The right to health is a fundamental human right enshrined in numerous international legal instruments and is binding on their signatory states. What this progressive right entails remains vague, but it includes the right to receive communication about health information and risks. This makes the timely and accurate communication of essential public health information crucial, particularly in emergency situations.
Varying levels of health literacy within any community means that health information must be communicated in an appropriate manner and format that is understandable and accessible to the broadest audience possible. Translation and interpreting for minority and foreign language speakers must be provided to ensure equality and non-discrimination where language may impede access. In this context, translators must go beyond the transfer of words from one language to another and consider communication more broadly. They must look at factors such as whether the text is appropriate and meaningfully accessible to its intended users, the degree of physical and digital access, the level of content, and whether a written text format is more suitable than audio-visual media or infographics. Translation that does not provide functional communication to ensure positive health outcomes or that cannot be meaningfully accessed by the target audience due to its poor quality can be a wasteful exercise.
The lower prestige of public service translation (PST), or community translation, with respect to more visible public service interpreting and other forms of print translation, has resulted in less research, a lack of public funding, and lower levels of remuneration, training, and opportunities for practitioners. The increasing use of artificial intelligence and digital technologies in the field pose further challenges to public service translators. Consequently, the outcome is that in both emergency and public service contexts, the translation of such materials is increasingly delegated to unpaid volunteers and/or non-professional translators. The communication needs of the target audience are not adequately considered. The lack of accessibility and overall coherent meaning of the translation may render it pointless, or even lead to or exacerbate miscommunication. This reinforces the vulnerability and often unequal status of minority and foreign language speakers.
Furthermore, in a globalized language services marketplace, where it is cheaper to outsource translations to translators in the Global South, the communication needs of migrant communities living in the diaspora, where the source and target language audiences share the same physical space and deal with the same authorities and systems, are often not adequately considered, or are misunderstood. This can result in miscommunication or costly errors in information, for example, on how to access primary medical services or pay for them.
This situation came to a head during the worldwide Covid-19 pandemic which was globally declared a public health emergency in March 2020 and is still ongoing. States were tasked with providing public health risk communication from the World Health Organization (WHO) in a suitable language for their own communities. Some failed to do so and others found themselves confronted with a lack of professional translators they could turn to for this task, particularly for under-resourced languages or those for which public translations are seldom produced. The novel and rapidly changing information and guidelines meant that some state authorities resorted to volunteers and the third sector, which often already had better communication and relationships of trust with the communities concerned.
The inadequate response of the public authorities in the United Kingdom, which inconsistently translated materials into a handful of community languages, meant foreign language speakers had to rely on sometimes inaccurate and outdated government translations, if provided, or resort to information not applicable to them produced in their own languages from other countries, as even across the United Kingdom, guidance was not uniform. This led to the voluntary or non-profit sector stepping in to fill the gap.
The focus of this paper is the work of the main non-governmental organization involved, Doctors of the World UK (DoTW) and its partner organizations, to translate pandemic health guidance at a national level in England, the largest country in the United Kingdom, with a population of over 50 million. DoTW provided translations of official guidance for England in over sixty languages and in multimedia formats, including video and infographics. This unique and sustained initiative is potentially the largest voluntary sector project to communicate public health risks through translation anywhere in the world, particularly in an emergency situation.
Based on a written interview with DoTW conducted via email in 2021, I examine the strategy adopted by DoTW from the beginning of the pandemic, focusing on the period between 2020 and mid-2021. The paper uses publicly available secondary data that shed further light on the process and outcome. DoTW’s approach is then analyzed through the lens of Taibi’s (2018) community translation quality assurance model, which considers community (public service) translation as a form of community empowerment. The model examines whether and how communicative goals were met and identifies good practices, factors and strategies for successful risk communication through translation. In view of the growing use of voluntary sector initiatives in the public sector, it also considers the sustainability and future scope of voluntary sector intervention at a national level for filling the gap in public service translation.
