Resources

Citizen Translation course

The INTERACT project has now made its free, online Citizen Translation course available on YouTube. There are 12 short videos explaining basic concepts in translation, and five videos explaining the basics of machine translation and post-editing. Transcriptions for all narrated content are available in English. Feel free to subtitle in your language! A Train the Trainer manual is also available. Though this content is intended for crisis translation where professionals may be unavailable, it may be useful for translation/machine translation literacy in general. As is stated in all courses, this is not intended to replace essential professional translator training.

INTERACT recommendations on policies

The INTERACT network has put forward 10 implementable and policy-based recommendations whose goal is to address gaps in current practices of emergency management communication. These recommendations aim to contribute to the crisis translation policies of national, EU and international agencies. The recommendations can be seen here.

Ethics recommendations for crisis translation settings

The INTERACT team has relesead a set of ethics recommendations emerging from Work Package 6 (“Ethical Challenges for Crisis Translation”). The report can be accessed here.

INTERACT-Cochrane free webinar on motivating, managing, and training volunteers

Dr Patrick Cadwell (Dublin City University), Juliane Ried (Cochrane), and Prof Livia Puljak (Catholic University of Croatia) delivered a webinar to provide an overview of Cochrane's largely volunteer-driven translation activities in different languages. Results from the INTERACT project and from Cochrane Croatia were presented. The webinar is of interest to anyone who wants to know more about managing and training volunteers. Issues discussed include feedback, motivation, sustainability, and quality control in the context of volunteering activities. The slides and the recordings are freely available here.

Related project: Translation as Empowerment

The 'Translation ans Empowerment' project, led by Dr Wine Tesseur, investigates the critical role of translation in establishing an equal, two-way dialogue between Northern NGOs and their partner organisations in the Global South. The project considers translation, in written and oral form, as a contributor to communities’ empowerment in two ways: as a tool that provides access to information; and as a tool that enables voices to be heard. The project focuses on human rights advocacy organisations, because language rights are part of the human rights agenda. Details on the project here.

Practical recommendations from WP3

Alessandra's PhD research, conducted as part of INTERACT Work Package 3, dealt with the usability of different approaches for the simplification of health content. Using the plain language summaries and the abstracts produced by the non-profit organisation Cochrane (one of the INTERACT's partners), Alessandra examined: (i) the satisfaction of volunteer authors of simplified medical texts; and (ii) the readability, comprehensibility, and machine translatability achieved in medical texts. A non-automated approach to text simplification and a semi-automated one were compared throughout the thesis. The non-automated approach involved the manual implementation and checking of different sets of plain language guidelines, while the semi-automated approach involved the introduction of a controlled language checker, a tool that automatically and consistently flags readability and translatability issues in texts. Practical recommendations emerging from Alessandra' s PhD research can be found here.

Crisis-related terminological sources:

Websites of INTERACT partners