Description
The UN Secretary-General’s report, Our Common Agenda, reiterates the importance of the commitment of the Sustainable Development Goals to ‘leave no one behind’. However, the deleterious impacts of linguistic exclusion on international development work is barely considered by policy-makers and NGO practitioners, let alone satisfactorily addressed (Footitt et al 2020, Tesseur 2022). This paper gives an overview of a multidisciplinary research endeavour between IR/public administration and language/translation scholars to provide a local solution to this global problem. It describes how a Chichewa translation glossary of international development terminology was co-produced with communities in Malawi through participatory workshops, with the aim of facilitating communication between development stakeholders. It explains our achievements in enhancing the impact of this project by helping practitioners to run their own workshops in different languages. I argue that translation can be conceptualised as an anti-racist practice, and I reflect on lessons learned for academics and practitioners with similar normative and methodological concerns.
