Ukraine Situation - Moldova: Accountability to Affected Population Task Force - Moldova Language Capacity And Gap Research by CLEAR Global (2022)

Despite sharing a language with responders, Ukrainians who fled to Moldova must navigate complex, generic and unreliable information to answer critical questions

Summary: what you absolutely need to know

Responding organizations and language service providers (LSPs) can take advantage of Russian, which almost all Moldovans use as a second language, to support people fleeing the war in Ukraine. But gaps remain for service users needing to communicate in Ukrainian and marginalized languages. Even when content is in the right language, people struggle to verify information to help them make decisions about their stay in Moldova.

• People in Moldova fleeing the war in Ukraine overall face fewer language barriers than in other host countries. Most of the roughly 700,000 Ukrainians who crossed into Moldova after February 2022 are first- or second-language Russian speakers, who fled to Moldova precisely because Russian is widely spoken there. As a result, responding organizations have needed less professional language support than in Poland and Romania, the other countries included in this study.

• Responding organizations are largely unequipped to support communication in other languages.
  Organizations recognize the need to cater for speakers of other languages, but lack capacity to do so.
  Substantial communication gaps remain, especially for members of the Roma community1, who are largely reliant on verbal communication and have few opportunities to verify information.

• Written information presents challenges regardless of a person’s first language. Most information sources are outdated and unreliable. Specific information is either lacking, buried in a mass of irrelevant detail, or expressed in terms that are hard to understand. Instead, people trust in-person communication and human hotline operators to provide the specific information they need.

• Language service providers are largely working in isolation and at personal cost. Existing professional language support capacity could help overcome many communication challenges - as long as LSPs are adequately supported. LSPs are largely unfamiliar with the structures and terminology of international humanitarian action. Most are providing translation and interpreting support either for