We propose to establish an interdisciplinary, intersectoral and international research and innovation network in Crisis Translation, called INTERACT. Crisis Translation is understood here as the translation of written information from one linguistic and cultural system to another in the context of a crisis scenario, with a view to enabling affected communities and responders to be prepared for crises, improve resilience and reduce the loss of lives. Due to the transboundary nature of modern day crises, crisis communication must be multilingual and multilingual crisis communication is enabled through translation. Multilingual information access through translation addresses work programme aims such as social fairness and democratic access to essential information for all. The primary focus of INTERACT is on health-related crisis content. The main objectives of the project are 1) to make meaningful and effective contributions to knowledge, policies, expertise, training and technology that enable accurate and timely translation-enabled crisis communication, with a particular focus on health-related content; 2) to improve outcomes for crisis-affected and at-risk communities by contributing to translation-enabled communication to, with and from those communities; 3) to enhance human skills, competences and cross-sectoral collaboration across academic, humanitarian, and industrial sectors involved in crisis translation. This will be achieved by focusing on five main topics: crisis communication policy, comprehension in limited proficiency communities, crisis machine translation, citizen translator education, and ethics and through collaboration across academic, SME, NGO, and Multinational partners. The contribution of INTERACT will be a much broader, better informed, innovative, much more impactful perspective on the challenges of crisis communication and the role of translation.

To an ever-increasing extent, web-based services are providing a frontline for healthcare information in Europe. They help citizens find answers to their questions and help them understand and find the local services they need. However, due to the number of languages spoken in Europe, and the mobility of its population, there is a high demand for these services to be available in many languages. In order to satisfy this demand, we need to rely on automatic translation, as it is infeasible to manually translate into all languages requested. The aim of HimL is to use recent advances in machine translation to create and deploy a system for the automatic translation of public health information, with a special focus on meaning preservation. In particular, we will include recent work on domain adaptation, translation into morphological rich languages, terminology management, and semantically enhanced machine translation to build reliable machine translation for the health domain. The aim will be to create usable, reliable, fully automatic translation of public health information, initially testing with translation from English into Czech, Polish, Romanian and German. In the HimL project we will iterate cycles of incorporating improvements into the MT systems, with careful evaluation and user acceptance testing.