Interpreter and translator training From crisis response to sustainable livelihoods

This chapter provides an outline of the legal frameworks at international and national levels that govern communication in humanitarian contexts, from preparedness all the way through to recovery and the nexus to development. We deduce from these the legal requirements for language mediation–interpreting, translation, transcription and other forms of language support–and how countries and entire regions affected by crisis, including conflict, can responsibly meet these legal requirements together with stakeholders in the humanitarian and development ecosystem as crisis-affected countries move into the recovery stage and out of the humanitarian programming cycle. The approach is set within the World Humanitarian Summit’s Grand Bargain commitments, adopted in 2016, and the accompanying Agenda for Humanity, designed to shift power and funding to local actors (broadly defined)(Moser-Mercer et al. 2021). The discussion forms part of the humanitarian policy and practice review (Gibbons and Otieku-Boadu 2021), and within that framework contributes more specifically to the localisation debate. The Grand Bargain now brings together 64 NGOs and NGO networks with the aim of making the humanitarian system more efficient. As humanitarian action is almost always in crisis mode, the approaches championed in the Grand Bargain and its future iteration (IASC 2022) prevent humanitarian settings from becoming protracted by supporting their evolution into a more manageable post-crisis and constructive recovery mode. Sustainable solutions require long-term engagement, which the humanitarian system is not designed to provide or to …