Clear, timely and accurate information is recognised as strategically and operationally critical to disaster response effectiveness. Increasing cultural and linguistic diversity across the globe creates a demand for information to be available in multiple languages. This signifies a need for language translation to be a key element of disaster management. However, language translation is an underdeveloped tool in disaster management and has been a neglected topic in research. We analyse the disaster response approaches for five nations-Ireland, the UK, New Zealand, Japan and the USA-to determine the degree to which language translation is utilised. Taking the right to information as a starting point, we use a 4-A, rights-based analytic framework. Each approach is inspected for standards of Availability, Accessibility, Acceptability and Adaptability. The US has the strongest adherence to these standards while the other approaches are less developed. We suggest several principles for effective practice in providing language access services.

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In September 2015, the ADAPT Centre for Digital Content Technology carried out a focus group study of 70 translators at the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Translation (DGT). The aim was to better understand the factors involved in the translators’ adoption and non-adoption of machine translation (MT) during their translation tasks. Our analysis showed that, while broadly positive attitudes to MT could be observed, MT was not consistently adopted for all tasks. We argue that ergonomic factors related to a human translator’s needs, abilities, limitations, and overall well-being heavily impacted on participants’ decisions to use MT or not in their tasks. We further claim that it is only by taking into account the special institutional circumstances in which the activity of DGT translation is situated that these ergonomic factors can be fully understood and explained.

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