In 2015 I started a project for Raif Badawi. I collected over time 100 translations of a phrase of support for him from people all over the world. I wrote about this project already in June 2015 on the website in support of Raif Badawi and also mentioned the project in my earlier post Twitter is great. To mark the anniversary of his flogging on 9 January 2015 and his 33rd birthday on 13 January, I want to share my post in an amended form also from my blog.
1. What is the background?
In February 2015 @VeraSScott a human rights activists came up with the following phrase of support for Raif Badawi: “We will hold Raif Badawi in our hearts and minds until his family can hold him in their arms”. This phrase proved to be very popular and soon many people were using it on Twitter.
I liked the phrase and thought it would be great, if we have this wonderful phrase of support for Raif not only in English, but in many different languages. Raif Badawi became during the weeks and months after he was flogged the first time an international symbol for the struggle of so many people for human rights and freedom of speech. This international interest in his case and his fate should manifest itself in support for him in languages from all over the world.
Initially I was not sure how many translations I wanted to collect, but then I decided that it really should be translations into 50 languages. Saudi Arabia decided to flog Raif Badawi in January 2015 50 times and they planned to give him 50 lashes each week, we should show him our support in 50 languages – one for each lash he had to endure.
When I published this article initially I had collected 56 languages. After that I continued to collect translations of this phrase. Now I have 100 pictures with translations of this phrase of support.
2. Which languages are represented?
If you look at the list of languages below, you will see an amazing variety of languages.
There are European, African and Asian languages. The seven UN languages (Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish) are represented. You will find translations in the 12 languages which are spoken by most people in the world as their native language (Hindi, Bangla, Portuguese, Italian, German, Japanese in addition to the UN languages). But you can also find languages as Scottish Gaelic and Romansh which are only spoken by a few ten thousand people or languages as Luxembourgish and Maltese which are spoken by some hundred thousand people.
The languages represent different cultures and connected with the different cultures also different religions. However, the support for Raif Badawi and for human rights goes beyond culture and religion.
3. Who translated the phrase?
I got all the translations via Twitter and again the broad range of different people who were willing to help was astonishing. People from Iceland in the North to Australia in the South and from Canada in the West to Malaysia, Indonesia and Korea in the East helped with the translations. I had people from each continent of the earth who helped with this project.
Also the background of the people and their involvement in campaigns for Raif Badawi covered a broad range of different types of involvment. I asked many Amnesty International divisions for translations and a lot of them helped me. I asked the people who tweet a lot for Raif. But I was more surprised that also such people were happy to help who had only signed one petition for him or even people who did not seem to have any prior involvement in campaigns for Raif Badawi. Some of them not only translated the phrase for me, but also used the picture afterwards themselves and asked their followers to take action.
I think this is a moving sign for the global support and global outcry Raif Badawi’s case has attracted.
4. What follows next?
Please continue to use the pictures and the phrase in different languages. Add them to your tweets, share them on Facebook and on Instagram and continue to support Raif Badawi and his family.
You will find below a list of all the languages and also all the pictures. They are roughly in geographical order, starting with Europe. I collected a lot of Indian languages. For the ease of reference, you will find languages spoken on the Indian subcontinent in a separate group. The next group includes all remaining Asian languages and the last group comprises of all African languages.
I think 100 languages is a good number and I decided that I will not actively continue to collect further languages. However, if you speak a language which is not yet represented and think it should be represented, then please tweet me at @CiLuna27 and send me your translation. I am happy to put it in a picture as well.
5. The Languages
a) European Languages
- English
- Irish
- Scottish Gaelic
- Welsh
- Portuguese
- Spanish
- Catalan
- Basque
- Galician
- French
- Dutch
- German
- Luxembourgish
- Rumantsch
- Italian
- Maltese
- Greek
- Albanian
- Macedonian
- Bulgarian
- Romanian
- Hungarian
- Serbian
- Croatian
- Bosnian
- Slovene
- Slovak
- Czech
- Polish
- Icelandic
- Norwegian
- Danish
- Swedish
- Finnish
- Estonian
- Latvian
- Lithuanian
- Belarusian
- Ukrainian
- Russian
b) Languages of the Indian Subcontinent
- Hindi
- Awadhi
- Bangla
- Bhojpuri
- Chittagonian
- Gujarati
- Kannada
- Malayalam
- Marathi
- Marwari
- Nepali
- Pahari
- Punjabi (Gurmukhi)
- Punjabi (Shahmukhi)
- Saraiki
- Arabic Sindhi
- Devanagari Sindhi
- Sinhala
- Tamil
- Telugu
- Urdu
c) Other Asian Languages
- Arabic
- Hebrew
- Turkish
- Kurdish
- Armenian
- Georgian
- Azeri
- Persian
- Kazakh
- Uzbek
- Pashto
- Dari
- Mongolian
- Chinese
- Tibetan
- Vietnamese
- Thai
- Indonesian
- Malaysian
- Tagalog
- Visayan
- Korean
- Japanese
d) African Languages
- Afrikaans
- Chibemba
- Dholuo
- Ekegusii
- Hausa
- Igbo
- Kirundi
- Luhya
- Ndebele
- Oromo
- Shona
- Somali
- Swahili
- Wolof
- Xhosa
- Yoruba
ciluna27's Blog 
[…] via Support for Raif Badawi from around the world — ciluna27’s Blog […]
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[…] I wrote 40 blog posts about human rights topics, eight of these posts are in the category human rights and the category poetry, because they share poetry and are human rights related, most of the time, because the poet is in prison and was punished for his or her poetry. Eight of the human rights topics are also in the category Twitter. Sometimes these were blog posts about tweet storms, at other times, they included or reported a campaign on Twitter like the “Sky For Shawkan” campaign for the Egyptian photographer Shawkan or the translations project of a phrase of support for Raif Badawi. […]
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