Wine Tesseur: A story of contradictions from the Save the Children UK archives.
Channel: GIRES-Global Research Institute
Date: 27/05/2021

FULL TITLE 
Found, then lost in translation? A story of contradictions from the Save the Children UK archives.

Dr Wine Tesseur is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie and Irish Research Council postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Applied Language and Intercultural Studies at Dublin City University, where she conducts research in collaboration with the Irish humanitarian NGO GOAL as part of her project ‘Translation as Empowerment’. Her research focuses on language and translation policies and practices in NGOs. She has recently co-authored a monograph called ‘Development NGOs and Languages: Listening, Power and Inclusion, with Prof Hilary Footitt and Dr Angela Crack. The book explores how international NGOs listen to the communities they work with across languages, and how these listening approaches developed over time.

ABSTRACT
Humanitarian organisations tend to rely on English as their lingua franca, and languages often have a low profile in disaster preparedness and response. This can have negative consequences, as it may render humanitarian assistance less accessible or inappropriate. This paper explores what we can learn from organisational history to understand the present low profile attributed to languages and translation by humanitarian actors. It does so by tracing the role of languages and translation in the history of one specific humanitarian organisation, Save the Children UK, on the basis of archival material.
Save the Children UK was established in 1919 to provide humanitarian assistance to children in need in famine-struck Europe. From a language perspective, Save the Children has a particularly intriguing history: it was established as a consequence of earlier efforts to translate news from the other side of the war barricades, and its founder, Eglantyne Jebb, was involved in producing the Declaration of the Rights of the Child in English and in French. Despite this early linguistically attuned history, Save the Children UK’s archives from later years rather tell a story of language silence. The paper seeks to explore and understand these contradictions, and will reflect on how they have contributed to the organisation’s attitude towards languages today.

CONFERENCE INFORMATION
"Humanitarian Organizations: (Hi)Stories, Impact and Challenges"
Organizer: GIRES-Global Institute for Research Education & Scholarship  
Date: 20-21 February 2021
Place: Amsterdam (Virtual)
More information: https://www.gires.org/activities/conferences/humanitarian-organizations-histories-impact-and-challenges/