Cascading crises: translation as risk reduction

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.