Chairing Multi-Lingual meetings

The success and quality of your meetings rely on everyone being given the space to contribute their views and information without fearing the consequence of anything they might say and without making them look stupid in front of their peers.

Conducting meetings entirely in either the relevant international language or the local language reduces effectiveness as it excludes key stakeholders. There are four options for interpretation:

1.     Whispering: Useful when only one or two people require interpretation, but it is distracting.

2.     Liaison: The interpreter translates a few sentences at a time. This is effective in short meetings when every word has to be understood, but becomes tedious and more than doubles the length of the meeting.

3.     Consecutive: The interpreter listens to a longer exchange of information, takes notes, and then delivers a summary. This method is probably the most useful as it captures key points but it risks losing some of the required detail.

4.     Simultaneous: Requires a radio microphone for the interpreter and headsets for the listeners. Obligatory in larger or more formal multi-national meetings, but requires technology, high levels of technical translation skill, and a pool of interpreters who can rotate (every half hour or so).

The method I have found to be the most effective and the most efficient is to chair the meeting and make presentations in the international language while simultaneously projecting a summarised version in the local language on a screen dedicated solely to that use (i.e in the opposite corner to the main screen being used). This version then becomes the basis for the meeting notes that you will circulate after the meeting.

It is important to recognise that improving accountability is a process that starts with the capacity to listen and respond to those affected.

People will respond in different ways to an emergency and some will be more resilient than others, providing ample opportunity to start the process of consultation. Emergencies personnel can and should nurture people’s capacity to overcome adversity by listening, providing clear and accurate information and opportunities for people to shape the responses and to feed back on actions taken.

Of course, as I mentioned at the beginning, and slightly counter-intuitive as it appears, it is actually lack of language skills that is one of the prime determinants of poor coordination.

Of course, other aspects are also important. For example, the vocabulary of disaster ensures that we use

• Aid Speak (see below)
• Incomprehensible acronyms, not just of the humanitarian enterprise as a whole, but with its myriad technical specialisms

This is an extract from an article in the 27 January 2011 edition of the Economist:

THE emerging new country of South Sudan, which has voted overwhelmingly for secession from the north, has already become a leading nation of “the workshop”: not a place where hard work gets done under duress but where the language of aid is taking hold even among the natives. “I feel like a stakeholder now,” exclaimed a woman of the Dinka tribe, the region’s most prolific.

All the favourite words of NGO-speak are now aired in the makeshift corridors and canteens of Juba, the fledgling capital. Top of the list are “empowerment”, “capacity-building” and “stakeholder” (not someone actually carrying a stake). “Governance”, “civil society”, “facilitators” and “disadvantaged” follow fast behind. British NGOs have a fondness for “focal groups”. Americans like anything that leads to “inclusion”, especially of the “excluded”.

The joy of such terms’ is that they are nice and woolly, hard to define, and harder still to contradict: who could possibly turn down the chance to enhance development practitioners’ facilitation skills for the capacity-building of gender-disadvantaged women?

NGO-speak is particularly cherished and fostered in the grant applications that smaller NGOs have to file to the bigger ones. U

Now, what do us humanitarians do at the moment?

• Hire local interpreters at community level. This is fine when doing a participatory rural appraisal under the Banyan tree
• Provide sequential interpretation in larger meetings. But this more than doubles the length of the meeting.
• Provide simultaneous interpreting services dotted about the room. But people don’t like to admit they don’t understand.
• Project written translation in real time. Works well, but is highly dependent on a rare skill and electricity.
• And as for the written word, do it badly though ‘google translate’ or wait a week or more to find anything on the website

The international humanitarian system fails to provide translation and interpretation services as an integral component of its coordination management arrangements. Why? Because coordination costs money.

But, poor coordination costs lives.

If the inability to engage with disaster victims through lack of a common language results in poor coordination, then, by definition, people die needlessly or suffer unnecessarily as a direct consequence of being unable to converse with the aid community that has come to help them.

In other words, language kills.

Coordinated poorly, each disaster event has the potential to set back attainment of the MDGs as resilience and coping capacities among affected populations erode.

Ongoing reform of the humanitarian sector led by the United Nations demands that aid expenditures are as efficiently and effectively used as possible. This infers that cost-effective and appropriate relief interventions have been planned for based on local assessment of needs, capacities, priorities, and solutions.

Yet, the very people who know their needs best – those who have been directly affected by disaster – become disenfranchised because in too many cases they do not speak the same language as the international aid community that has arrived to support them.

As a result of this disconnect, it is estimated that a significant percentage of humanitarian aid is squandered through poor appreciation of the need and consequent misallocation of incorrect relief supplies.

Internationally-recognized ‘good practice’ guidelines for disaster response stipulate the inclusion of the affected population into the policy formulation and operational decision-making process. Yet, every recent evaluation of external humanitarian assistance specifically cites the language barrier as one of the major constraints to achieving this.

International humanitarian agencies, including the United Nations system, recognize the problem, acknowledge the need, and are increasingly asking for provision of language services.

The aim is to provide Cluster coordination mechanisms in the field with a consistent and high quality translation and interpreting service using stand-alone portable systems and web-based applications managed by local humanitarian enterprise initiatives.

TIP:

Once a document has been translated, get a separate translator who has not seen the original document to translate it back – does the translation make any sense?!

If you would like to know more, contact the author on [email protected]