SEE EVENT POSTER:  Translating in Danger zones

Translating in Danger Zones seminar 6, Modern Languages and European Studies

“Languages in post-conflict development: working with NGOs”, Professor Hilary Footitt and Dr Wine Tesseur (University of Reading)

Wednesday 1 February, 5-6pm, HUMSS 128

International NGOs are confronted with a large variety of languages in their fieldwork, yet languages do not tend to have a high profile within international British NGOs. Foreign language policies are often not in place, and funding for translation and interpreting needs tends to be limited. Moreover, evaluative processes usually omit references to languages. This seminar draws on early findings of the AHRC-funded project “The Listening Zones of NGOs: languages and cultural knowledge in development programmes” (2015-2018), a joint project by the University of Reading, with the University of Portsmouth and the International NGO Training and Research Centre (INTRAC), Oxford (www.reading.ac.uk/listening-zones-ngos). We will discuss how our previous research, such as on Languages at War and Translation Policies at Amnesty International, has led us to the present project. We will then describe the aid and humanitarian working space in more detail, and share some preliminary results from our interviews with NGO practitioners and translators/interpreters working for and in development projects.