Who We Are:
Founded by a Middlebury College alum, Respond Crisis Translation is a frontlines crisis response organization composed of 3,100 translators, interpreters and language activists supporting refugees, asylum seekers, deportees, migrants, domestic violence and trafficking survivors, and many more thousands of people experiencing climate crisis, war, genocide, economic collapse and political violence around the world.
We facilitate the work of more than 600 nonprofit organizations supporting refugees through legal asylum processes, as well as through all aspects of resettlement (finding housing, accessing medical and psychological care, education, social services, job support, polls access, etc etc etc). We also support thousands of individual asylum seekers, refugees and migrants who reach out to us directly for support. We never say no to cases, and through our work have been able to create a robust training program on crisis translation, as well as jobs for 606 linguists who are themselves refugees, or actively living in war zones.
Our team is composed of language experts, global health practicioners, professional interpreters, project managers, and curriculum designers who are passionate about the intersection of immigrant justice and language democracy. Thank you so much for joining us —and for contributing your language skills to this important cause!
The Internship:
We are looking for undergraduate or graduate student interns who are passionate about language democracy and is deeply committed to justice for refugees and migrants.
As an intern, you will be responsible for taking full end-to-end ownership of your projects and you will play a huge role in strengthening asylum seekers´ chances of winning their asylum cases. Interns will work closely with their supervisors to develop an individual development plan, describing their academic and professional development goals for the experience and outlining actionable steps in order to achieve them.
Our work environment is highly collaborative, interconnected and supportive. You are expected to work proactively and closely with your team members, including language team leads, the admin and development teams, and the comms and media team.
Internships begin on a rolling basis and interns are expected to commit at least 240 hours (30 hrs/wk for 8 weeks). Applications are due February 15, 2024 for the Summer 2025 cohort.
Essential Responsibilities:
Depending on your interests, and the scope of your internship (as will be determined throughout the application, screening and onboarding process), internship responsibilities will include various of the following:
- Project Management: Receive, coordinate, proofread and edit translation and interpretation requests between nonprofit/ngo partner organizations and linguists in the Respond network. Maintaining close communication with partners and linguists around projects, and tracking all projects carefully in Resond’s database in Airtable.
- Language Team Support: Support language team leads and project managers in facilitating and organizing community support events aimed at building community among linguists and on language teams, including skills practice sessions (in translation and interpretation), language practice coffee breaks, and skills-based trainings and workshops for linguists.
- Outreach + Community Networking: Lead strategic outreach to frontlines crisis response and refugee support organizations in need of language access support, including independent media and journalism organizations, or organizations doing climate justice work. Meeting with and onboarding new partner organizations, and nurturing and expanding partner relationships in collaboration with language team leads and the operations team.
- Templates: Organize and build out our template library to support with common legal, asylum, and medical translations
- Glossary: Compile legal / medical / psych glossaries in all of the main languages we work in for translators and interpreters on our teams supporting urgent asylum, humanitarian parole and TPS cases; legal aid/policy update requests; psych evals for asylum cases; emotional support and therapy sessions; emergency medical aid.
- Research: Gathering data / stories about language access, as well as the impact of lack of language access)
- Social Media + Comms: Work in close collaboration with our comms team and executive director to manage social media accounts and draft educational content illuminating the role of language access work across systems. Work closely with team leads to collect stories of cases from linguist and partners to highlight on social media
- Development + Grant Writing: Work in close collaboration with our development team (including executive director, operations director, and operations team) to do grant research and writing and support with development and fundraising.
- Global Health: Work closely with our public health team to increase linguistic accessibility in academic publishing and public health promotion and awareness campaigns.
Desired Qualifications:
- Solid experience managing high-stakes, urgent projects effectively and successfully
- Strong people skills
- Excellent writing skills
- Passion and interest in issues affecting migrants
- Passion and interest in language access and democracy
- Written and spoken fluency in any of the following languages and English: Kurdish, Farsi, Dari, Pashto, French, Spanish, Arabic, Turkish, Ukrainian, German, Russian, Somali, Tigrinya, Urdu, Bangla, Indigenous languages from Latin America (other languages also encouraged)
- Respond is committed to addressing systemic oppressions. People with disabilities, with past criminal convictions, without formal education, or with diverse immigration statuses are encouraged to apply.