As co-founder of both Lexcelera and Translators without Borders, I spend a lot of time switching between two hats.

Hat number one is an entrepreneurial hat, and I’ve been wearing it since I was 12. That’s when I started my first business in Northern Ontario, selling Christmas trees in a town ringed by forests of Christmas trees.

My next three businesses kept me busy from the ages of 17 to 21. At 18 I was politely asked to leave high school because my pager interrupted classes.  A couple of years later I sold my small businesses, including Lori’s Flowers and Photos, so I could go to university.

Later, with a master’s degree in creative writing, I thought I had left being an entrepreneur behind me. I moved to Paris to write the great Canadian novel. But business turned out to be hard wired: within a month I started the translation company that would become Lexcelera.
Hat number two came much later. After years of almost giving, I had run out of excuses when Doctors without Borders came knocking on Lexcelera’s door to ask us to quote on a translation project. Put up or shut up time. “If we don’t charge you, can you use the money instead for your work in the field?” I asked them, and Translators without Borders was born.
Today my passion for my company comes from the same place as my passion for Translators without Borders: finding creative solutions to language barriers by putting smart people and smart technology together. And if I spend more time nowadays wearing my Translators without Borders hat, it’s because taking down the language barriers to knowledge for a few billion people is a bigger challenge.

It’s going to take the concerted efforts of a lot of people wearing two hats!

During all those years I spent “almost giving” I imagined myself serving food in a refugee camp, or teaching children in an orphanage. I never dreamed that my own métier – translation – could actually be a key to ending poverty and saving lives.       

Translation is essential to meeting all eight Millennium Development Goals by 2015.

We believe all people deserve access to knowledge

Arabic, African, Indian Translators: Your Skills Save Lives

We particularly need those of you who translate into Arabic or an African or Indian language.

Why?

We have many exciting projects going on right now for those languages including subtitling health videos and translating health articles from Wikipedia. Our goal is to take down the language barriers to information so that people in the developing world will have access to the same information we do. To make global knowledge local – and to make local knowledge global.

There is so much good we can do.

This is what gets me up in the morning!

Please join us.

In fact, these terms are misnomers according to Sozinho Francisco Matsinhe, the Executive Secretary of the African Academy of Languages (http://www.acalan.org/).

“The former colonial languages are spoken by a very small minority elite, not the majority of the people in Africa.”

This elite tends to be educated and located in the urban areas, not the villages where the majority of Africans reside.

In “The status of languages in multilingual societies” William Mackey tells us that some 90% of Africans “have no knowledge of the official language of their country even though it is presumed to be the vehicle of communication between the government and its citizens”. This means that for up to 90% of Africans, language is a barrier. A century after independence, Africa is still a colony, linguistically speaking.

“Though spoken by a small minority confined to urban areas, the former colonial languages are given preferential treatment in all domaines, including cyber space, at the expense of the African languages spoken by the vast majority of Africans,” Matsinhe points out.

Gregory Kamwendo of the University of Botswana warns us to be careful of using classifications such as anglophone or francophone Africa.

“If you go out to the villages, you will not see people speaking English or French.”

Yet governments and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) alike cling to the idea of an Africa that can be divided into English, French and Portuguese-speaking areas. This may partly explain the failure of aid programs so far to make a significant dent in reducing poverty.

“True development can only take place when it is embedded in the languages of the people.”

Development efforts in Africa have long been conducted as if everyone in Africa spoke a European language. Every day, all across Africa, aid is being delivered in the language of the donors, not of the beneficiaries.

In Thange, Kenya, AIDS orphans play in front of a poster that promotes healthy practices; like the only healthcare manual that sits in the dispensary, the poster is in English, a language the Swahili-speaking villagers barely understand.

“Community-based development won’t happen unless we engage the people in the language they know best. If you go to the rural areas in Africa speaking English, French, Portuguese, you are speaking to yourselves because no one understands you,” says Matsinhe.

Here’s an excerpt:

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Early last year, I accompanied a group of rice farmers and extension officers from Madagascar. We visited rice farmers in Central Kenya and as the exchanges proceeded, I noticed that our Kenyan farmers were handicapped by Swahili. This was compounded all the more so since the Malagasy side were using their local language that would then be translated into French and I would pick it from there to interpret into Swahili. Being a Kikuyu myself, I formulated a request (in Kikuyu) to the Kenyan group to speak in Kikuyu. All of a sudden, the flood gates opened and exchanges continued for longer than expected.

Most of the questions asked by the Kikuyu farmers would never,  in my view, have come out due to language barriers. I was very happy and proud at the turn of events and you can be sure that I became an instant hero to them.

I was filled with a lot of empathy for the group and realized that most of what we want to communicate never gets to be communicated precisely for reasons such as the fact that we tend to lump people together without taking into account their different language needs and the extent to which they may not understand the major languages that we use. Our African rural populations look  up to us to be their window to the external world, to communicate to them any news of information coming from outside our borders, but in a language they can understand.

When I was small, my late grandmother would sit me down and dictate a letter to me in Kikuyu what she wanted to tell my uncles and aunts. I write and read Kikuyu and she had never gone to school. So she would dictate and I would draft the letter, such is how our communities can be.

Language is oneself, and denying someone the right to express themselves in the language they understand better is denying them their human rights. That said,we cannot impose on everybody to learn a different or foreign language, and that is where we translators and interpreters become messengers.

I do interpretation and translations in English/French/English. I feel privileged and lucky to have transited from a rural upbringing in Kenya into university education in France  and in England. I spent 7 years in France and 11/2 years in Brighton. I run a small translation and interpretation consultancy here in Nairobi but I also work with other interpreters and translators.

Trains graze the stalls in the Kibera slum

We’ve been invited to Kibera, Kenya’s largest slum, to talk about – of all things – translation. “We” refers to a delegation from Translators without Borders consisting of Paula Shannon, Simon and Harriet Andriesen, and myself. Kibera is a place we never expected to find ourselves in. The second largest slum in Africa after Soweto, Kibera is home to approximately 1 million of the poorest people on the planet. Our hosts on this improbable visit are 15 commercial sex workers.

To meet them we have to park at the government office then walk the train tracks that squeeze between the stalls displaying plastic buckets, clothes, tin cooking pots, coal. The tracks are so close that when the train goes by on its way to Mombasa or Uganda, it grazes the shanty structures just inches away.

Simon visits the Drop In Center

We are late arriving at the drop-in clinic run by Family Health Options Kenya and its indomitable manager, Muthoni Gichohi. But cheerful greetings are called out to us as we climb the stairs to the second floor of a tin and wood structure.

The 15 girls – and clearly they are still girls – have been waiting for us in this hot tin room for over an hour. Modestly dressed in summer dresses or tee shirts and jeans, most are still active in the sex trade, but all are also what the Kenyan Ministry of Public Health calls “peer educators”. Their role is to educate other women in the Kibera slum on reproductive health: family planning, nutrition, and prevention of sexually transmitted infections (STIs). And who better to do this work?

The girls are all natural linguists. They have to be. The average African speaks 3 languages: these girls speak up to 10. Kibera is home to 14 different tribes speaking Kikuyu, Kikamba, Luo, Maasai and of course Swahili, the lingua franca. English is only a third, fourth or fifth language.

The girls are proud of their role as peer educators here, and rightly so. They are on the front lines of the worst health care tragedy in the world. The enemy is lack of information and some of the casualties include rampant HIV infections, a large number of AIDS orphans (50,000 in Kenya alone, according to UNICEF) and female circumcision affecting up to 100% of the girls in some tribes. The Center for Disease Control estimates as much as 20% of the population is HIV positive. FHOK tells us the HIV rate among their peer educators is less than 1%. Knowledge is everything.

This is why Translators without Borders has been invited here today. They need our help to share their knowledge of healthy living.

In a room full of women who are not at all shy, Mildred is particularly outspoken. She tells us that most of the people they are working with understand little English, yet that is the language of over 90% of their written health materials. “When you teach a woman in her language, she is in a better position to understand,” she points out.

Lydia, the Public Health Nurse

Lydia is the nurse in residence. Just slightly older than the girls, she too is wearing a tee shirt and jeans. She adds “If you have a limited English vocabulary, our material may not make sense. What we need is materials they can understand.” Privacy is an often an issue: written translations mean that brochures may be studied at home.

Sitting by the window in a long flowered dress, one of the girls with braided hair chimes in. “They don’t understand our brochures so when they leave us they just throw them to the ground.” She illustrates this by making a throwing gesture.

The girls are used to working in the drop–in center as a group, even though they come from many different tribes and represent most of Kibera’s 14 languages. So they want Translators without Borders to train them as a group so they can translate their brochures into their own mother tongues. After all, they know best how to word their messages. They shine with a sense of mission. “We need to translate our materials so we can prevent them from getting STIs to live a healthy life.”

The girls are unequivocal, and more than a little persistent. “With translation we can prevent more diseases.” And they want our help.

With the objective of translating humanitarian information into the languages people need most, Translators without Borders has been drawn to Africa. However, a dearth of translators in most local languages, even those spoken by tens of millions of people, means that to fulfill our mission we must first pass through capacity building. So here we are talking to Africans about training them to translate for their own people. The demand for our training is far greater than we had ever expected. And we never imagined that we would find requests coming from a roomful of commercial sex workers.

On the other hand, who better to educate their peers than this motivated, determined group? The Department of Health Information agrees with us, but they have no budget and must themselves fight to get the money for a single computer. If we want to help, we have to find our own way to do so.

Kibera Day Care Centre

As we prepare to leave we assure the group we will try to find the funding for some computers and a space to train them in. They ask if we can do this soon, maybe in February or March. Every day more people are infected by the AIDS virus, more girls die in unsafe abortions, more children are orphaned. There is a tangible sense of urgency.

“We have many challenges,” they tell us, although this is amply clear. “So we hope you can support us.”

I believe that everything we need to bridge the knowledge divide that separates rich and poor exists today. I believe that now is the time to start dismantling the barriers to build a world where everyone can access the knowledge they need to live healthy and productive lives.

I believe we can do this, and I believe we will do this.

Lest you think I’m starry-eyed and unrealistic, let me tell you how all the pieces are falling into place. Today’s technology is giving us the means to distribute knowledge to the four corners of the world.

Did you know that already in Africa more people have access to a cell phone than have access to a pair of shoes or a toilet? A sobering statistic, but also testament to how important it is to human beings to communicate.

In Africa more people have access to a cell phone than have access to a pair of shoes or a toilet

Think of technology like cell phones, tablets and other mobile devices that are capable of connecting to the Internet. These devices can and will bring all of human knowledge into the hands of every man, woman and child. Price barriers are falling every day, internet connectivity is expanding and off-grid solutions are becoming commonplace. Most importantly, as anyone who has been to the developing world will attest, people there have the will to learn, an absolute drive to learn that may be like nothing you have ever seen before.

The will is there, and barriers are coming down. I believe we can dismantle the last and final barrier: language.

Because knowledge that is in the wrong language is just squiggles on a page or on a screen.

That is why I believe that Translators with Borders can and must take down the barrier of the language last mile. And that is why I believe the time to do this is now.

To get there we need volunteers. We need funds. We need you.

- Thanks to an online translation platform programmed for us by ProZ.com, we’ve already increased our capacity to help aid organizations two-fold, and expect to quadruple our contribution by the end of the year. To give you an example of our progress, in May we provided around $40,000 worth of free translations to NGOs: in June this figure was $50,000 and in July $60,000!

- We have gone from offering just the main European languages to donating translations in over 50 languages including Swahili, Yoruba and Tigrinya.

- Besides translating documents, Translators without Borders is now subtitling films and translating SMS messages, both ways that health information is being transmitted to people in under-resourced communities.

- We are continuing to translate documents and websites for NGOs that help them raise awareness of populations in crisis, attract funding from international donors and train their international staff. But we also have a new mission: helping people access information in their own language. We find it shocking that people who do not speak a dominant language like English or Spanish can’t access the basic information they need to keep themselves and their families healthy, and to live longer lives. So we are starting a program to mentor translators in emerging languages like Swahili to build capacity for this important work.

A wise man in Kenya once said to me:

“If your vision doesn’t scare you, it isn’t big enough.”

Well, our vision of building a world where every person has access to knowledge in his or her own language scares the hell out of me!

Come join us and help make this vision a reality. We need translators, of course, but we also need volunteers with many different skills: vendor managers, project managers, DTP experts, graphic artists, web developers, event planners, and so on. We also have a very acute need for funding to bring our programs to life. Ask me about our sponsorship program.

Please join us in translating for humanity.

Tufts University, based in Boston, has created a dynamic multimedia health knowledge management system known as TUSK. In a project funded by USAID to train university and governmental bodies on pandemic threat response, Tufts is installing TUSK at different universities throughout the developing world. The universities of Kinshasa and Lubumbashi in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) are slated to receive TUSK in 2012.

The challenge is that the open source educational system is in English, while the students and faculty in the DRC speak French.

Translators without Borders has accepted the challenge of translating the health knowledge platform into French – with one proviso. Rather than simply translate the interface into French, we plan to use this project as an occasion for local capacity building.

Rather than deliver a French translation to Tufts University, we saw this as an opportunity to make a wider impact. By matching experienced French translators with Congolese student translators, we realized that we can ensure a high-quality translation at the same time as we foster new translators in the DRC.

French volunteers from Translators without Borders, under the supervision of Suzanne  Assénat, will work via the internet to verify the translations, using corrections as a ‘teachable moment’ to explain the nuances of translation to the university students, who could go on to become professional translators.

The students we will work with are typically skilled at languages, but will have had little or no translation experience. One of the students is in the last year of studying English language and civilization and speaks French, English, Swahili, Kibemba and Nyanja. Another is trilingual, and was trained as a primary school teacher.

The potential impact of TUSK goes beyond that of a typical eLearning platform. “A great deal of TUSK is available via mobile,” says Susan Albright, Director, Tufts University Sciences KnowledgeBase. “We added this feature when we worked with our partners in India many years ago when we learned that phones were ubiquitous but computers not so.  These are the things that make our system attractive to health sciences schools in the US and the developing world.”

The DRC is just the beginning for TUSK. Says Susan Albright, “We are in the planning stages of giving TUSK to a variety of schools in Southeast Asia including the countries of Laos, Cambodia, Viet Nam and Thailand. For this we will need translation into the languages of these countries.”

Translators without Borders is planning to continue its partnership with Tufts University for the languages of Southeast Asia.