Arturo Gándara Rossi is a doctoral student at the Universitat Rovira i Virgili, working on translation policy for international aid in Latin America. He holds a BA in Technical Engineering from the International University of Catalonia (2007) and Masters degrees in Business Administration, Occupational Health and Safety, and Professional Translation, all from the Universitat Rovira i Virgili. He has worked for many years as a freelance translator, and for three years as an in-house translator for an NGO. His translation experience has to do mostly with documents related to the Third Sector.
Política lingüística y desarrollo: Superando las barreras lingüísticas entre las organizaciones donantes y las organizaciones no gubernamentales de desarrollo
Language policy and development: Overcoming language barriers between donor organizations and non-governmental development organizations
Thesis supervised by Professor Anthony Pym and Dr. Nune Ayvazyan
Research Summary
This research asks whether the language policies of donor organizations take into account the limitations of NGOs with fewer resources. The general hypothesis is that the smaller the NGO, the more language assistance it needs when applying for funding. Some of the variables that are taken into account are the size of the NGO, the language policies of donors, the capacity to communicate in English, the obligatory use of English, and the existence of dialogue and trust. The methods used to gather the information are a sampling of Latin American NGOs and donor organizations that work in development projects (representing big, medium, and small NGOs), questionnaires and interviews for NGO representatives on obstacles encountered in fulfilling language policies of donors, and questionnaires and interviews with donor organizations regarding language quality standards expected from applying NGOs, as well as other factors that come into play when a grant is awarded.
Conference presentation
Gándara, A. 2022. COVID-19 vaccination messaging in Barcelona: Questions of translation policy. 1st International Conference on the Right to Languages, 15 - 17 June 2022. Universitat de València, Valencia, Spain.
