Zoe Moores, David Orrego-Carmona, Pia Ghosh, Tom Bartindale, Delvin Varghese and Margherita Angelucci:

The Action Translate Team, based at the Universities of Warwick, Northumbria and Monash

What is Action Translate?

Action Translate is an all-in-one team, initiative and crowdsourcing platform that supports volunteer translation initiatives. Working alongside academic partners, Action Translate recruits and trains multilingual students and volunteers from around the world to join our translation action and supports them as they take what are often their first steps working on a real-world, collaborative translation project of this size.

Since 2022, we have been working alongside the International Federation of the Red Cross and Crescent Societies (IFRC) and the Solferino Academy as they engage young people around the world to innovate for climate and environmental crises. Every year, the Solferino Academy runs the Limitless Innovation Academy, which helps individual National Societies of the IFRC Network transform and prepare for challenges and opportunities of the future. This year, the programme will be supporting youth volunteers to lead projects that promote peace, social cohesion and community resilience across 19+ languages. 

For some volunteers, this is their very first encounter with translation, but all who join us gain new skills and translation experience - and content which would not otherwise be translated due to financial restrictions becomes accessible to Limitless trainees around the globe. Additionally, through discussions about translation, practical experience and personal reflection, volunteers learn about the complexities of translation, and this in turn increases the visibility of translation in wider society.

How does Action Translate work?

We use a ‘human-in-the-loop’ workflow for our translations. First, all of the content is machine-translated, allowing us to draw on the speed and power that neural machine translation technology offers. After engaging with our training materials, our volunteers use their language expertise to post-edit and review this machine-translated content to ensure that the materials the Limitless trainees receive are of good quality.

For every project, we run an onboarding session allowing project managers and volunteers to connect, learn to navigate our platform, receive basic training on translation processes and working with machine-edited content, and gain access to a range of materials to support them as they work. This allows volunteers to familiarise themselves with the subject matter and audience of the material they will be working on, further their knowledge about translation, and get to know their colleagues. Then the translation begins, and volunteers log in across time zones and collaborate as they post-edit and review the Limitless materials. Project managers track the progress of each language, and can direct volunteers to work on particular content so that resources are ready on time.

Why create a bespoke platform?

The Action Translate platform is central to the running of each project - and by creating a bespoke platform, we have been able to embed a number of core principles into our work:

• Communication and collaboration: Creating a space for volunteers to communicate as they work is vital on a round-the-clock collaborative project such as this. The platform facilitates a direct chat with other team members, and there is a dedicated space to develop a language-specific glossary, tailored to the content being translated.
   
• Flexibility and responsiveness to the needs of the IFRC and our volunteers: Translating a wide range of content (from video resources, marketing posters and training manuals to shorter texts such as website strings or WhatsApp exchanges) on this scale using open access resources (YouTubeStudio, Canva, GoogleDocs…) can be challenging, but is essential if the IFRC Solferino Academy is to truly respond to the needs of its communities. 
   
• A safe and welcoming space to grow: Even though our content is engaging, motivating and low risk, signing off that first task can still be daunting. Our volunteers know that every task they work on will be reviewed, and queries raised will be addressed. To recognise their efforts, translators are rewarded with badges as they progress, and all receive certificates at the end of the programme.
   
• Skills for the future: All our volunteers leave with experience of a new project and platform for their CVs, and often increased confidence. In addition, we invite volunteers enrolled in translation degrees to become project managers and develop new skills.

What does the future hold?

Our work to date has highlighted the positive impact of translation on the work of IFRC and Limitless - and underlined the fact that fully automated solutions cannot be relied upon. Human involvement is key for effective technology integration.

What we want to do now is to support IFRC teams around the world in bringing translation tasks in-house, training them with the skills to coordinate and project manage the translation of vital material, so that their employees, in turn, are able to bring their multilingual prowess into the work that they do. 

Views expressed on CIOL Voices are those of the writer and may not represent those of the wider membership or CIOL.