Emily Sarmiento
Executive Director, PGLS Cares Foundation
When crises are unfolding, language barriers can be deadly. Without timely communication and comprehension, at-risk and crisis-affected populations can experience worse outcomes, and humanitarian teams are inhibited from responding comprehensively to real-time needs.
For these reasons and more, language access plays a critical role in crisis response. Nonprofits and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) working in diverse regions rely on humanitarian interpreters, cultural mediators, and translators to bridge communication differences, navigate cultural nuances, and act with sensitivity and professionalism. Here is how the essential (but often invisible) work of linguists directly supports capacity-building for teams operating in the field, along with lessons learned to enhance future crisis response.
How Language Access Acts as a Capacity-Building Tool in Crisis Response
To quote Translators without Borders: “Information in the wrong language is useless.” Effective communication, whether proactive, timely, or post-event, is the foundation of crisis response, enabling teams to act in accordance with priorities. When accurate communication is not accessible as a result of language barriers, a higher rate of fatalities, suffering, damages, and other harms is likely to occur. Language access supports the purpose of crisis response by providing the means to disseminate information, in the right languages, to save lives and protect human dignity.
Language access also aids capacity-building by empowering the people on the ground to gain a more comprehensive situational understanding, track statuses, and share actionable updates with headquarters for fundraising and mobilization. Language access enables more efficient and effective direct services delivery to aid affected communities and partner with other response agencies. Finally, language access allows field teams to identify when they need to pivot out or adapt their response approach.
For example, as it fights to maintain its independence, Ukraine has garnered broad support from the international community, and its population has suffered greatly. Humanitarian interpreters and cultural mediators from around the world have been called upon to bridge communication. CLEAR Global, an international leader that facilitates global communication, offers a toolkit to align field workers with the resources they need to communicate with Ukrainians impacted by violence.
One key finding from the toolkit is Ukraine’s broad multilingualism. According to Ukraine’s 2001 census, 20 languages are spoken within its borders. It is well known that at least one third of Ukraine’s population speaks Russian, but populations that often go overlooked include an estimated 150,000 to 400,000 Roma, who may speak Romani as a first language. Thousands more speak Crimean Tatar, Bulgarian, or Hungarian. Without this important data, aid programs may fail to reach some of Ukraine’s most vulnerable communities.
It serves as an important reminder to pursue demographic data to aid in decision-making about field staffing and language access. In many cases, high-conflict zones will affect marginalized populations who speak minority languages. While up-to-date census information is not always readily available in these situations, field teams can source real-time feedback to identify the appropriate language access resources for a given situation, leveraging virtual interpreters and mediators to bridge needs in the interim.
What Does Crisis Response Look Like without Language Access?
When crisis teams operate without the support of expert linguists that reflect a region’s diverse linguistic makeup, the reach and potential for impact are lessened. In this context, humanitarian teams would be operating based on a diminished understanding of the populations they intend to serve and support. This can be damaging to credibility and halt trust-building efforts.
Life-saving information, including medical care, trauma counseling, food distribution events, pop-up shelters, and relocation services may not reach the vulnerable groups who would benefit most. Additionally, authorities and watch groups would be limited in their access to witness testimony, which is detrimental to defending human rights or prosecuting perpetrators down the line.
Community interpreters play an important role to bridge needs when trained linguists are not available. That said, for privacy and professionalism’s sake, there are use cases where trained third parties can offer enhanced support, particularly in trauma-informed cases.
Interpreting and Translation as Harm Reduction
Trauma shuts people down. Information on war crimes and human rights attacks, such as mass killings, forced labor, child soldier enlistment, child marriage, and sexual violence, is hard to ascertain even in the best of conditions. Trauma-informed interpreting is essential in these cases and must be grounded in cultural understanding, nuance, and sensitivity. Interpreters must act in accordance with international law and local culture, navigating the very real fears of social, financial, or legal repercussions for reporting crimes. Gaining (and retaining) trust is essential.
This is why working with local humanitarian-trained linguists, whenever possible, makes a difference. This approach also contributes to harm reduction by avoiding unnecessary retraumatization due to poor communication or non-adherence to trauma-informed interpreting norms. Field teams landing in a new context may lack cultural understanding, and communities may rightfully be wary of outsiders. Local cultural mediators not only support credibility, but they also can help local citizens reach a better mutual understanding of a humanitarian field team’s presence and purpose, which can help enhance trust with crisis-affected communities.
When local linguists are not available, as is sometimes the case, be sure your approach meets affected populations on a peer level. To build credibility, responders that effectively and swiftly bridge language gaps are better positioned to earn trust by those affected by the crisis, by local authorities leading response, and by governmental, intergovernmental, or partner NGO agencies. Doing so can save more lives and begin the healing process sooner.
Where Has Language Access Made a Difference in Crisis Response?
In conflict zones, such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan, and Ukraine, interviewing women and children or others about human rights abuses requires culturally sensitive, effective interpreting. This approach allows crisis responders to ascertain what happened, gather defensible evidence, prepare a response, and bring perpetrators to justice. The International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague needs these carefully secured and preserved testimonies to prosecute war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide.
Language access is essential for local crises, too. The 2025 Los Angeles wildfires demonstrated an urgent need for better multilingual disaster communications. A recent study led by UCLA and the AAPI Equity Alliance found that more than 12,000 Asian Americans with limited English proficiency resided in Los Angeles County’s four evacuation zones. However, most evacuation alerts and recovery programs were provided in English and Spanish only.
Lessons Learned: Improving Language Access for Future Crisis Response
With the threat of future disasters looming large, the AAPI Equity Alliance is calling on LA County to expand multilingual disaster preparedness, with an emphasis on Chinese, Korean, Tagalog, Vietnamese, and the dozens of other Asian languages spoken in the region. Globally, as migration driven by climate change and conflict causes widespread displacement, relief agencies will need to factor in language access to enhance the effectiveness of relocation support efforts.
When the next pandemic or epidemic breaks out, deploying effective public health communications in all spoken languages will be key to avoiding contamination and saving lives. We learned key lessons this decade and the last. For example, health authorities responding to the most recent Ebola outbreak in West Africa disseminated hygiene, vaccination, and treatment information via written and oral communications in French, and later, an international form of Swahili. It was a missed opportunity to reach rural districts in their regional dialects and curb the outbreak sooner, as many communities did not understand this live-saving messaging.
Technology provides an opening to address these key learnings and enhance preparedness. Through our experiences in the field, PGLS has witnessed firsthand that commercial language technology may not work for humanitarian use cases. Current models are not necessarily available in the right variants for crisis-affected communities, rarely account for how second-language speakers use contact languages in real life, and may not be adopted due to varying tech literacy rates. More localization of the solutions must be done.
Data, inclusion of minority language speakers, and coordination with local resources can maximize the effectiveness of crisis response tech. By aligning humanitarian organizations, marginalized language speakers, and language technologists, PGLS is bringing advanced solutions to the field, including a language identifier and an on-demand translation tool for humanitarian missions.
In addition to providing scalable, tech-driven language solutions that adapt to the evolving needs of vulnerable populations, PGLS also spearheads a training program, Piedmont Academy. As part of our nonprofit foundation, PGLS Cares, Piedmont Academy embodies our human-first philosophy by empowering local interpreters and translators to handle language needs in large-scale operations. With talent and tech combined, we can improve the effectiveness of relief efforts while respecting the linguistic and cultural identity of impacted populations.
Learn more about how PGLS supports our nonprofit/NGO partners with language access services, and join us on LinkedIn to keep the conversation going.