Public vaccination information in times of a pandemic presents perhaps the purest test of public trust: the receiver trusts the message or does not, and trust is physically manifested in the act of vaccination. In 2020 and 2021, in many cities around the world, trust in vaccine information was reported as being lower in culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) communities than among L1 speakers of official languages, and in some cases this was reported as being partly due to distrust in mediation by translators and interpreters.
This panel will present an initial comparison of vaccination communication in four cities that have significant CALD populations: Brussels, Melbourne, Shanghai, and Barcelona. We will compare the legal frameworks, the language policies, the translation policies that may or may not ensue from the language policies, the translation practices undertaken to ensure cross-lingual understanding of the vaccination information, and the relative success of the communication in terms of behavior-change communication in selected target communities in each city.
Of particular interest is the variable role of community organizations and healthcare institutions as mediators of messages, alongside and occasionally instead of certified translators and interpreters. In some instances, there are indications that such volunteer mediators may have been considered more trustworthy than the official translators and interpreters, and that this greater trust correlates with higher levels of vaccination in the communities concerned.
If such a relation can be attested as more than an isolated phenomenon, it should provoke a rethinking of sole dependence on certified translators and interpreters as the efficient instruments of language and translation policies in relation to CALD communities. This in turn may reflect on the institutional levels at which language and translation policies should become direct causes of decisions about which languages to translate into and who should be entrusted with the translation.
Since these are the initial reports laying the groundwork of a four-year project led by KU Leuven and the University of Melbourne, we do not intend to advance any definitive conclusions. We will, however, use our initial fieldwork and policy analysis to explore several informed hypotheses about which factors are key to the success of this kind of behavior-change communication, and about what kinds of translation policies are most likely to lead to trust-building among CALD communities in superdiverse cities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Keywords<\/strong>: translation policy, COVID, vaccination, trust, CALD communities.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Panel Chair: Anthony Pym Participants: Kadija Bouyzourn, Rachel Macreadie, Shuxia Zhou, Arturo G\u00e1ndara Public vaccination information in times of a pandemic presents perhaps the purest test of public trust: the receiver trusts the message or does not, and trust is … Continue reading