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Unity in Adversity: Multilingual Crisis Translation and Emergency Linguistics in the COVID-19 Pandemic

The Open Public Health Journal 22 Mar 2021 DOI: 10.2174/1874944502114010094

Abstract

In this globalised era, technological innovations in mobility and travel brought in international and intercultural contact which historically exposed the world population to diseases of pandemic levels. As we are already living in multilingual and multicultural societies, this contact amongst peoples necessitates the need for multilingual knowledge and educational materials production pertaining to public health measures. As established in recent literature on multilingual crisis translation initiatives from China and the Philippines, this discursive piece proposes that emergency language services should be formally institutionalised in public health organisations, most certainly in crisis prevention, responses, and mitigation. The COVID-19 pandemic expedited the need for such expertise and language experts all over the world are currently proposing to establish a new field in linguistics to tackle public health translation in emergency situations – emergency linguistics.

Keywords: COVID-19, Crisis translation, Emergency linguistics, Multilingualism, Public health, Mitigation.
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