochrane is achieved mostly through the efforts of linguistic volunteers. Translation in crisis settings, too, relies on the work of volunteers; however, appropriate ways to manage and train these volunteers are unclear. We carried out a study of the case of translation at one part of Cochrane, Cochrane Germany, to learn about the management and training of linguistic volunteers there and in Cochrane more broadly. Thematic analysis of data gathered by the researcher during a two-month secondment to the offices of Cochrane Germany– including data from formal interviews, informal meetings, field notes, a reflective journal, and a large corpus of grey literature – generated three main themes. The themes relate to appropriate conceptualisations of linguistic volunteers, project management in the assurance of quality volunteer work, and feedback as a form of volunteer training. Recommendations are made to apply these lessons learned to future work on crisis translation and for possible improvements to linguistic volunteer management and training at Cochrane.

This document is a summary public version of the Ethics Recommendations for Crisis Translation Settings produced by some of the INTERACT project team. INTERACT is the International Network in Crisis Translation, a project funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 734211. Further information about the project as a whole is available at: https://sites.google.com/view/crisistranslation/home

Clear, timely and accurate information is recognised as strategically and operationally critical to disaster response effectiveness. Increasing cultural and linguistic diversity across the globe creates a demand for information to be available in multiple languages. This signifies a need for language translation to be a key element of disaster management. However, language translation is an underdeveloped tool in disaster management and has been a neglected topic in research. We analyse the disaster response approaches for five nations—Ireland, the UK, New Zealand, Japan and the USA—to determine the degree to which language translation is utilised. Taking the right to information as a starting point, we use a 4-A, rights-based analytic framework. Each approach is inspected for standards of Availability, Accessibility, Acceptability and Adaptability. The US has the strongest adherence to these standards while the other approaches are less developed. We suggest several principles for effective practice in providing language access services.

Translators and interpreters have been shown to play an important role in supporting the activities of NGOs involved in crisis communication scenarios. However, there is little evidence of whether standardized training materials or technological assistance are required by or would be beneficial to quickly recruited ‘citizen translators’ working in these environments. This article will present a study of the design, delivery, and preliminary evaluation of a set of training materials developed for use in a citizen translation project run by New Zealand Red Cross (NZRC) with the support of the EU H2020-funded International Network on Crisis Translation (INTERACT). The article describes the training materials and discusses the epistemological and didactic issues that were faced in their design and delivery. Findings from the article will be of interest to those seeking to understand citizen translation and issues involved in working with an NGO on translator training.

The three measurements for post-editing effort as proposed by Krings (2001) have been adopted by many researchers in subsequent studies and publications. These measurements comprise temporal effort (the speed or productivity rate of post-editing, often measured in words per second or per minute at the segment level), technical effort (the number of actual edits performed by the post-editor, sometimes approximated using the Translation Edit Rate metric (Snover et al. 2006), again usually at the segment level), and cognitive effort. Cognitive effort has been measured using Think-Aloud Protocols, pause measurement, and, increasingly, eye-tracking. This chapter provides a review of studies of post-editing effort using eye-tracking, noting the influence of publications by Danks et al. (1997), and O’Brien (2006, 2008), before describing a single study in detail. The detailed study examines whether predicted effort indicators affect post-editing effort and results were previously published as Moorkens et al. (2015). Most of the eye-tracking data analysed were unused in the previous

This book offers a range of analyses of the multiplicity of opinions and ideologies attached to rendering, in familiar or unfamiliar voices, languages known as non-standard varieties. The contributions include theoretical reflections, case studies and comparative studies that draw from the full spectrum of translation strategies adopted in rendering non-standard varieties and reflect the endless possibilities of language variation. The strength of the volume lies in the wide range of languages discussed, from Arabic to Turkish and from Italian to Catalan, as well as in its variety of complementary and contrastive methodologies. The contributions reveal the importance of exploring further issues in translating local voices. Discussing dialects and marginal voices in translation, the contributors encourage and challenge the reader to reflect on what is standard and non-standard, acceptable and unacceptable, thereby overturning accepted principles and challenging familiar practices.

Olive mill wastewater (OMW) with added N and Mg was used as a medium in a shake-flask, repeated-batch fermentation process with a passively immobilized, acid-producing, strain of Aspergillus niger. The latter was able to reduce the phenolic content of the waste material to 59% of its initial amount and to lower the pH of the medium. Rock phosphate, added to the OMW medium was solubilized to a maximum amount of 0·5 g/l during the fourth batch cycle with a corresponding productivity of 10·6 mg P/l.h. Five types of OMW ± RP, microbially treated or not, were tested in a soil-Trifolium system for their fertilizing ability. The beneficial effect of microbially treated OMW was more evident during the first crop cycle. The best plant growth response and P uptake were found in mycorrhizal plants grown in soil amended with fungal treated OMW+RP.

Olive mill waste water (OMW), supplemented or not with ammonium sulphate and rock phosphate (RP), was applied as a medium in a shake-flask repeated-batch fermentation with Aspergillus niger immobilized on polyurethane sponge. Compared to other treatments, the results showed higher growth of the immobilized mycelium and significant reduction of the total phenols when the waste material was enriched with RP and ammonium sulphate (N). The immobilized fungus solubilized the RP with a maximum level of soluble P of 0·58 g/litre reached during the fourth batch cycle of the OMW+RP treatment. Depending on the medium composition, three types of treated OMW were produced which could be further used for various purposes.

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