Abstract
After Haiti was hit by a devastating earthquake in January 2010, the disaster relief community saw the unprecedented response of thousands of spontaneous helpers – among them many multilinguals. Translators and interpreters were urgently needed to help establish communication within the disaster relief community, to assist in coordinating crisis intervention, and above all, to provide urgent language services for those affected. Due to the chaotic situation in the aftermath of the earthquake, volunteers were able to mobilize only by massive use of social media and internet technologies. The article investigates the efforts of volunteer translators/interpreters to meet the needs for multilingual communication of the international disaster relief community. It explores how language volunteers mobilized and organized in spontaneous networks, what kind of (translation) projects they launched and engaged in, which language technologies they used or helped to develop, and which challenges they met during their work.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | Non-Professional Interpreting and Translation: State of the Art and Future of an Emerging Field of Research |
| Editors | Rachele Antonini, Letizia Cirillo, Linda Rossato, Ira Torresi |
| Place of Publication | Amsterdam |
| Publisher | John Benjamins |
| Pages | 231-255 |
| Publication status | Published - 2017 |
Austrian Fields of Science 2012
- 602051 Translation studies
- 211921 Civil protection and disaster control