Development NGOs and Languages

Sensitivity to languages is central to any serious analysis of inequality between Global North and Global South. Development NGOs and Languages is a long overdue intervention in this area, exploring urgent questions of interpreting and translation in the work of international NGOs. Drawing on extensive geographical and institutional case studies, the book recasts development as an inherently multilingual operation. The result is essential reading for scholars and practitioners in this field.

– Charles Forsdick, AHRC Theme Leadership Fellow, Translating Cultures

This book addresses, for the first time, the question of how development NGOs attempt to 'listen' to communities in linguistically diverse environments. NGOs are under increasing pressure to demonstrate that they 'listen' to the people and communities that they are trying to serve, but this can be an immensely challenging task where there are significant language and cultural differences. However, until now, there has been no systematic study of the role of foreign languages in development work. The authors present findings based on interviews with a wide range of NGO staff and government officials, NGO archives, and Southern NGOs in Malawi, Peru and Kyrgyzstan.They suggest ways in which NGOs can reform their language policies to listen to the recipients of aid more effectively.

Angela M. Crack is Reader in Civil Society at the University of Portsmouth. Her publications focus on her research specialism of NGO accountability, particularly regarding issues of self-regulation and accountability to beneficiaries.

Hilary Footitt is Hon. Research Fellow in the Department of Languages and Cultures, University of Reading, and PI for the AHRC funded project: 'The Listening Zones of NGOs: Languages and Cultural Knowledge in development programmes'. She has written widely on languages in war and conflict, and is the co-editor of the Palgrave ‘Languages at War’ series.

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 NGO GOAL on ‘Translation as Empowerment: Translation as a contributor to human rights in the Global South‘. Her research specialism is translation policies in NGOs.