Partnership

Gillian Williams

Nina Guerrero

Senior Advisor for Leadership and Organizational Development
Madrid, Spain

Performer, designer, DJ and artist
Mérida, Yucatán, México

Justicia del lenguaje/Language justice

This soundscape has three parts and in places you will hear our voices - Nina’s and Gillian’s - because the project and the process was personal to us both. The language you hear and may not know, is Triqui, an indigenous language from the south of Mexico.

The piece recognizes the chaotic and vibrant landscape of language and communication. It contains ecosystems that seem real but aren’t; others that are real and seem false. You will hear “el llamado” (the calling). Let it take you where it will.

Escucha activa. Escucha política. Listen to the soundscape.

Some connections to TER…

“When we say multilingual space, we don’t just mean a space where many languages are spoken, but spaces where there is a commitment to equality among languages, as well as a resistance to the dominance of any one language in the room.”
– Antena Aire in "How to Build Language Justice" (2020)

As we deepen our work around creating infrastructures that are healthy, just, and joyful, TER has been exploring ways to increase engagement with the tools and learning that we create and share, through more consistent translation and interpretation. We’ve also started thinking about the role language plays in how we connect internally as a team and where it fits in our conversations about equity.

We now have two Co-EDs who consider a language other than English their language of most comfort. A language of home (or one's territories, as Paola might say). Big themes of power and politics come into play when Dalia talks about her personal and professional experiences with language. For Pao, that of communicating and of ties to place and community. Both lead from places where expression and communication are vitally important. All of which makes this moment in time a ripe one for us to deepen our understanding of the intertwined nature of social justice and language justice.

We are already exploring and building ways to create these spaces. The recent community call for the launch of our Healthier Ecosystems report that Bárbara led, created a multilingual space that went beyond language access and into the territories of justice. She created a set of materials for the interpreters (a glossary of key concepts, templates, and guidelines that unpack nuanced and complex concepts) and are templates we can build on for future events and calls.

There are also opportunities for us to explore and grow as a team of people who come from a wide variety of different language homes; to reflect, and adopt new ways of communicating. We can further unpack the power dynamics inherent in our default to English and to the technical language of tech that is part of our daily life at TER.

Some things to mull over and connect around as an organization:

Reflections on Language Justice

Weather can impact accents. Languages of people who grow up in a very sunny part of the world are influenced by how often they use their facial muscles to squint.

Onomatopeya de Chile. There is a word achichiu. It sounds like a sneeze. Or a shiver.

Black ASL takes up more of the physical frame in which people sign than standard ASL. iPhones have made interpretation more accessible but have shrunk the frame.

Birds and drums communicate not just with sound but with syntax and accents.

When people have a word for a specific color, they see that color and can visually distinguish it. When there is no specific word for a color, then people have a harder time visually distinguishing it.

Aligning who we are to ourselves and who we are to the world: How do we diversify our use of language in meetings, chats, and collaborations on written work? How can we de-center the English language in certain spaces so that we re-center people who don’t claim it as their home language? What would it look like to deconstruct the power imbalances of language at TER?

Shifting the narrative around translation and interpretation from being about access to opening communication in whatever ways make it possible for us to share thinking, co-create, and join with others in work and learning. And to recognize the translators and interpreters who are themselves activists by the nature of their work.

Investing in the resources that increase language justice: training for consistent TER interpreters and translators; time for advance preparation of presentations and reports so interpreters and translators are able to prep; copy editing in other languages and translation into (not from) English, so team members can write in the languages most comfortable to them.

Language justice work takes time, resources, and commitment. Our first steps include belonging to a community of others who have made this same commitment to language justice. To communicate and learn with each other. To pursue a more just and joyful world together.

Some things about language that made me think differently about language after DDW…

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