Editor’s note: The Covid-19 crisis has exposed fractures in the social and linguistic fabric in many contexts internationally, as we have been documenting in our series of language aspects of the COVID-19 crisis since February. This article provides yet another perspective on crisis communication in multilingual Australia. It was first published as “Lost in translation: COVID-19 leaves migrants behind” by Macquarie University’s The Lighthouse.

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Photo: Engin Akyurt, Unsplash

Many migrants struggle to understand public health information about COVID-19. Ingrid Piller, Distinguished Professor of Applied Linguistics at Macquarie University, considers what a linguistic crisis response should look like.

Before February 11, when the World Health Organisation christened the novel coronavirus, COVID-19 was not even long-listed for most popular name.

Just as parents might choose a new baby moniker that keeps all stakeholders happy, WHO advisers were diplomatic: Co and Vi come from coronavirus, D stood for disease and 19 standing for 2019, the year the first cases were seen.

It’s fair to say that COVID-19 was delivered to the linguistic repertoire of the largest number of people after the shortest gestation period.

Naming the disease, however, has been just a minuscule part of the mass communication enveloping the pandemic.

Almost everyone in the world has had to learn about public health concepts such as ‘social distancing’, ‘droplet transmission’ or ‘flattening the curve’ to avoid getting sick.

Almost everyone has had to understand the specifics of containment measures such as lockdowns, contact tracing, or mask wearing in their jurisdiction.

And almost everyone has had to weigh into public debates that pit health against the economy, link the virus to particular social groups, or politicise the disease.

As a topic of conversation, COVID-19 is the water cooler wunderkind.

But not everyone is joining the chat. Multilingual crisis communication has emerged as a global challenge. Australia’s migrants, refugees, the aged, and those with low levels of literacy have struggled to process public health information about the virus.

More than one in five Australian households speak a language other than English. Between 800,000 and one million people in Australia either don’t speak English at all, or don’t speak it well enough to understand complex information.

What people most need is local intel. As well as symptoms to look for, they want answers to questions such as where to get tested, hotspots, new cases in the area, how many people can come to the house, whether restrictions have changed, and so on. The answers differ across jurisdictions.

The trust factor

There is a real onus on government to make this information as widely accessible as possible. But that kind of information has not kept up multilingually.

Communication isn’t always consistent. Face masks, for example, have gone from being: not a good idea … might make things worse because people touch their faces more … recommended to wear only if there are symptoms, no need to if there are none … suggest wearing one on public transport but not mandatory ….must wear one anywhere in Victoria.

How much information is available to migrants depends on which language community they belong to. Speakers of languages with sizeable numbers of practitioners – Mandarin, Arabic, Vietnamese, Cantonese or Greek – can glean information from community publications, newspapers, radio stations, Facebook groups, churches, mosques, national organisations and clubs.

Covid-19 signage in a Sydney shop

Large communities also can rely on diasporic communities like those in the US where the media is big on community TV channels. But there are smaller languages that may not be affiliated with a particular state, and they can be poorly served both at home and internationally.

Trust is key to selling COVID-19 messages and triumphing over the fake news that has proliferated during the pandemic.

But levels of trust among linguistic minorities might be influenced by a community’s mother country and attitudes of the Australian media. Some groups experience more racism than others, and that can limit the trust they have towards authorities.

Keeping it local

Physical distancing and lockdowns have disrupted our social fabric. Older generations of migrants who don’t speak English well tend to rely on family and friends to step in as language brokers or mediators for everyday information, for dealing with public services, or attending medical appointments.

Cognitive or degenerative diseases can further impact language processing. In bilingual populations, these tend to affect the weaker language more. Add to that being in lockdown in an aged care facility, where you can’t have visitors, family or a carer who speaks your language, and the isolation compounds.

What will improve the lot of linguistic minorities in this pandemic?

A communications strategy should be part of a public health strategy. One thing that has been learned about controlling COVID-19 is the importance of having local measures in place, especially around testing and contact tracing.

You need to reach people who are in high traffic places, understanding what their information needs are, and identify language communities in each suburb. Different council areas have different needs, and therefore local communications strategy is important.

The language clusters of, say, the Sydney suburbs of Marsfield, Fairfield, and Mona Vale couldn’t be more different.

In Marsfield, 54 per cent of households speak a language other than English at home, the top three being Mandarin, Cantonese, and Korean. That’s more than the Sydney average of 38 per cent but small in comparison to Fairfield, where 80 per cent of households speak a language other than English at home: the top three being Assyrian, Arabic, and Vietnamese. Mona Vale is on the other end of the spectrum, with only 13 per cent of households speaking a language other than English – the top three are Serbian, German, and Croatian.

A colleague, Dr Alexandra Grey, has done a study of the posters in the Sydney suburbs of Strathfield and Burwood, and she found there was quite a mismatch between the linguistic profiles of these communities and the language of the posters.

A mismatch between the language in which COVID-19 information is communicated and the linguistic repertoires of those who need the information exacerbates the effect of disasters like a pandemic on linguistic minorities.

Emergency preparation and crisis planning

Not having access to timely, high quality, trusted information increases vulnerability. If information is not available in a language people understand, or from a source they trust, they end up looking for answers on social media. And while that is not necessarily a bad thing, the WHO has warned that an over-abundance of COVID-19 information could be misleading and even harmful.

The ‘infodemic’ that has accompanied the pandemic, WHO warned, is just as dangerous as the virus itself.

Moroccan clinical neuropsychologist Mohamed Taibine wrote in the ‘Language on the Move’ blog last month: “Misinformation is like a carcinogenic cell that duplicates irrational and implausible facts, and then transforms them into a growth of seemingly trustworthy and verified information via social media.”

It is important we have a diversified and sophisticated communications strategy, and social media certainly needs to be part of that because that is where most people get their information.

May the force be with you…

Not only migrants have trouble interpreting complex COVID-19 messages. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, 13.8 per cent of Australians don’t read above primary school level.

‘A little while ago I googled ‘nsw corona/covid restrictions’. The top hits all referred to NSW Government websites. I homed in on two of them  “What you can and can’t do under the rules” and “Public Health Orders and restrictions”.’

A readability analysis using algorithms that are now built into most word processing software showed that one post required 11 years of formal education to read and the other 14 years of formal education.

In other words, at least 2.3 million Australians will not be able to read the two key texts about NSW’s COVID-19 restrictions. In a crisis where the actions of every one of us have a big impact on the course of the pandemic, this is a large number.

What Australia needs is a communications volunteer taskforce.

As the bushfires have taught us, an effective way to deal with disaster is to mobilise a volunteer force, a large segment of the population, in the same way the Rural Fire Service has a system in place for recruiting volunteers, training them, keeping them on hold, and then mobilising them.

However, for a public health crisis, you need volunteers with different skills and capabilities: people who can translate, interpret; who are willing to sit down with people filling in forms and explain things like what a postcode is (in order to find the nearest testing centre).

We have multilingual talent so we could actually do this. It’s unrealistic to expect the government to put out all the information in all the languages, so we need to shape a communications strategy and a national language policy suitable for a rapidly changing and complex information environment, one that takes into account all the communications channels including social media.

Language challenges of the Covid-19 pandemic

Visit here for the full Language on the Move coverage of language aspects of the COVID-19 crisis. The special issue of Multilingua of 12 peer-reviewed research papers about “Linguistic diversity in a time of crisis” is available here. And if you’d like to listen to a lecture about “Linguistic Diversity in a Time of Crisis” head over to YouTube.

Beijing Advanced Innovation Center for Language Resources and Research Center for Standardized Use of Chinese Language, Beijing Language and Culture University

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Editor’s note: This is a translated and shortened version of an article first published in Chinese as “战疫语言服务团的故事” in the CPPCC Newspaper on March 9, 2020. Translated by Dr Zhang Jie, Zhongnan University of Economics and Law, Wuhan, and Dr Li Jia, Yunnan University, Kunming.

In this article, Professor Li Yuming not only recounts the rapid linguistic response of Chinese applied sociolinguists to the COVID-19 epidemic but also outlines a program for “emergency linguistics,” a research specialisation devoted to language and communication aspects of disaster preparedness.

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Handbook of Hubei Dialects for Medical Assistance Teams

Doctor-patient communication in Hubei dialect, online resource

The outbreak of COVID-19 has required the whole of China to stand together against the epidemic with the mobilisation of national resources to assist Hubei, the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak. One of the difficulties in mobilising trans-provincial resources is the language barrier between doctors and patients in clinical communication. To solve the urgent needs of language communication between doctors from other parts of China and local patients, the medical assistance team of Qilu Hospital of Shandong University compiled The Guidebook of Wuhan Dialect for Medical Assistance Teams, Audio Materials of Wuhan Dialect for Medical Assistance Teams, and The Handbook of Doctor-Patient Communication within 48 hours after the team arrived in Wuhan. This is an instance of the provision of language services as part of the emergency response.

The example demonstrates the necessity for linguists to participate in fighting COVID-19. As linguists, we should not let medical personnel be distracted by also having to deal with language and communication barriers.

On February 10, 2020, Beijing Advanced Innovation Center for Language Resources of BLCU and the National Institute of Chinese Language Matters and Social Development of Wuhan University, together with more than a dozen research institutes and enterprises, initiated a program to join the fight against COVID-19 by offering language services.

Under the guidance of the Department of Language Information Management of the Chinese Ministry of Education, the Handbook of Hubei Dialects for Medical Assistance Teams was compiled to facilitate communication between medical assistance teams and patients in Hubei province. The Handbook includes 76 sentences and 156 words which are commonly used in diagnosis and treatment along with their equivalents in the dialects of Wuhan, Xiangyang, Yichang, Huangshi, Jingzhou, E’zhou, Xiaogan, Huanggang, and Xianning.

Although team members lived in different localities, they performed the tasks with tacit cooperation and managed to play to their respective strengths. With their devotion for three days and three nights, seven types of language service products were made available on WeChat, a dedicated webpage, converging media, video clips, Tik Tok, a 24/7 telephone hotline, and instant translation software.

The Handbook of Hubei Dialects for Medical Assistance Teams was of significant help to front-line medical personnel. Not only was it suitable for different groups of people in various scenarios, but also bolstered the confidence of medical workers. It was very well received. Almost 30 WeChat official accounts related to linguistics re-posted the handbook, setting a precedent for WeChat official accounts in fighting against the epidemic. So far, the total clicks of the handbook on WeChat have amounted to nearly 30,000; for the recording, around 340,000; and for the online version, more than 100,000. Furthermore, nearly 6,000 copies of pocketbooks published by the Commercial Press were distributed free of charge directly to the medical assistance teams in Hubei.

Bilingual Greek-Chinese diagnostic sheet

Apart from compiling the handbook of Hubei dialects, language services later expanded to foreign languages targeting international students and foreign residents who began to return and come to China with the effective prevention and control of the epidemic and the resumption of work and production. To better inform these foreigners of the updated information about the coronavirus and to protect their safety, Beijing Advanced Innovation Center for Language Resources of BLCU, as a core member of the program, developed A Guide to the Prevention and Control of COVID-19 Epidemic in Foreign Languages promptly and efficiently on February 27.

The Guide includes 75 sentences commonly used in daily precautions, entry precautions, medical treatment, and personal protection. So far, the Guide has been written in more than 20 languages including Japanese, Korean, Persian, Italian, Arabic, English, German, Russian, and French, with versions including video clips, multimedia cards, and software system.

Since the launch of the Guide, not only has it received attention and support from the Ministry of Education, the State Language Commission, the National Center for Disease Control, the Foreign Affairs Office of the People’s Government of Beijing Municipality, the Chinese embassies and consulates abroad, but has also been welcomed by overseas Chinese students.

As the novel coronavirus has been spreading in other parts of the world, the Guide has now also been shared by foreign communities over the Internet and won positive feedback from some Chinese diplomatic missions.

Through such practices, China’s anti-epidemic progress and experience can be disseminated abroad, serving as humanitarian assistance for the international community in the prevention and control of the virus.

The Guide will continue to be updated based on the latest development of the epidemic at home and abroad, with more languages being added.

Another project we are working on is named Plain Chinese. Plain Chinese was successfully developed and is currently being tested. The project is tailored to international students and foreigners in China in the hope that they could be better informed about COVID-19, even if their Chinese language proficiency is limited. It is also helpful to those Chinese people who lack proficiency in Putonghua.

During and after any public emergency, mental health and psychological well-being is vital. Therapeutic interventions constitute another area for the provision of language services, and therefore constitute another duty for linguists to take on. Psychologists and linguists are expected to work hand in hand to deliver strategies for “linguistic comforting” during and after the COVID-19 disaster.

It is too early to draw conclusions as the disaster is yet to end, but I do wish to offer my reflections based on our provision of language services over the past 20 days.

First, being a scholar should not confine us to writing papers and imparting knowledge, but must include having a sense of social responsibility, the awareness and capability to solve practical problems. In recent decades, a group of Chinese sociolinguists have been calling people’s attention to language in social life (yuyan shenghuo).

This group has been advocating for attention to language-related problems in social development. Collectively, these linguists are known as the school of language in social life (语言生活派 yuyan shenghuo pai).

Professor Li Yuming’s original article “战疫语言服务团的故事” in CPPCC Newspaper, March 09, 2020

The reason why the language services program was able to rally so many volunteers, at a single call, is that these scholars actually were spurred to action by their convictions, i.e. to put their academic strength into the practice of the great cause of the motherland. Apart from the mission for research and education, scientific and educational studies also carry a social responsibility. In the fight against the epidemic, we should not simply care about self-protection, but instead, contribute ideas and exert efforts for the containment of the virus.

Second, information technology needs to be given full play in the prevention and control of epidemics. The current epidemic is characterized by immobility of people and commodities, but free flow of information.

Without information technology, it would have been far more difficult to fight this disaster. As a matter of fact, members of the language services program have not yet met each other in person, but have done an outstanding job with the help of online group chat.

Moreover, the development and promotion of language service products effectively utilized the previously established corpus, the modern language technology developed, and the inter-disciplinary talents cultivated during the construction of language resources. The progress made highlights the significance of China’s achievements in terms of the Internet and modern information technology.

Third, a plan on language services in emergency response needs to be included in the prevention and control of public emergencies. It is a critical test for the national governance system and management competence to effectively handle public emergencies. In recent years, the prevention and control of public emergencies in China have made remarkable progress, with many statutes and contingency plans enacted, such as the Emergency Response Law of the People’s Republic of China, the National Plan on Emergency Response, and the Regulation on Response for Public Health Emergencies. Meanwhile, particular units specializing in public emergency management and services have also been established. However, linguistic contingency plans are still absent from those solutions. Through the current public health emergency, importance should be attached to filling this gap as soon as possible.

It is proposed that the plan on language services in emergency responses shall include at least three aspects, namely:

First, we shall formulate the National Mechanism and Plan on Language Services in Public Emergency Response, or simply revise the current statutes, regulations and plans, such as the Emergency Response Law of the People’s Republic of China, the National Plan on Emergency Response, by adding relevant content.

The details of language services in public emergency response, however, remain to be investigated. The following might be worthy of consideration: the selection of channels through which the information is released, e.g. telephone, radio, television, network media (Weibo and WeChat included); the languages that are supposed to be used in information dissemination, including Putonghua, plain Chinese, Chinese dialects (varieties), ethnic languages, signed languages, and foreign languages; possible communication barriers and concrete solutions; application of various modern language technologies; mechanisms and plans on language services in emergency response at different levels; and, other language-related content in various aspects of emergency response, such as prevention and preparedness, monitoring and early warning, emergency response and rescue, post-emergency recovery and reconstruction.

Second, a standing language service institution for public emergencies will need to be set up. During ordinary times, only a few in-service staff or researchers will be needed while others hold their original posts. When an emergency arises, they can be urgently summoned to offer various language services.

Third, greater importance will need to be attached to language-related studies in public emergency response. Language services in emergency response is actually a problem of language application within a particular sphere and for a specific purpose. It is a special type of language situation. We should draw on the practical experience of such language services at home and abroad and take advantage of the academic achievements made in applied linguistics, to actively conduct research in this domain and establish the discipline of “emergency linguistics.” In doing so, linguists are able to contribute more to public emergency response. What is more, research centers devoted to language access in emergency response shall be founded, which are aimed at dealing with different types of public emergencies such as natural disasters, accidents, public health incidents, social security incidents, and to cultivate specialized talents by integrating with the existing departments of public emergency management and services.