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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.

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.

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 humanitarian organizations towards affected communities;  Accommodating language needs is consistently seen as a complex task; currently, even when there is capacity to address the issue, there is no agreement on how language needs should be accommodated;  Language access capabilities may go beyond budget or staff resources and include issues of modality, culture, politics, ownership within the organizations, etc.;  Key gaps in practice render service delivery less effective. Implications & Recommendations  Findings suggest defined “ownership” of language translation within an organization is key to effective practice;  Incorporating more systematic efforts on language translation in humanitarian operations is directly relevant to the Grand Bargain goals of accountability, localization, and participation in serving affected communities;  Establishing systematic provision for communication in local languages in humanitarian response plans is crucial as the world is facing increasing hazard vulnerability;  Improving humanitarian assistance requires management solutions such as better integration of language access provision with the cluster system.