The Value of Translation – and a huge thank you

The best information in the world is useless if people cannot access or understand it. Communication and distribution of information and materials on rabies control was a central reason for GARC’s establishment, and has been at the core of what we have done ever since.

We know from our own project work that translation is a critical part of community engagement. For instance, various Information, Education, and Communication (IEC) materials including brochures, billboards and posters have been translated specifically into the local dialects of our project sites (Ilocos Norte and Sorsogon) in the Philippines. Several materials have also been translated into Bahasa for Nias Island in Indonesia.

Having these materials translated and effectively conveying our key messages into the language that community members can fully understand and relate to encourages wider community participation and gives them a sense of ownership on the project. This has proven to be extremely valuable in mobilizing the community because more than information dissemination, what we aim to achieve in the long run is sustainable social and behavior change.

GARC and the global rabies community have always benefited enormously from the work of generous volunteers from within and outside the rabies field who have donated their time and talents to support improvements to our tools and their reach – from the information itself, to translation and proofreading.

Many people have submitted educational materials in their native languages to our education bank, which we are delighted to make as widely available as we can.  Similarly, our community has helped us to translate the World Rabies Day logo into 49 languages. To translate our newsletter into French and Portuguese, Betty Dodet, Brigitte Dunais and Phyllis Romijn, all active rabies and public health specialists have donated many, many hours of time for which we are very grateful. We hope to begin translating articles into Spanish starting with this issue.

 

For our larger projects such as the translation of the Canine and Surveillance Blueprint, we have partnered with FAO Bamako in Mali and the European Commission and have recently started to work with Translators without Borders, a non-profit that allows translators to donate their talents to support NGOs such as ours. Since January 2015,  Suzanne Assenat, Jacques Barrat, Lizette Britz, MultiPro, Murielle Brugoux, Nora Glembocki, Benoit Grommersch, Daniela Helguera, ladynaty, Eric Ragu,  Irene Vitali have all provided invaluable translations and proofreading services.

Our new educational platform and Rabies Educator Certificate (REC), will shortly be available in English, French and Spanish. These three primary languages will be the only languages for the online platform, which will allow users to participate and become certified as Rabies Educators. GARC is also involved with a few large-scale training programmes targeting specific communities. Although these targeted education workshops are not the primary focus of the GARC Education Platform, the downloadable offline reading material has been translated into Creole and Khmer in order to assist in the large-scale training events where many participants are certified simultaneously.  We would like to thank all the dedicated professionals that have set time aside to translate and proofread the downloadable course work, despite the fact that the work is done just for a single event.

We would love to be able to provide all of our resources in many languages, but how to make the best use of our limited resources is a constant challenge. So our model is to reach out via the internet, with our core materials available in a few key languages so that they can be kept up to date and as useful as possible. From here we rely on facilitators and educators in rabies endemic countries to adapt those tools and information to their own settings and communicate them in their own languages.

So, from all at GARC we say to all the translators that we know and all the translators in the wider community: