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. Because of the chaotic situation in the aftermath of the earthquake, volunteers were able to mobilize only by massive use of social media and Internet technologies. This paper investigates the efforts of volunteer translators/interpreters to meet the needs of multilingual communication of the international disaster relief community. It explores how language volunteers mobilised and organised in spontaneous networks, what type 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.
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This list is based on CrossRef data as of 14 july 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.