Over the last two months I have attended three events (two conferences and a “festival”) that really spoke to my professional values and why I do and love my work.
The events
The first, Languages For an Inclusive World, was a festival of three events specifically about translation in the third sector. The focus of these events was the role of translation, interpreting and language professionals in humanitarian and development work. They emphasized that the words we choose to use matter, particularly in the third sector where combatting ingrained power imbalances is central to the mission of many organizations.
The second, the ITI Conference, was the highlight of the year so far. It was fantastic to be able to chat to other translators about their experiences and attend so many great presentations by such a talented range of speakers. One session in particular, The Violence of Silence, presented by "museum doctor" Ngaire Blankenberg stressed that the stories we tell and words we use to tell them matter. They reflect and conceal power imbalances and will continue to do so unless we make an effort to change what we say and how we say it.
Finally, the Bond Conference brought together practitioners and experts from a wide range of NGOs working in the field of international development. Key themes at the conference concerned whose voice was being heard in development narratives, the role of donors and Western NGOs and how to share power with local communities. The power of terminology and stories was also key here, particularly when words like beneficiary, local and development are so loaded.
The takeaways: Listen, learn, change
All these events reaffirmed my conviction that translation can be a tool for justice and liberation, when used well. A tool to listen to a wider range of voices, to empower the marginalized to be heard and to challenge the hegemony of dominant paradigms.
But we can’t just listen to others, we must learn from them and then change our practice in pursuit of justice, fairness and freedom for all. It’s about how we frame our work and that comes through in the language we choose to use.
The Bond conference in particular asked important questions that anyone working in international development must ask: Is international development about charity, about reparations or rather about justice and solidarity? The problem with the charity model is that it takes agency away from funding recipients and gives it to donors, placing them on the moral high ground. The problem with the reparations model is that it divides, and has myriad legal and moral implications, not all of which are desirable.
The justice model is – though disputed – the preferred model. Justice is a moral concept everyone can get behind. It is engrained in our very being. People do not fund development projects in other countries because they are good and others are needy, nor because they owe them. They do it because we all want to live in a more just and equitable world.
In practice, this means donors sharing power and listening to what the people they proclaim to be helping want. It means they have to reshape how they do business, changing their modus operandi to more effectively achieve their mission.
The link to our work
Many translators are already aware of these issues to some extent, given that much of our work involves listening to “local communities”. There are fantastic examples of organizations that do listen and many of them are our clients. This is not by coincidence, but because those organizations that want to listen, often have to hire translators to do so.
Yet there is a long way to go. Many organizations I have spoken to about their translation provision use untrained bilingual staff, inexperienced volunteers or community interpreters. Languages for an Inclusive World organizer, Wine Tesseur,[1] has done extensive work on the pitfalls of all these approaches, on how they do a disservice to those whom organizations seek to support and how they can further disempower the most marginalized.
Budgets may be tight but good translation costs money — rightly so, given that translators invest valuable time and money in the skills needed to provide such translations (and we all need to earn a living). But organizations and their donors need to decide whether they are ready to listen, to put listening at the heart of funding requests, and to allocate resources to translation, interpreting and training linguists from marginalized groups on the ground.
A value for money argument could easily be made here, for what could be more effective than projects designed in true partnership with the people they are meant to serve. Indeed, as Stephanie Draper from Bond explained, changing donor policy and practice is a key stream of their new initiative to promote people-led development.
What more can translators do?
We can facilitate listening by translating the words of people whose voices are not often heard by those in positions of power.
We can be intentional. We are not unbiased conduits; we can work to recognize our own biases and inform ourselves, to push ourselves to see what we wouldn’t naturally see and to apply what we have learned in our work.
We can ask questions, of ourselves and our clients, about appropriate terminology and the attitudes the words we use reflect. We are the experts on language and how it is used in our fields. We can spark conversations.
As Lusungu Kalanga recognised when speaking at the Bond Conference about racism in the development sector, not everyone is in a privileged enough position to turn down work or have those thorny conversations. But we should do as much as we can when we can, and look for opportunities to get people thinking.
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Suggested questions that came up during the three conferences:
- What do we mean by local? Are we concealing or
disregarding power imbalances at the local level?
- Who are we empowering or disempowering when we use English (or French or Spanish) as the lingua franca?
- Is it still appropriate to use terms like beneficiaries or recipients that disempower people? Could more accurate (less lazy) terms such as local people, community leaders or service users be used instead?
- How should we use language to talk about disability?
- How can we avoid stigmatizing people living with (not
suffering from) diseases?
- What is really meant by racism and racial discrimination? Does the client mean gender-based violence or violence against women?
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Together these three conferences have helped me to vocalize how I think I have always seen my work in this sector:
I don’t translate for the international development sector; the international development sector pays me to translate for the people it serves.
