Babels: An interview with Gemma Galdon
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Babels: An interview with Gemma Galdon
NICOLA BULLARD
Nicola Bullard interviews Gemma Galdon a 28-year-old activist based in Barcelona. Babels is a network of translators and interpreters that has been created during the European Social Forum process in response to the need for accessible and affordable translation services. How did you become involved in Babels? I became involved with Babels almost by accident. I was one of the people organizing in Barcelona for the first European Social Forum and had some experience translating and interpreting. Since then, I’ve continued with Babels as part of my involvement in grassroots social movements. I guess the fact that my mother tongue, Catalan, is only spoken by nine million people worldwide makes me especially sensitive to the issue of language diversity. Babels is something entirely new that has emerged out of the Social Forum Process. Can you tell me more about how Babels was created? Babels was created in 2001, during the preparation of the first European Social Forum. Some of us realized that interpretation was going to be needed at the Forum, and that there were no funds for it.We started contacting people we knew in the movement who could help, and that effort quickly reached universities and professional associations. In Spain, we managed to get 50 volunteers involved, most of them professionals, who were willing to travel to Florence by bus (16 h!) and give us a hand. The same happened in France and Italy, and to a lesser extent in other European countries. During this process, we realized that, actually, using volunteer interpretation for the Forums was really a good idea, not only because it allowed us to lower the overall budget of the Forums and thus make them more sustainable and independent financially, but also because most of the interpreters were familiar with the issues and found them interesting. Moreover, the self-organizing of this aspect of the Forum allowed us to take into account and include minority languages, which, for the Catalan movements, was a very important issue. In the end, the interpretation at the first European Social Forum was a complete chaos, but we did manage to enable people to understand each other, so we left the event thinking that our initiative should develop further ^ and so some of the people who organized the French interpreters created Babels. Development (2005) 48(2), 8–9. doi:10.1057/palgrave.development.1100146
Bullard: An interview with Gemma Galdon How has Babels developed since this first experiment? In many ways, Babels is still a project. We’re doing something that no one has ever done before, and the challenges we face are massive, from the technical difficulties involved in coordinating a database which includes more than 9000 people, to the difficulties involved in making people understand what Babels is about and challenging the ‘cheap service provider’approach. On top of that, we are also experimenting with ways of organizing such a huge and loose network. Right now we’re having an internal deb
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