Translation Spaces - Volume 7, Issue 1, 2018

Non-governmental organisations hold an important place in today’s globalised society. After presenting an overview of previous research on Translation and Interpreting Studies on language mediation in NGOs, this introduction to the special issue argues that more research into NGOs’ translation and interpreting practices and policies is required to better understand these organisations and their influence on global society. The introduction engages with what NGO practitioners and professional translators have said on current challenges in translating and interpreting in the context of NGOs, and what this implies for future research and training in Translation and Interpreting Studies. Lastly, it reflects on the use of interdisciplinary approaches to understanding NGOs as global organisations and discusses the contribution that Translation and Interpreting Studies could make to other disciplines that aim to gain new insights on these organisations.

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.

Switzerland is a multilingual country with four official languages. As such, NGOs and other organizations based in Switzerland tend to have a comparatively high awareness of multilingualism. Based on in-depth interviews with representatives of two Swiss development NGOs, Caritas Switzerland and the Fédération genevoise de coopération, this paper aims to explore how Swiss development NGOs work multilingually at home and abroad.

By zooming in on the language practices that are used in the different contact zones along the aid chain we aim to provide a more nuanced picture of multilingualism in development projects. The two case studies show that professional translation is merely one of several strategies used to overcome language barriers in the aid chain. Others include ad hoc language mediation practices, reliance on bilingual staff and the use of a lingua franca.

Within the human rights knowledge production infrastructure, information undergoes processes of entextualisation, archiving, publication, and reception. This article examines the place of testimonies – first-person accounts of suffering and/or historic events – in Amnesty International. A network of agents form around testimonies to produce them through translation from the witnesses’ languages – spoken varieties of Arabic – to the language of globalised governance – written English – and to formal written Arabic. The co-construction of meaning, in encounters between human rights researchers and witnesses, is a modern ritual that is entextualised in the genre ‘testimony’; its translations between spoken and written modes, languages and styles, are exercises in persuasive rhetoric aimed at redressing ‘testimonial injustice’. The researchers are not professional translators, yet their unselfconscious translations are constitutive of the knowledge that audiences receive. The data is based on interviews and questionnaires with Amnesty International staff, textual analysis of publications, and on focus groups and surveys.

In the wake of profound structural and organizational changes stemming from an institutional restructure as part of the Global Transition Programme and the Governance Reform undertaken to transform Amnesty International into a truly global movement, the Amnesty International Language Resource Centre examines the role it must play in order to align with the new operating model and evaluates the position it should reach so as to contribute to organizational aspirations for increased diversity and inclusion, as well as integrated approaches to working practices. This paper presents, in broad terms, the operational impact the structural changes have had on its language activities and reaffirms the Language Resource Centre’s crucial contribution to advancing the human rights agenda as a language service provider and strategic language advisor.

This article describes the trajectory of Oxfam GB as an international organisation, its structure, the way it operates and the linguistic issues that led to the creation of a professional translation service. It explores the ongoing challenges and the kind of support translation researchers could provide to help resolve them, with the goal of developing better professionals in the broader development sector.

This article addresses the relationship between translation, intercultural communication and international development practice as encountered in the field. Through tracing parallel developments in the academic fields of translation studies and intercultural communication studies, it highlights the move from static concepts of language, nation, and culture to the fluid exchange spaces of multilingual and intercultural encounters. In-the-field examples of international development challenges are examined and discussed in the light of these theoretical shifts. We propose (a) that both fields of study can learn from each other, (b) that translation training should account for the messy intercultural spaces of contact zones, and (c) that guidance on intercultural practice be further developed to benefit those working in the field.

Emanating from the recent sociological turn of translation studies scholarship ( Wolf 2006 , 2007 , 2009 and 2010 ), translation and interpreting practices in non-governmental organizations has become a field of research that imperatively requires cross-disciplinary approaches. This paper investigates multilingual initiatives carried out by the Human Rights Investigation Lab (HRIL) and Translators Without Borders (TWB) and their contribution to ensuring language access in crisis scenarios. Based on interviews with delegates from both organizations, and taking into consideration legal and sociological perspectives, it sets out a broad reflection on how translation studies research is evolving in the area of NGOs. It intends to address the caveats that can arise from both conceptual and empirical approaches in the design of future projects, as it explores the notion of discipline-specific knowledge and relevant concepts in translation training and external collaborations.