Federici, Federico

O'Brien, Sharon

English

Crises are often transboundary and, even if they are not, culturally and linguistically

diverse communities may be caught up in them, whether they are migrant workers,

refugees, or tourists. Experts from multiple fields recognize, explore, and challenge our

current limitations in engaging with communication issues in multilingual situations of

crisis. Understood broadly as both written and spoken acts, translation saves lives and

reduces property damages and loss, if it is not a last-minute add-on to crisis

management plans. A crisis is not a simple geo-spatial, cultural, legal, humanitarian,

medical, logistical, and political tipping point, it is a major concatenation of causes and

effects that cascade in many and often unpredictable directions. Yet even where

effective, accurate, and specific information is available to be disseminated in different

ways through an ever-growing array of technologies, too often the language barrier

remains in place. This chapter explores the concept of cascading crises and the role

translation could and should have. It positions crisis translation at the intersection of

disaster risk reduction, risk communication and translation and interpreting studies. It

concludes by highlighting the diverse topics in the volume that start to paint a picture

of a diverse field that is opening up for research and development

Cascading crises: translation as risk reduction

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