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Investigating the role of communities and NGOs in supporting sustainable crisis translation in Hong Kong

Project Website

https://linguashk.org

 

Project Description

Effectively communicating crisis information such as hygiene instructions in an epidemic is key in mitigating risk in disaster situations. The small amount of literature examining crisis communication conducted via translation has sought to increase the visibility of translation in disaster situations and has advocated for a greater emphasis on multilingualism and multiculturalism in government policies. Scholars have also investigated the active participation undertaken by ordinary citizens in the form of crowdsourcing and volunteer translation. These citizen translators play different roles when they produce the translated messages collaboratively. However, the effectiveness and sustainability of their translation activities can be hindered by a lack of professional training, systematic organisation and its ad hoc nature.


These challenges are also encountered by NGOs in their translation provisions, especially when serving minority language users. This project is situated in Hong Kong and aims to facilitate crisis communication with the city’s Nepalese and Pakistani South Asian (SA) residents who have been underprivileged in society and under-researched in the scholarly literature. The project will bring together two stakeholders, i.e. communities and NGOs, by introducing the practice of collaborative translation through a tailored training programme and developing a theoretically informed community of practice with technological support.


The project team will first collect information regarding SA residents’ experience of crisis translation, through a combination of documentary and ethnographic methods including analysis of newspaper reports, evaluation of the crisis information made available on the government’s websites, and ethnographic fieldwork in the SA communities and NGOs. These will provide insights as to issues of availability, accessibility and acceptability with respect to crisis communication with residents speaking minority languages, as well as an initial understanding of the SA’s linguistic competence and communicational needs, and of the challenges that the two stakeholder groups have encountered. Having obtained an in-depth understanding of the status quo of crisis communication conducted in minority languages, the project team will implement a citizen translation training programme, in which collaborative translation involving both human and non-human actors plays a significant role. The monitoring and evaluation of the interactions between the participants and between human translators and machines, and the interplay between the NGO staff and SA residents, will significantly contribute to our understanding of the process of collaborative translation, non-professional translation and translator training.

 

Translating for South Asians in Preparation for Crisis Workshop Series

Eight South Asian community members who respectively speak Nepali and Urdu participated in a two-day-long workshop organised and delivered by the PI. Through the workshop, they engaged in collaborative translation activities, translating crisis-related content between English and Nepali and English and Urdu.

Sports for Wellness Through Service-Learning: A Multilingual Social Media Campaign

31 HKBU students and 15 South Asian students collaboratively created their own gamified sports for well-being, wrote up the script, shot and edited the trilingual video (narration in English and subtitles in the other two languages) and provided subtitles in two languages (Cantonese and Urdu, or Cantonese and Hindi) to the videos.

Videos

 

Project Investigator

Professor YU Chuan, Clara (Academy of Language and Culture)

 

Project Collabortors

  • Professor Mark SHUTTLEWORTH (Dean and Professor, School of Translation and Foreign Languages, The Hang Seng University of Hong Kong)
  • Professor Tom BARTINDALE (Associate Professor, Department of Computer and Information Sciences, Northumbria University, Newcastle, the UK)

 

Funding/Award

  • Research Grants Council - Early Career Scheme

 

Publications

 

HC inner

Humanities and Cultures

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