Building leadership through interpreting

By Pramesh Pokharel

Pramesh with LVCICC member Shanta Manavi in 2013, ICC meeting and public policy workshop, Mexico City.

I was the central committee member for the Youth Peasants Federation in 2007/08, organizing youth peasants and working on the issue of youth in agriculture. The Youth Peasants Federation is one of the 23 subject-specific community and commodity-based associations under the umbrella of the All Nepal Peasants Federation (ANPFA). As ANPFA is a member of various national and international networks, I started to follow up on the documents, emails, etc., helping to translate documents and sharing them with leaders from the movements. Similarly, I also started to help the leaders with interpretation, in various national and international fora (English to Nepali and vice versa). During this process, I also participated in La Via Campesina as a delegate and also as an interpreter. This is how I came close to the interpreters’ groups.

 Being an interpreter, I realized how important the role of interpreters is for movements. For me, the saying that there is no revolution without interpretation is absolutely correct. To link the local movements to the global and vice versa, interpreters play an important role. In the South-Asian context, where we have many local languages and most of our grassroots leaders need to be helped with interpretation, I realized the real need for interpretation. Though it is a very tough task, it can also be interesting and fruitful not only to develop one's skills and enrich one’s knowledge, but also to contribute to peoples’ understanding in equal measure.

 In this context, with the help of some friends like Laura and Katie, we started to work on organizing trainings. When I became a leader of a peasant movement as the International Co-ordination Committee member of La Via Campesina (Youth) South Asia, I took the initiative to organize such a training at the national level and also to help in the process at regional level. We have been organizing a series of trainings in Nepal for the last two years. Especially after establishing a political ideological school (Madan Bhandari School of Asia), there was an urgent need to train interpreters for the school. We did a training in 2017. Similarly, we organized a training in 2018, and in 2019 we organized it again. On March 21, 2019, we founded a new group of volunteers with a focus on interpretation skills.

 Volunteer interpreters are essential to grassroots movements.  We need more interpreters’ trainings to globalize the hope and globalize the struggles.