Hesperian’s Spring Translations Report

Working to extend our impact on health internationally, we often find that “it’s not what you know, but who you know.” And Hesperian knows some incredible, truly committed organizations working at the grassroots all over the world.

We’ve been cooperating with them to bring out our books in languages other than English and Spanish. For example, we’ve been distributing seed funding for the new Handbook for Women with Disabilities to encourage translations in several Asian countries. Five translations that began before the book was even published (in Lao, Nepali, Chinese, Vietnamese and Khmer) are off to a good start. Several are engaging in a lot of community collaboration to make the book most useful in local conditions.

We are also supporting a Bengali edition of the Handbook for Women with Disabilities, produced by the West Bengal Voluntary Health Association, who later plan to translate the book into Oriya and Hindi as well. Their neighbors in the Pakistan National Forum on Women's Health are working on both an Urdu and a Sindhi edition of that title. Since they began their translation, two additional Pakistani organizations interested in an Urdu edition have joined in the effort to develop the book and subsequently to distribute it to the farthest reaches of Pakistan.

Another exciting new project is the translation of an Amharic edition of Helping Children Who are Blind in Amharic for Ethiopia.

While corresponding with people to get new translations off the ground is one of the most fulfilling jobs at Hesperian, the real blast comes from opening the mail to discover a brand new book! Recently published editions include the Tamil and Malayalam editions of Pesticides are Poison, taken from our Environmental Health Book, which is still in process. Also, Macmillan produced a beautiful, updated edition of A Book for Midwives aimed at English-speaking Africa. We also received the Urdu edition of Disabled Village Children, the result of an enormous amount of work completed this spring.

Read about some of the other translations:
Please click here to read about the Urdu edition of DVC.
Here for the Iban edition of A book for midwives.
Here for the Vietnamese edition of Helping Children who are Deaf.