Translators Without Border work with enhancing the humanitarian sectors capacity to operate in the languages spoken by crisis affected populations.
In this episode Ellie Kemp (twitter handle @EllKemp) from and Lars Peter Nissen explore the way in which the power of language fundamentally shapes humanitarian action.
You can learn more about TWBs work on their website translatorswithoutborders.org.
Transcript
This week's episode of humanitarian is with Ellie Kemp from Translators Without Borders. It's a really interesting conversation around the role that language plays in including and excluding different populations. It is truly troubling to think about how far removed we are times are from the people we serve, and how language can be something that really separate us from truly understanding what the needs and priorities of crisis affected populations are. It's such a thought provoking conversation, I hope you will find it useful and rethink your daily work in light of what what Ellie has to share. Enjoy the conversation.
Ellie Kemp, welcome to Trumanitarian.
Ellie Kemp:Thank you.
Lars Peter Nissen:It's a great pleasure to have you here. You work with Translators Without orders as the Head of Research, Evidence and Advocacy. And maybe let's begin with that. Why do we need Translators Without Borders in the first place?
Ellie Kemp:Well, in the humanitarian sector, we need it because we have a massive unacknowledged problem, for the most part, around language. We have a blind spot. There is an assumption, and it's one that, as a humanitarian of 21 years standing, I've made myself, that basically language is something that our national colleagues are going to deal with. And as a result, we, we massively limit the reach and the impact and the accountability of the work we do because we are simply not looking at this problem. It's a little bit like gender inequality 30 odd years ago, when we all suddenly realised that if we simply ignored it, we weren't going to be able to address it.
Lars Peter Nissen:It's interesting that you describe it as a blind spot, because you would assume that an organisation who works with crisis affected populations in a given country would want to be able to speak to the people they work with. And so, I mean, how can we get away with this?
Ellie Kemp:Yeah, well, that's probably power dynamics in the sector. The people that know that we have a problem aren't the ones that are making the decisions. The decisions are made in English. The whole sector works in English. In some contexts, you know, DRC, the decisions are made, the strategies and programmes are developed in French. But to get at that table, even to engage in a cluster, a Congolese organisation, or a Congolese individual, at least has to be able to articulate ideas and make a case in French. So in the former colonial language. Which is also one of the official languages, but it's not the language that most of Congo's population are confident enough to engage in.
Lars Peter Nissen:If we take DRC as an example, how many languages are there? And how many languages should we be able to operate in?
Ellie Kemp:Second one is a really hard question and we could only answer it with data. There's something over 200 languages spoken in DRC. To know which languages, we would actually need the data. And this is where the blind spot comes in. It wouldn't occur to us these days to design a programme without data on the affected population in relation to age and gender, for instance. We are finally finding, after way too long a time... struggling to incorporate data on disability, for instance. We're nowhere near getting gender... are nowhere near using language, sorry. And because we don't... so there is... incredibly, there is no global or authoritative and up to date, and free, dataset on the languages that people speak and understand. So there isn't a ready reference that humanitarians can go to. And we don't think about language. And so we don't collect data on language. So for instance, when the northeast Nigeria response got going big time, maybe eight or nine years ago, organisations turn up and say, great, well, it's an Anglophone country, that's really handy, because most of our international staff speak English. And then those international staff turned up and needed to recruit teams. They may have asked themselves, what's the big language spoken here, they may have asked government officials there, and they would have been told the official language, one of the official languages and the one most spoken in northeast Nigeria, which is Hausa which is, of course, a really important regional language. But they didn't ask beyond that. And they didn't look to collect data beyond that. And as a result, they did... as happens in humanitarian emergencies around the world, they hired national staff that the ones that actually going to implement the programme on the basis of experience and qualifications and the ability to speak English. And their ability to speak with the affected communities was not part of the equation. And to be honest, they wouldn't have been able to specify which languages should be used. And so the people... even today, the majority of humanitarian communication with communities in northeast Nigeria is happening in Hausa or in English. You go to IDP camps and there are signs up, you know, disease prevention and control messages, for instance, in English. In a context where very many people don't get an education at all, literacy levels are very low, and English is nowhere on most people's capacity to read.
Lars Peter Nissen:When you describe the problem, it is so obvious. And I don't think anybody who listens to this can really be in doubt that this is such a fundamental issue, and that it deeply affects our ability to deliver appropriate services to the populations we serve, but also impedes on our ability to be accountable to the people we serve.
Ellie Kemp:Yes, absolutely.
Lars Peter Nissen:Now, this is not a new problem. When were you actually created?
Ellie Kemp:Well, in our first incarnation (we were created in nineteen ninety-three), it was kind of a corporate social responsibility by two women who Lori Thicke and Ros Smith-Thomas, who were partners in a translation company in Paris, down the road from MSF. And they'd been working with MSF, providing translation services. And one day they asked MSF, If you didn't have to pay for the translation services, what would you do with the money? And they said, Well, we'd buy more medicines. So they set up Traducteurs sans Frontières in 93. And then, when the Haiti earthquake happened in 2O1O, they realised that they needed to go a step further, because the translation requests they were receiving from their various humanitarian partners were into French. And they said, Well, hang on a minute, French simply won't cut it. In Haiti, if you want to communicate with communities, you need Haitian Creole. And they realised they need to go a step further, and also look at expanding knowledge of languages as a starting point. And so Translated Without Borders with was founded.
Lars Peter Nissen:And so just to be clear, the name comes from MSF and that link that you describe, but organizationally today, you're not affiliated with MSF. You're independent from from them.
Ellie Kemp:Or we're entirely independent from it. Yeah, but I think it did and it does resonate, particularly with... we have this amazing community of about 60,000 linguists around the world. And that idea of language without borders, of using language across borders to support other people, is one that you know, that very much resonates.
Lars Peter Nissen:The MSF brand does have a certain level of challenge in it. I mean, they speak loudly and clearly. And when they're not happy, you know it. So do you also have a bit of that rebel streak in you?
Ellie Kemp:I think it's probably... well, MSF gets to have that rebel streak because of the independence of their funding. We're not quite as lucky in that regard. But I think it's easier as a smaller organisation to come from out of left field and speak a little... perhaps a little bit more plainly. But we are looking to evolve that brand. Because I think the big problem with Translators Without Borders is that we don't just just translate. I mean, translating is an incredibly important part of what we do, It's the core of what we do, but we do a great deal more. We do language mapping, we do research, we provide training and terminology work. There's a whole raft of services that we provide that isn't really captured in that. And so we're looking at evolving beyond that. So in the coming weeks, you're going to see an evolution of that of that brand. That looks a bit beyond.
Lars Peter Nissen:Oh really, I mean, you could break the news here.
Ellie Kemp:I could break the news here. So what's being discussed at the moment is CLEAR which is... CLEAR Global. CLEAR would stand for community, language, engagement, accountability and reach. So CLEAR Global is what we're looking at. We're not losing TWB, that remains where we come from, that remains the heart of what we do, but we do a lot more. And we're wanting to recognise that too. And also to kind of cut short the conversations where people have assumed that what we're offering is a is a semi-commercial language service, which is not the case.
Lars Peter Nissen:But let's just go back to you as an organisation. How many people are you? Where are you headquartered? What are your main work streams?
Ellie Kemp:So, for starters, we have no headquarters, which is lovely. Even before COVID hit, we were largely remote. We're registered in the US as a nonprofit. But yes, we work all over the world. My direct reports are in Tuscany and Minnesota and Bor-... no, longer Bordeaux. So all over the place. I think we're now 120, something like that. But it was 27 when I joined in 2O17. So we've grown grown a lot which has its own challenges, but also It's exciting to see it grow. It says something about the degree of traction that we're beginning to get around this idea that we need to do something about language as a sector.
Lars Peter Nissen:So you are 120 full-time staff. And then you mentioned a roster of 60,000 linguists?
Ellie Kemp:So it's a network. It's a global network of largely volunteer linguists. Some of them are in the diaspora, or have moved abroad for whatever reason, and are wanting to help people back home. I have a colleague based in Syria who for the longest... he joined us as a volunteer, supporting Syrian refugees washing up on the shores of Greece. There's some amazing people in our... in this group of linguists. And I used to be a translator myself. It's a fun thing to have. I mean, you know, as a multilingual yourself, it's nice, it's enjoyable to be able to speak other languages. But it's... as a translation... as a translator, you may often be translating quite a lot of, you know, administrative stuff. To be able to feel that your language superpower enables you to help people who are facing an emergencyis a pretty fantastic thing. And I think it motivates a lot of the people that volunteer, incredibly, volunteer their time to support people who are who are in need of it.
Lars Peter Nissen:And then what are your main work streams?
Ellie Kemp:Well, it depends, to some extent on... well I mean, basically, we provide language support that the fundements of what we do is support two-way communication. So both communicating with and listening to people affected by emergencies. And I should say that I'm speaking now about our humanitarian work. We believe that we have much less evidence to support that the same language blind spot exists in the development sector and in things like human rights, climate change. That's not the piece that I've been working on so far, but it's entirely irrelevant. So obviously, we need to give that support to the needs in a particular context. At the moment, we have three on-the-ground programmes, three country programmes, and each of them have tailored what they do to to the opportunities and needs and the data that they've gathered about the situation for affected people. So in...
Lars Peter Nissen:Which three locations are you in?
Ellie Kemp:Sorry, northeast Nigeria, DRC, and the Rohingya response in Cox's Bazar in Bangladesh. So in in Cox's Bazar, the situation was that basically the refugees spoke one language and speak one language. And the assumption of the humanitarian community was (which speaks a whole rash of languages)... was that they could communicate by hiring local people from Chittagong, because the Chittagonian language is related to Rohingya. And there was an assumption that that was gonna be close enough for communication. And yet in, I think it was October 2O17, Infonews did a survey among refugees about their ability to speak to humanitarians and whether they had whether they felt they had the information they needed to make decisions for themselves and their families. And the results were really stark. I think 56% said they couldn't speak to humanitarians and something over 70% felt they didn't have the information that they needed. And that was because it actually Chittagong isn't close enough. I mean, there's... it's very close, and that's great and that's really helpful. But just to then assume without the knowledge that that's okay, is to do what we typically do as a sector and place the burden of communication on national colleagues without training, without support, without data. And so there we discovered... when TWB arrived, and was able to dig into this a little bit, we discovered that words like 'pregnant' and 'help' and 'pain' and 'storm' are not mutually intelligible between Rohingya and Chittagonian. And so both sides need a little bit of help in that communication. And the organisations need to be aware that is a challenge. So in Cox's Bazar, what we've been able to do is work as part of a consortium with BBC Media Action and Ground Truth solutions, and earlier with Internews, just providing a common service for community engagement, accountability. And that's it. Yeah, it's a raft of services. It's about being part of an existing communication with communities, collective effort. So we're part of decisions about how best to communicate, we're part of... we're able to give advice on the format, we're able to give advice on graphics, and of course, we do a lot of a lot of translation, and a lot of support to, and research into, the perceptions of the community, what they're understanding what they're having difficulty with, that we can then relay back to other humanitarian organisations as a basis for them to change the way they're going about things to respond, concerns and so on. In other situ-... so in Nigeria, northeast Nigeria is a very different situation. There you have this communication in Hausa, typically, and population... So the IOM's data suggests that something between 30 and 40 languages are spoken by people affected by the conflict in the in the Northeast. So they have a real challenge of how are you going to cater for all of those people. So now we provide language support in nine languages, in those languages of northeast Nigeria. We do as much as we can in audio. We advocate a lot for audio because literacy levels are so low. And one of the exciting things we've done there is work with IOM to make their community feedback mechanism accessible to speakers of marginalised languages, and to people whose literacy level is not that great. So what they did was set up these simple, very simple recording devices in camps. And people could just leave a message and then TWB... they could leave a message in whatever language they wanted, then we got the recording and figured out which language it was and transcribed and translated it.
Lars Peter Nissen:So, what you describe sounds to me like you work as a public good for the humanitarian sector. So it's not a client relationship you have to the individual organisation, They don't pay you for your services.
Ellie Kemp:We like to think of it as partners when it's bilateral. But... so there are two models basically. Whenever we can, it's certainly our preferred option to provide a common service across a response, because that means that small NGOs can also access those services. It means that everybody gets access to it. Where we can't do that, and we want to work in a bilateral partnership, because an individual organisation has brought us in, then our agreement with them is that anything that we produce, whether it's a glossary of terms or training or maps or research findings, that those will be shared with the whole community.
Lars Peter Nissen:And is that typically... When you go into a bilateral relationship, is it typically an NGO? Is it the one of the big operational UN agencies? Is it OCHA? Who contracts you?
Ellie Kemp:Yeah, generally, one of the big UN agencies, or one of the big international NGOs. And we have never had a problem with them accepting that what we're doing is for the public good. It's part of our our ethos. So I think those those organisations, and those individuals within organisations that get that language is an under-acknowledged issue, also want that. They see that there's a need for change across the sector.
Lars Peter Nissen:I mean, as you speak, the enormity of this just hits me, right?
Ellie Kemp:That's really good to hear. It is it's huge. It's huge. And it's from the beginning. Because we don't have that basic data, we make assumptions. We make assumptions that Chitigonian is going to be okay, we make some assumptions, that Hausa is going to reach everyone. Whereas when we could replace that entirely, we hire potentially the wrong people. We hire people who aren't going to have the skills, the language skills, to do what we're going to ask of them. And then we don't provide them with the training and support. Translation interpreting is so regularly... I've done this myself, I'm guilty of it myself. I had a colleague and in Eastern Congo years ago, who was known to be really good at languages. And I was forever asking him, Hey, you speak this language. Would you mind helping me? I didn't really give him an opportunity to say, actually, I'm, I'm not that strong in Lindow. So probably best not to. I didn't tell him, This is what I'm going to. I want to ask her about, you know, are you comfortable with those terms or any of those difficult to translate? I didn't ask him, Is this an okay subject for you, as a Swahili speaking man, to be asking her about? Or for me as a foreigner to be asking her about none of that? I just barged it. And I think we typically do. But then it really is at the fundament. The research that we've done... In northeast Nigeria, for instance, we were we interviewed and did comprehension testing with the numerators, who were carrying out needs assessments for various different NGOs. So three teams of enumerators. First of all, we did comprehension testing on terms taken from surveys that they were already using. And in the best case, the team that understood most understood 8 out of 10 of these key terms. In the worst case, it was one in 10. Typically abbreviations, technical terms, abstract nouns. So we don't we don't always... and this isn't everyone there are some organisations like REACH, for instance, does an amazing job at this, I know a CAPS typically do an amazing job at this as well, who think about language and prepare their enumerators. But that's not typical in the experience that we've had so far. And certainly in this... the sample that we had in Northeast Nigeria, they were not asked if they understood the survey questions. They were not... they were expected... they were given the survey questions in English, normally, and they had... they were left to translate that as they wish. So if you have content that you don't fully understand, and then each person translates it as they think, you're not going to get the same question being asked in any data expert will tell you that that's a non-starter for getting good quality data, then they're doing an on site translation from English into Hausa. And then translating the reply that comes back in Hausa into English on their form with speed (you can already see where this is going), then when the person was involved in and how does that work? Do people already speak good enough house? So they said, No, often not. So what do you do? Well, in that case, we will, we'll simplify the question and we'll use hand gestures, and then you get the answer back in hand gestures as well. And when they couldn't find... when the person didn't speak good enough Hausa and for that, they would do as the rest of us have and ask a member of the community, often a child, because they're this kind of linguistic sponge creature among us, to interpret. Now, if the enumerator doesn't fully understand the question and the terminology to start with, asking this child to do so is... really should be a non-starter. We should not be doing that. And so you have t this hedge hopping English to Hausa, Hausa to Waha, question gets answered, God knows what the question is at this stage, and then it bounces back on to your form in English. And then worse was... even that, is that sometimes they can't find the child. Sometimes they can't find somebody in the community who speaks good enough Hausa and Waha to support that process. And we said, So what do you do, and they, Well, have no choice. We just have to move on to the next person that we can speak to. And that means that the needs assessment data on which our programmes are designed on which funding decisions are made, routinely excludes an entirely unknown proportion of marginalised language speakers. And those that do get hurt. Those that do say, yes, you can speak to me, are the people that are most confident in a dominant language, so they're more likely to be those that did get an education, those that are relatively less vulnerable?
Lars Peter Nissen:Yeah, it creates a massive danger of reproducing the inequality that already exists.
Ellie Kemp:Exactly.
Lars Peter Nissen:And the Tower of Babel just comes to mind as such a power.
Ellie Kemp:Indeed. I mean, you're going to have a programme that isn't really designed for a section... it's not designed for marginalised language speakers, at least. It's... it then services are set up which don't take language on board. So maybe you're that Waha speaking woman, and your child is sick, and you take her to the doctor, and you and the doctor can't speak to each other because setting up the service to respond in Waha really wasn't part of the whole plan. And maybe you given some medicine, you're given a ORS or something to take away and the instructions on the packet are, at best, in Hausa. So you rely on somebody else, maybe a neighbour maybe a family member, typically a younger man, who's has a better chance of being able to read what's on the back of the packet.
Lars Peter Nissen:So really, does it make sense to talk about localization if we can address this language issue? I mean, we... it's such a focus for the sector, but the way you describe it... Is it meaningful if we don't fill this gap?
Ellie Kemp:I think we'd have to redefine what local... what we mean by local. It... We know that it's hard for really grassroots organisations in crisis-affected countries to get to the table to engage with the internationally dominated cluster system and coordination mechanisms. We don't mean it to be that way. I don't think humanitarians are generally bad people. But we're comfortable in our language space and it's in, you know, it's in our languages. It's in international languages. We did a really interesting piece of research recently with the global education cluster and the child protection area of responsibility, because they were interested in understanding the reach and uptake of the guidance they produce. They produce a lot of technical guidance based on decades of work across different countries and they tried to make it available to cluster members in the various countries. So we started... we spoke to practitioners of child protection and education in DRC, and Bangladesh and Mozambique, and we found that language is one of the huge issues for accessing that content. (There were others. There's, you know, internet access, having an electricity supply, having enough hard copies, you know, one hard copy in the staff room for 40 teachers is an issue.) But also our tendency as a sector not to use plain language. Our love of jargon, which is pretty impenetrable, even to the native English speaker, and I speak as a native English speaker. And... Oh, that's a good one. One of my favourite is protection. If you've ever tried to hire a protection officer and found that group four people were working out, you realise just how unclear the term protection is. And yet we, we use our jargon like everybody understands it. And that's a massive challenge. It means you're having an insider conversation. And you're having it largely in international languages. And even when... for heaven's sake, I worked in Congo for four years. Even in French, you're using English. If your first language is Nande, that's really no help to you. We saw that in the... in recent Ebola outbreaks in DRC. So in the 2O18 to 2O21. We found that... and we've seen it again in Guinea with the latest Ebola outbreak. An English medical term like 'swab' is taken for some reason into French, which has perfectly good words for it, and turned to a verb, so it's then 'swabby'. And so, health communicators in eastern Congo, and doubtless also in Guinea, were being trained about this thing called 'swabby', which happened to... when someone had died as a test to find out whether they'd been infected with Ebola. Typically, what we found in eastern Congo, in that response at any rate, was that someone whose first language was maybe Swahili or maybe Nande, around the Beni centered outbreak, was being trained in French, or they were maybe being trained in Swahili, but the communicat-... the conversation they did have with communities was typically in Nande. And they weren't prepared for that at all. The terminology that was being used to train them was not terminology they understood. It doesn't even exist in a dictionary. It's not real language. So yes, when we did... to go back to what we found out with the... with this recent research, that use of technical jargon, the use of very formal language, the failure to think typically about communicating in local languages, rather than the official, generally postcolonial, language of the country really lets people down. It's a significant barrier to access. And if we want (and will surely as a sector)... we want local and national organisations with their vastly superior insights into what's going on, and what can change and who is vulnerable, to take the leadership in humanitarian action, then... and we still want these standards that we've worked so hard to develop, you know, with so much pain still to be applied, then we have to find a way to square that circle. The good news is, I think there is a lot more attention to it. If you look on the, you know, the online libraries for child protection and education now, you will see that there are more... in recent years, there are more and more guidance, materials and so on that are being made available in languages outside the UN languages. But still, the number one is English. Still, if you can fluently understand English, then you're far ahead of the pack. And that's really no way to get those insights and that local expertise at the top of the table.
Lars Peter Nissen:So I think I understand how you influence and improve the operations when you're there, right? So that when you translate something, obvious... obviously that that makes it more likely that the aid given is appropriate. But what's your theory of change? Because you can't be everywhere all the time. So how are you thinking in terms of system change?
Ellie Kemp:Well, we we do more work... where we're present, we do more than provide the translation. We also advise [inaudible]... we advise on how to set up, for instance, accountability mechanisms, so that they will be as accessible as possible. We do research to understand what's what's going wrong, and communication between effective people and humanitarians. And we advise on that. We are small and feisty and it's a big world with a lot of humanitarian emergencies in it. So we need to raise awareness, and we need to get... the first thing is to get the data out there. Because as you say, with any other humanitarian I talked to about this, the almost universal response is, Oh, goodness, I've never thought about it like that. But now you say it, it's obvious. Pretty much as you said. So you have to have the evidence in front of you. Otherwise, it's very easy to assume that it's being taken care of. It's very easy to assume that national colleagues have got this, except that we haven't prepared them to get this. So the... one of the most fundamental things is getting organisations to collect the data. When REACH's MSNA, Multi-sector Needs Assessment, in 2O19 for Nigeria included language questions for the first time, that was a real eye opener. We discovered that despite this being the main language of communication for humanitarians, it's a minority language. 31% of respondents, the MSNA spoke it as a first language, and 41% couldn't read it. And that changed things. That influenced, I think the Mine Action sector, for instance, started developing its guidance in the nine languages that we can offer and a lot of other organisations there are looking at it similarly. This year, 2O21, would be a great year, for instance, for the MSNAs around the world (I mean, there's going to be another dozen carried out) to add language questions. There's a... we're pushing with everyone that will listen to us, for at least one question to be added. Very simply, what's the main language you speak at home? And there are three others that we would recommend behind that which have already been accepted as part of the IRC'S AAP questions... kind of standard questionnaire. But I know that people who develop surveys are reluctant ever to add more for the volume of work that it adds. But it gets you such a wealth of data. And if the same questions or similar questions, comparable questions, are asked in each context, then we can start to build a picture. So I think we've changed... is to is to raise awareness through data, and through our research and through trying stuff out. I mean, the services that we've developed in the last four years in particular, have been on a trial and error basis. We've, you know, found what seems to work best, we continue to learn and we were lucky enough to have some partners that are interested to learn with us. And everything we do, we have to shout about. Everything we do, we need to use through whatever forums we can to just to draw people's attention to this is not a nice to have, but an absolutely fundamental piece of doing humanitarian programming effectively. And accountably, which is a core component of it. But if you can't... if certain groups are never going to be able to make a complaint, then we have a problem.
Lars Peter Nissen:This learning process that you describe, where is it going to take you do you think? What... When you look at the future, five years, 10 years from now, what what is clear for Translators Without Borders? What... How will you have transformed the world if things go your way?
Ellie Kemp:One thing we will have done that we haven't spoken about so far is we will have moved things a lot a long way forward on the using language technology, developing language technology in marginalised languages. Because that Waha speaking woman with a sick child, what she really needs is for Microsoft Translator to work in Waha in order to speak to the doctor. And she needs Google Translate to work in Waha, so she can read the back of the medicine packet. And that puts it in her hands. She doesn't have to go through, you know, a male neighbour, she doesn't have to go through a humanitarian, she can get the information she wants when she wants it. So that's a huge piece. And we're working towards that. Yeah, building various tools that can support that.
Lars Peter Nissen:So you're engaging with Google, with Microsoft, to influence the way they develop the tools.
Ellie Kemp:We do work with... it's not about the way they develop the tools. So language... machine translation requires a massive data so that the technology for doing it is out there and organisations like those two have been a big part of developing it. So you need the parallel data: you need the Waha text, and it's the English equivalent, and you need masses and masses of that for machine translation. So one of the things that we do, and the agreement that we have with all of our partners, is that it content that we translate, humanitarian content that we translate, we will use as parallel texts to build that translation capacity. And there are exciting possibilities around that. For voice translation, which is obviously much more relevant for most of the planet, since most of the planet are not that strong in reading and writing. We... what we... sorry, for voice data... for voice translation, you need less data than for text. And so there's a lot of opportunities there that we can develop. And we're working with Kobo, for instance, which is one of the most widely used data collection tools in the humanitarian sector to look at integrating automated transcription into their tools which would enable the sector to listen more directly, not through some kind of a gatekeeper,to people directly affected. But beyond that, I think it would be lovely... I think the... we're already seeing a big uptake in demand for marginalised language services. I'd really like to see that overtaking the UN languages. I think we... we're keen to work with translators and linguists to build their capacities, to build the capacities of the language services industry, in crisis affected countries so that that capacity is there. It shouldn't have to be a TWB in the middle. So some more national and local language capacity that's established that works well that, you know, the aid organisations know where to find it. And they know how to deal with humanitarian texts and provide humanitarian services. Yeah, and just... if we were to leave no one behind, we need to be tracking it. And so, in five or 10 years time, it will be wonderful if it was standard for humanitarian programmes to collect data on the languages of the service users, and to track, you know, health outcomes, education outcomes against that.
Lars Peter Nissen:And so what are your... What's your wish list for the individual humanitarian who's listening to this and who's wondering how he or she can help out with the work here? What do you want them to do? What's your call to action?
Ellie Kemp:Think about language, see language, stop being invisible. Think about it, talk about it, ask questions about it. And the first thing to do is ask the people that you are serving about their language and communication preferences, and then take it from there. It's a lot of this is really not rocket science. It just needs not to be invisible anymore.
Lars Peter Nissen:Ellie Kemp, thank you so much for coming on Trumanitarian. Thank you for all the work you do in Translators Without Borders. Thank you for helping us see the blind spot. It's such a fundamental piece. And you sometimes wonder how we have been able to function for so long without really focusing on this. So thank you.
Ellie Kemp:Thank you very much.