National emergency language competence (NELC) can be understood as the capacity to use language to cope with domestic and international public emergencies. NELC constitutes the foundation of and guidance for the provision of emergency language services. Based on a review of emergency language services and language competence development, this…

Translation is an important means of enabling access to information in an emergency response. Increasingly, volunteer translators have been using social media platforms to self-organize and carry out urgent translation tasks that effectively complement official disaster relief efforts. However, the role of crowdsourced translations and the…

Multilingual crisis communication has emerged as a global challenge during the COVID-19 pandemic. Global public health communication is characterized by the large-scale exclusion of linguistic minorities from timely high-quality information. The severe limitations of multilingual crisis communication that the COVID-19 crisis has laid bare result…