The Afghan Languages Team accomplished remarkable feats in 2023.

We take pride in successfully concluding 951 projects, offering our assistance to nearly ten thousand individuals. Around the clock, we collaborated to provide language support across diverse areas such as immigration and asylum, legal matters, asylum clinics, education, mental health, medical services, political events involving high delegations, domestic violence, and climate change.

Machine translation is on the rise. For-profit government contractors and aid organizations are increasingly adopting these tools to cut costs. This not only costs translators their jobs, but is quite literally jeopardizing Afghans’ asylum cases. The error-riddled translations in Dari, Pashto, and countless other languages…

“Machine translations of Pashto and Dari, in particular, are riddled with errors that have introduced confusion into already complex immigration processes, and led to the rejected asylum claim of at least one Afghan refugee.”

Without the help of interpreters like those who stepped forward at Respond Crisis, we would not have been able to do our part of this community wide effort. Respond has truly allowed us to respond during this crisis.

In this video, our Afghan Languages Team Lead discusses the importance of her work and why it is so urgent to fund Afghan language practitioners.