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Riječ je o prikazu knjige naslovljene Translating Crises, koju su uredili Sharon O'Brien i Federico M. Federici.

Crisis situations present highly complex challenges, which has led to the development of crisis response planning and crisis management. Numerous aspects need to be incorporated within these fields in order to save lives and reduce damage as much as possible. One particularly important and, at the same time, challenging aspect is respect for human rights, especially the right to access information in a foreign language. To this end, the topic of crisis translation has been gaining attention in recent times. Inspired by the work done by the INTERACT network, this paper examines the position of translation in crisis response planning in Croatia. In order to provide a comprehensive insight into the topic, this case study used three methods. First, official documents were analysed to see whether and how crisis translation is regulated in this country. Further, experts active in crisis response and crisis response planning were interviewed to explore crisis translation procedures in the field. Finally, a questionnaire among professional translators and interpreters was conducted to examine their experiences and opinions on the matter. The findings show that Croatian legislation does not include detailed implementation plans when it comes to translation in crisis situations and that the crisis translation in the field is done on an ad hoc basis. Further, a great majority of Croatian translators and interpreters would be willing to work in crisis situations although there are no training opportunities offered in this area, either as a part of the formal education system or as post-education training programs. The findings obtained by this paper may be used to encourage further research on the topic and improve the position of translation in crisis response planning in Croatia, as well as to inform the design of training courses for both professional translators and responders in the field

Crisis situations, including disasters, require making urgent decisions often without sufficient resources. These include decisions about translation and interpretation. We argue that using citizens in such contexts can be ethically justified despite their lack of professional translator training (we term them citizen translators). Translation potentially improves people’s access to crucial information for their safety, and therefore delivering such information is critical. We also acknowledge several ethical challenges with citizen translation based on our experience translating in humanitarian contexts, relevant literature, and discussions with various stakeholders engaged with our research consortium. Recourse to citizen translators has limitations, but we advance mitigation measures to address the ethical challenges they face providing timely information to linguistically diverse groups in crisis. We propose virtue ethics as a framework for citizen translators to examine and address ethical issues during crises. We suggest training that can prepare citizen translators for ethical challenges likely in the field.

The application of machine translation (MT) in crisis settings is of increasing interest to humanitarian practitioners. We collaborated with industry and non-profit partners: (1) to develop and test the utility of an MT system trained specifically on crisis-related content in an under-resourced language combination (French-to-Swahili); and (2) to evaluate the extent to which speakers of both French and Swahili without post-editing experience could be mobilized to post-edit the output of this system effectively. Our small study carried out in Kenya found that our system performed well, provided useful output, and was positively evaluated by inexperienced post-editors. We use the study to discuss the feasibility of MT use in crisis settings for low-resource language combinations and make recommendations on data selection and domain consideration for future crisis-related MT development.

This chapter reports on the findings of a qualitative study undertaken with the aim of examining the status of crisis translators and interpreters (T&Is) in Yemen. The study aimed to ascertain how they perceive their role as volunteer T&Is and what challenges they face in their work during the current crisis in Yemen, particularly the humanitarian relief operation in the cholera epidemic. Identifying such challenges presumably informs trainers and international organizations on what to include in courses to train T&Is working in crises. The study adopts a qualitative method and uses data collected via semi-structured interviews, which are carried out with twelve volunteer T&Is working with international organizations in Yemen. The study finds that volunteer T&Is perceive their role as to serve their country and people. They face many challenges in their work: Some are caused by the deteriorating situation in Yemen; some are related to the lack of proper training; and some, which are rather striking, are caused by the international organizations’ lack of knowledge of the cultural and social norms of the Yemeni society.

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.

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.

[EN]In the wake of a disaster, failures in various systems are bound to cause temporary impairments and exacerbate permanent ones. Non-inclusiveness in planning tends to prevent people with disabilities, as well as culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) communities, from standard rescue and relief responses, which not only goes against universal human rights but may amplify the crisis into cascading effects. This chapter explores the notion of accessibility as a form of risk and vulnerability reduction, response and mitigation. We argue that producing information on disaster preparedness, response and recovery with accessibility and cultural and linguistic diversity in mind can help reduce the vulnerability usually associated with the aforementioned communities, as well as potentially benefit both the general population and the international humanitarian community. Additionally, we contend that designing accessibility-compliant (digital) content can both mitigate the effects of limited or malfunctioning communication infrastructure resulting from the disaster, and facilitate the production of multilingual information by reducing the time, technology and human efforts required for the translation process, which are often scarce in a crisis environment. Finally, we highlight the need for crisis translators to be more disability-aware and accessibility-informed to ensure an effective communication between all stakeholders in disaster situations.

When an emergency, crisis or disaster strikes, timely and accurate information is crucial to ensure that there is a limited impact on the health and well-being of those affected (O’Brien and Cadwell 2017 ; O’Brien et al 2018). Crisis response depends substantially on volunteers, including citizen translators who may or may not have training or experience in translation, computer-aided translation technologies, Machine Translation (MT) or post-editing. With the growing deployment of MT, there is increasing interest in its use as a crisis communication tool (Lewis 2010, Lewis et al 2011) and, consequently, a need for training. This paper describes the design and creation of a “Post-Editing 101 Course” for citizen translators in crisis response. The course recognises that professional translators are most desirable, but crisis settings sometimes call for a ‘needs must’ approach. The course was designed with the assumption that a citizen translator might have little to no knowledge of MT or post-editing and very little time to learn those skills. It also makes the assumption that a small amount of training is better than none at all, especially in the context of MT and post-editing being used for crisis communication. The paper will present the main components of the course: What is Machine Translation? ; The Importance of “Data” for “Quality” ; A Brief Overview of Post-Editing ; The Post-Editing Task ; and The Post-Editors’ Skills. We will demonstrate how we incorporated practice sets for English to Croatian, Polish and German as optional components in the courseware. We will explain how we tried to make this course accessible to a non-specialised audience and present results from an initial evaluation of the courseware by Polish, Swahili and Croatian- speaking volunteers.

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.