As the work of DAI becomes increasingly global, and with members in more than 38 countries now, it is imperative we do more than have a 'Translate' button on our website, which is in reality, is not very accurate in many of the languages.
Without major sponsorship, of course, doing this is costly and mostly unaffordable, but we have many friends and supporters of our work and people with dementia in their own countries who are very generously willing to support our work, and today, we are highlighting two of them.
So, it is important we acknowledge that DAI is an "Advocacy and Support group, of by and for people with dementia", with "the support of a lot of friends, which include our families and care partners, as well as a growing number of academics and other colleagues committed to improving the lives of people with dementia and our families".
Eloisa Stella from Italy is an applied anthropologist, a mental health advocate, and the co-founder and vice-president of Novilunio (novilunio.net), and we thank her for her support of DAI and all people with dementia in her country especially.
This organisation is an Italian non-profit organization dedicated to promoting quality of life services and social inclusion of individuals with cognitive decline. She has very generously translated our Human Rights publication, and has been highlighting our work on her own website and publications, by translating some of our blogs. Thank you Eliosa.
The Italian translation can be downloaded here The Human Rights of people with dementia: from Rhetoric to Reality and read the blog about DAI (if you read Italian!!) here...
It you read Italian, you can also see some of our members stories and our work translated on her organisational website. Ken Clasper from Durham in the UK features in this article.
The second DAI friend we wish to highlight today and express our sincere thanks to for her support is Lyn Chenoweth.
Lyn is Professor of Nursing the Centre for Healthy Brain Ageing at the University of New South Wales. Lyn has generously funded the Arabic translation of our Human Rights publication, which you can download here The Human Rights of people living with dementia-from Rhetoric to Reality_arabic.
We also have been provided with a Spanish translation of the Human Rights document worked on by a number of DAI supporters currently being formatted, and will write a blog focused on one of our DAI members who presented in Mexico on World Alzheimer's Day last week (via video) and our Spanish translation of this document and her presentation next week.
It is incredible that we are becoming truly global in this way, as we work to support members who do not speak English. We also have someone generously working on a translation in Portuguese, and hopefully soon, Japanese as well.
DAI is also working on videos for a number of non-English speaking countries to support both the advocacy organisations and their members, with subtitles in a number of different translations. Again, as ewe mostly rely on pro bono support, it takes time, but, importantly, it is in progress.