Wrong languages

Hossain Ahmed's son can't move his legs. He fled Myanmar with his father and now lives in a refugee camp in south-eastern Bangladesh. Time and again they visit the health centre at the camp – but with little luck. "I don't understand most of what they say at the clinic," Ahmed told the online portal The New Humanitarian. "And I think they also don't understand what I say."

The reason is that both refugees speak Rohingya while many of the translators at the camp speak Chittagonian, which is commonly spoken on the other side of the border. Although both languages are often assumed to be almost identical, research by Translators without Borders (TwB) came to a different conclusion. Over a third of the surveyed Rohingya would not understand a simple message in Chittagonian "Everyone thought that both the languages are close enough," says Mia Marzotto, who works with TwB. "But that is not the case."

Historically, a few languages – primarily English and French as former colonial languages – predominate in the humanitarian aid and development cooperation sphere. Besides these, projects and activities are implemented in numerous other languages as well, but this does not always work quite as desired. The 2010 earthquake in Haiti is a case in point. There was an influx of organisations and volunteers, but very often they lacked a common language.

A joint report prepared by the UN and the Harvard Humanitarian Institute notes that important meetings were held in languages that shut out many participants and consequently delayed the communication of important decisions. A staffer at the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) is quoted saying that the problem is well known. Evaluation reports repeatedly stressed: "Make effective information available to the government and the population in their own language." But it was still not done. Poor translations, as the report notes, are a "perennial hidden issue".

Translators without Borders found glaring flaws in translation in practically all contexts: from the earthquake in Kathmandu and refugee camps in northern Nigeria to the COVID-19 pandemic. This is serious, considering that efficient communication is even more important during crisis situations. Why does this happen? And how can the shortcomings be addressed?

The most obvious hurdles to better communication are time and resources. While translations often have to be done very quickly, it is not uncommon for a large number of mother tongues to exist side-by-side in affected regions. The challenge this can represent is illustrated by the dissemination of COVID-19 information in India. The country officially has 22 scheduled languages and over 120 languages and dialects that are spoken by more than 10,000 people as their mother tongue.

In the early stages of the pandemic, much of the information was communicated in Hindi and English, which are just bridge languages for many and not understood by some people at all. This led to certain groups not taking the danger seriously, says Biplab Ghosh, who works for the civil society movement Bharat Gyan Vigyan Samiti. "It felt like a distant threat." For people to be able to identify with information, it is vital that it is conveyed in their mother tongue.

However, such translations are time and resource-intensive. If an organisation already has scarce resources, it may use these elsewhere. Mia Marzotto from Translators without Borders is nevertheless convinced that the problem of language barriers can and must be overcome. In a recently published report, she has compiled the experiences of her organisation in different contexts. She concludes that international actors often wrongly assume that local staff are able to communicate with all population groups in a country. In fact, very often there is no information at all about which mother tongue the affected people speak.

The translation expert has suggested three key approaches to overcome such barriers. First, mother tongues must be identified at an early stage when the needs assessment for a project is carried out. Second, budgets for translation and the preparation of a context-specific glossary must be included in project planning. Third, information material should be clear and in plain, simple language so that it can be understood by a wide section of the population.

Machine translation, which has been getting better and better over the years, is a frequently underestimated resource. A current example is the Translation Initiative for COVID-19, where several influential universities and tech companies have come together to provide machine-readable translation data in almost 90 languages so that essential information is made widely available.

Online portal «The New Humanitarian»