The Girls First Fund (GFF) is a funding partnership that focuses on ending child marriage across the world. They aim to bring together donors and community-based organizations “that are working on the front lines to stop the practice of child marriage and early unions”.

IWORDS has a well-established relationship with GFF through Geneva Global, a philanthropy consulting company that supports GFF, providing translation services for their specific needs, including internal communications, forms, web content, and instructions for their partner organizations on how to navigate the funding process. Today, GFF’s activities are based in six primary countries: Democratic Republic of Congo, Dominican Republic, India, Nepal, Niger and Uganda. Their mission is to “support and advance girl-centred and gender-transformative work”, which entails the need of seamless communication between GFF and their partners. 

As GFF works locally with organizations in different countries, multiple linguistic needs must be catered to. A particular challenge of managing multi-lingual projects is finding the right language service providers, linguists who understand the vision and mission of GFF and share their values. At IWORDS, we are lucky to have a team of expert native linguists who are committed to delivering the best quality in each translation project we take on. Managing multiple simultaneous projects can also be taxing, but our dedicated Project Manager excels at organization skills, and coordinating tasks and deliveries, which is fundamental for assuring client satisfaction. 

GFF prioritises working with girls-led and women-led organizations, and this poses a particular challenge when translating to multiple languages as the translation needs are very specific to each country and language. For example, all translations into Spanish and French must reflect this preference and address their existing and potential partners using feminine nouns, pronouns, and adjectives, in an effort to better connect with them. This, however, is not attainable in languages like Hindi and Nepalese, so the translators make an effort to convey the same intention with the tools available in their languages. Also, we have worked together with representatives from GFF and Geneva Global in the development of a series of guidelines and glossaries to ensure consistency across projects, which is of great assistance to linguists.

At IWORDS, we strive to communicate GFF’s message in a way that is not only correct by linguistic standards, but also accurately reflects their vision, mission, and values. Our long-standing partnership is proof that working together leads to better quality results.