Publications

Special issue on Disaster Prevention and Management

INTERACT coordinator, Prof Sharon O'Brien, and Dr Federico Federici (UCL) have edited a special issue on translation in cascading crises for the journal Disaster Prevention and Management. Further details are available here.

INTERACT publication in Journal of Humanitarian Affairs

Hunt, M., O'Brien, S., Cadwell, P. and O'Mathúna, D. (2020). Ethics at the intersection of crisis translation and humanitarian innovation. Journal of Humanitarian Affairs, 1(3). Available here.

Recently published INTERACT article in Translation and Interpreting Studies

O'Mathúna, D., Parra Escartín, C., Roche, P. and Marlowe, J. (2020). Engaging citizen translators in disasters: Virtue ethics in response to ethical challenges. Translation and Interpreting Studies. The article is available here.

New INTERACT article in Cultus Journal

Federici, F., O’Hagan, M., O'Brien, S. and Cadwell, P. (2020). Crisis translation training challenges arising from new contexts of translation. Cultus: The Intercultural Journal of Mediation and Communication, 12, pp. 246-279. This article is available here.

INTERACT coordinator at DG Trad's 2019 Conference

INTERACT coordinator, Professor Sharon O'Brien, was invited to present at the DG Trad's 2019 Conference, which took place in Luxembourg on 18-19 November. The slides of her presentation, dealing with translation as a crisis management tool, are available here.

Professor Sharon O'Brien at Translating Europe Forum 2019

Professor Sharon O'Brien presented the INTERACT project that she is coordinating at the Translating Europe Forum 2019, as part of a session titled "Helping the helpers". Professor O'Brien's slides are available here.

New INTERACT article in Translation Studies journal

Rossetti, A. and O’Brien, S. (2019). Helping the helpers: Evaluating the impact of a controlled language checker on the intralingual and interlingual translation tasks involving volunteer health professionals. In McDonough Dolmaya, J. and Del Mar, M. (eds.) Special Issue of Translation Studies. Social Translation: New Roles, New Actors. DOI: 10.1080/14781700.2019.1689161. A pre-print version is available here.

New INTERACT article in Translation Spaces journal

Cadwell, P., O'Brien, S. and DeLuca, E. (2019). More than Tweets: A Critical Reflection on Developing and Testing Crisis Machine Translation Technology. Translation Spaces, 8(2), pp. 300–333. A pre-print version is available here.

Dr Patrick Cadwell (DCU) presented the work of INTERACT and INTERACT partner Translators without Borders at the 4th Disaster Risk Reduction Conference held at the University of Warsaw on October 23-25, 2019. The interdisciplinary conference brought together academics, politicians, and members of civil society interested in geography, urban planning, and information modelling, as well as sociocultural aspects of disaster risk such as gender, language, and translation. It was agreed at the conference that language, culture, and their translation have a role to play in the effectiveness of nature-based solutions to disaster risk reduction, especially with regard to capturing local, lay knowledge about natural systems. The slides presented by Dr Cadwell can be seen here.

Dr Patrick Cadwell (DCU) presented INTERACT work on trainining translators for crisis situations in Ireland and beyond at the one-day conference The Future of Translation in Ireland, held in Trinity College Dublin on 18 October 2019. The conference was organised by the Translation Studies Network of Ireland (TSNI), a group of scholars from across the island of Ireland who have an interest in the study of translation. The slides of Dr Cadwell's presentation are available here.

Publication of Routledge volume "Translation in Cascading Crises"

INTERACT is happy to announce the publication of the Routledge volume "Translation in Cascading Crises", edited by Dr Federico Federici (UCL) and Prof Sharon O'Brien (DCU). This volume deals with the role of multilingual communication in crisis settings. Authors come from both within and outside the INTERACT netwok, and their contributions vary in terms of geographical focus, language combinations, and disciplines. The online version of the volume is available here.

INTERACT panel and presentations at EST 2019

INTERACT was well represented at the 9th Congress of the European Society for Translation Studies (EST 2019), which took place in Stellenbosch (South Africa) from 9 to 13 September. The overall theme of the conference was "Living Translation: People, Processes, Products". In line with this theme, the INTERACT network held a panel titled "Living Translation when Crisis Strikes: Policy, Training, Technology, and Ethics". The aim of the panel was to provide theoretical, methodological, and practical considerations that will help to guide translation in future crisis settings. The panel was chaired by Pat Cadwell (DCU), who also gave a presentation on training volunteer translators at Cochrane (slides here). Another INTERACT contribution focused on the work conducted by Nataša Pavlović, Sharon O'Brien, and Pat Cadwell on a post-editing 101 course for crisis response (slides here). Contributions to the panel also came from outside the INTERACT network: Wine Tesseur gave a talk on the role of international and local NGOs, while Sarah Devlin's presentation dealt with the interlingual disaster communication mediator.

INTERACT presentation at Translating Europe Workshop 2019

Dr Pat Cadwell (DCU) was invited to give a talk at the Translating Europe Workshop held in Athens, Greece, on 21 June. The event revolved around translation and community interpreting in crisis settings. Dr Cadwell's talk was titled "Crisis Translation and Interpreting: Reasons and Methods for Training". The slides are available here.

Proceedings of the INTERACT Workshop on Crisis Machine Translation at MT Summit 2019

On 20th August 2019, as part of the MT Summit, the INTERACT netwok held a workshop on crisis machine translation. The objective of the event was to share ideas, experiences, and best practices in this field with a view to moving the state-of-the-art forward. The event was chaired by Prof Sharon O'Brien, and presenters included INTERACT partners from Translators without Borders, Unbabel, and Dublin City University. In addition, there were contributions from the University of Zagreb, the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, the Universidad de Alcalá, and Universidad Europea de Madrid. The workshop proceedings are available for download here.

Announcing the publication of the report “The International Humanitarian Sector and Language Translation in Crisis Situations"

INTERACT team members from UCL, ASU and DCU jointly conducted interviews at the end of 2018 with 20 representatives of international intergovernmental organisations, and non-governmental organisations on the degree to which the service efforts of such organisations are informed by commitment to multilingual communication and language translation. Our goal was to understand how these organisations contribute to risk reduction and improved community resilience via translation. This short report provides an assessment of the current state of practice and key language access issues in the humanitarian sector. Download the report here.

INTERACT researcher Dr Patrick Cadwell participated in the Terminology Summit organised by the European Association for Terminology, and held in San Sebastián on 22-23 November 2018. He presented a poster co-authored with Dr Federico Federici (UCL) and Dr Sharon O'Brien (DCU): "Terminology and Quality for Crisis Translation".

INTERACT researcher Alessandra Rossetti attended the Cochrane Colloquium which took place in Edinburgh on 16-18 September 2018. There, she presented her contribution, entitled: "Spanish Translations of Cochrane Plain Language Summaries: Assessing the Impact of a Controlled Language Checker on Machine Translation Quality".

INTERACT collaborator Jamie Shackleton (New Zealand Red Cross) has recently published her work collaborating with INTERACT researchers at the ISCRAM Asia Pacific 2018: Innovating for Resilience, which took place on 4-7 November 2018 in Wellington (New Zealand) and which won the best insight paper award:

INTERACT researchers Catarina Cruz Silva (Unbabel), Chao-Hong Liu (DCU) and Andy Way (DCU) in collaboration with DCU researcher Alberto Poncelas presented their joint work at WMT 2018, which took place from 31 October to 1 November in Brussels (Belgium):

INTERACT researchers Chao-Hong Liu (DCU), Catarina Cruz Silva (Unbabel) and Andy Way (DCU) in collaboration with DCU researcher Longyue Wang presented their joint work at CWMT 2018, which took place 25-26 October 2018 in Wuyi University (China):

INTERACT ESR Alessandra Rossetti (DCU) presented her contribution to the SIG Writing Conference 2018, which took place from 29-31 August 2018 at the University of Antwerp, Antwerp (Belgium):

International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction Article

The INTERACT team is delighted to announce the publication of an article on Crisis Translation Policy in the International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2212420918303832?via%3Dihub

A pre-review version of this article can be consulted here. It is recommended that the published version be consulted, in particular for any citations.

Federici, F. M. and P. Cadwell. 2018. Training Citizen Translators: Red Cross Translation Needs and the Delivery of a Bespoke Training on the Fundamentals of Translation. Translation and Interpreting in Non-Governmental Organisations. Special issue of Translation Spaces. Edited by Wine Tesseur, 7(1): 20-43.

Date: 21 March 2018

Title: Proceedings of LoResMT at AMTA 2018

Editor: Chao-Hong Liu

INTERACT organised a panel at the Conference of the International Association of Translation and Interpreting Studies (IATIS), which took place from 03-06 July 2018, at Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong, The panel was organised by Dr Federico Federici (UCL) and Dr Sharon O’Brien (DCU). The contributions from INTERACT were as follows:

The contributions from alternative projects were:

Dates: 22-24 May 2018

Title: Training Needs of Translators Involved in Crisis Communication Scenarios

Authors (presenter in bold): Patrick Cadwell, Federico Federici, Sharon O'Brien

Dr Federico Federici (UCL) gave a keynote at the 2018 conference of the American Translation & Interpreting Studies Association, held at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. The title of the keynote was "Mediating emergencies: Translation, the perennial issue".

Translating Europe Workshop, 2018

Dr Federico Federici (UCL) gave a talk on crisis translation at the Translating Europe Workshop held at the University of Alcalá, Spain. The talk was titled "Crisis translation: People, problems, products, processes".

Institute of Hazard Risk and Resilience, University of Durham, UK

Dates: 19-22 September, 2017

Title: Crises in Multilingual Contexts, or the Translation Barrier

Authors (presenter in bold): Federico M. Federici (University College London), Sharon O’Brien (Dublin City University), Brian J. Gerber (Arizona State University)

Dates: 18-22 September, 2017

Title: The Interact Project and Crisis MT

Authors (presenter in bold): Sharon O’Brien, Chao-Hong Liu, Andy Way, João Graça, André Martins, Helena Moniz, Ellie Kemp, Rebecca Petras

Dates: 13-16 September, 2017

Title: A comparison of different approaches for editing health-related information: an author’s satisfaction perspective

Authors (presenter in bold): Alessandra Rossetti, Silvia Rodríguez Vázquez, Juliane Ried, Sharon O’Brien

INTERACT researcher Dr Patrick Cadwell gave an invited talk on crisis translation at the IJET-28 conference, organised by the Japan Association of Translators and held at Ohio State University on 8-9 April, 2017: "Translation in disaster and crisis settings: A new field of research".