Translators: Would you like to support a new human rights project?

As a translator in the Lingua network, I love helping to make powerful stories heard, especially stories from people and parts of the world that don't get enough attention in English-speaking media.

As well as translating for Global Voices, I work for a civil society organisation here in Aotearoa/New Zealand, and have always had a strong interest in human rights. Recently, I have started collaborating with a team of academics, working out of New Zealand and the US, on developing a methodology for measuring human rights in different contexts. The project is called the Human Rights Measurement Initiative (HRMI), and it’s a start-up global social enterprise whose purpose is to reinvent the way human rights data are both produced and used, in order to inspire more ethical behaviour by states and other actors, and to give civil society organisations better data to support their advocacy work. For more information, here is a summary of the project.

The project is currently in its pilot phase, and we are about to launch our website. But to make sure the project is inclusive and global, we want to launch a multi-lingual website from day one. This is why we're asking for your help!

We're looking for volunteers to help us translate our website content from English into Spanish, Portuguese and French. If you would like to be a part of the project, or if you have any questions, please send me a message through my contributor profile – I would love to hear from you :)

Later in the pilot stage we aim to add more languages to this list, so if French, Spanish and Portuguese aren't your languages but you'd like to help, let me know!

Part of the project's methodology is to gather information using questionnaires filled out by human rights researchers in different countries around the world. Once the website is up and running, we will also be looking for help to translate the questionnaires.

We're a volunteer initiative at the moment, which is why we're asking for volunteer support from translators for now. But we're also working on getting funding, so there might be the potential for paid translation further down the line – I certainly hope so!

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