Hi Niru,

Belated reply to say yes! that makes sense! A practical consideration 🙂 But as you say, it’s funny that it’s inconsistent. Maybe someone different wrote the accompanying text for each of the translations? Interesting observation re gender!!

Thank you for this insightful post. Multilingual health communication has become even more imperative during this pandemic, and sociolinguits have an important contribution to make in highlighting where and how multilingualism is being utilised. Laura’s observation sparked my interest so I had a quick look at the Ministry of Public Health’s twitter account and offical webpage.
I was surprised to find that the Twitter videos (images above) have not been reposted since mid-March. Both the twitter account and the website are predominantly in Arabic and English, with the exception of two Malayalam posts which were retweeted in early April. Perhaps this speaks to the accounts’ perceived audience or the underlying linguistic ideologies? Like Laura, I wonder which alternative online platforms are being used to disseminate the provided multlingual health communication? The question then arises: where and how do various linguistic communities seek health information in their languages?
Moving on to the official website, there is a link to a designated Covid-19 website which is available in four languages: Arabic, English, Malayalam and Hindi. Clicking through these pages, it’s interesting that most government issued educational materials have not been translated. On the Malayalam and Hindi webpages, the posters have captions in the relevant languages, yet the actual posters are only available for download in bilingual Arabic/English (example here: https://www.moph.gov.qa/english/Pages/Educational-hMaterials.aspx). These observations speak to what Prof Piller commented above regarding how difficult it is to serve multilingual communities’ needs and that translation in itself may not be enough. For comparison, a quick look at the Australian Department of Health’s website reveals a similar picture. There is a page with translated resources – interestingly, each of the 36 available languages listed have varying numbers of resources that have been translated, ranging from 1-32 translated documents (https://www.health.gov.au/resources/translated). The Department’s youtube channel includes videos which were provided by SBS, a public multicultural and multilingual broadcaster, in various languages, yet the videos’ titles and descriptions are all in English (https://www.youtube.com/user/healthgovau/search?query=%22information+from+SBS%22). Again, this leads me to wonder how individuals, who may not be proficient in the dominant language(s) access multilingual health communication resources where they’re made available?

Re: the tweet for Sinhala – I’m wondering if the (Sri Lankan language) in brackets is a way to get the attention of local employers of Sri Lankan guest workers (mainly domestic and construction). The guest workers might not usually access tweets from the Ministry of Health. Therefore the description is for the benefit of English literate employers to pass on the video to their Sri Lankan staff – assuming those staff are Sinhala speakers and not speakers of another Sri Lankan language like Tamil!

But then the other tweets like the one for Malayalam don’t have a similar description about the language, so not sure. Also, the Sinhala tweet does not have a written English introduction for the video like the other ones – can’t read Arabic so not sure what the Sign language tweet says. Interesting that the top 3 tweets (Urdu, Malayalam, Tagalog) all note the name of the male doctors in their English intros but don’t see the same for the two posts featuring women in the Sinhala and French tweets!

Thanks Rizwan, for this interesting overview.

Thanks Ingrid and Laura for your insightful observations regarding the asymmetrical relationship between different languages. I agree with Ingrid that centuries of monolithic language ideologies are not easy to change. I will give you an example of how entrenched sixth an ideology is in the Arab world. With reference to multilingual countries such as India and Pakistan, many of my UG students will often say ‘Fatima speaks Pakistani’ and ‘Ali speaks Indian’. You can see the ideology of equating languages with nation dates in action in such statements. I will keep these points in mind as I work through the data. Thanks agains for your observations.

The reference to Urdu was in the context of how the right-wing BJP government treats Urdu, which is an element of much-celebrated Indian multilingualism. This incident Must be seen within a larger phenomenon involving aggressive acts that target Urdu including renaming of places with Urdu/Muslim names. I would like to bring to your attention also the demand by an RSS member to purge NCERT textbooks of Urdu words.
I agree with you that there was not much context to the defacing of Urdu signs in Delhi, but I hope you understand that in a short piece like this one, it was not possible to delineate the context fully. I have discussed this in greater detail elsewhere, and I would be more than happy to share with you when it is out.

This is a good point. Just wanted to add that multilingualism has started to establish itself, and there is evidence of that from much before Covid19. I have written about use of expatriate languages in Kuwait. It remains to be seen if the recent experiences including the post-Covid ones will (or will not) help strengthen multilingual practices.

Thanks, Laura! You are raising some important questions. It’s very hard, if not impossible, to challenge entrenched language regimes at the height of a crisis like the current pandemic. Efforts such as these are a step in the right direction but still heavily constrained by monolingual ideologies, linguistic expertise and capacity, as well as a one-size-fits-all approach (not all language communities have the same needs; so it’s not enough to simply translate the same information over and over again into various languages; we also need to consider literacy levels, specific information needs, etc.)
Unless they are exceptionally well-prepared, no one will get their multilingual communication right this time but what the pandemic does is put linguistic diversity on the agenda: not only for inclusion in disaster preparation, response and recovery plans but into everyday procedures and processes to ensue equitable access.

I noticed in the image of the Twitter videos that there are some inequalities between the different languages. Only the French and Arabic ones have text in their respective languages. The others all have English text, and all have hashtags in English/Arabic only. I wonder if this has impacts on how well they are accessed by their target audiences. Other than that, I wonder the indexical value of this divide – are certain languages more valued/legitimate in the digital world? Or is it simply a matter of the linguistic profile of the staff responsible for the Twitter account? Also, for the Sinhala one, putting in brackets (Sri Lankan language) suggests that there are multiple audiences for this post (including some who are literate in English but unaware that Sinhala is a Sri Lankan language). This makes me wonder about the symbolic value of this/these Tweet(s). As well as communicating practical information, do the tweets also help perform/demonstrate certain desirable qualities, eg. a government department that is inclusive? Just some thoughts!

I’m also wondering, did these/similar videos appear in other media, like on television, or in audio versions of local radio?

Renato Corsetti form Italy and UK