Unity in Adversity: Multilingual Crisis Translation and Emergency Linguistics in the COVID-19 Pandemic
Jeconiah Louis Dreisbach1, *, Sharon Mendoza-Dreisbach2
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2021Volume: 14
First Page: 94
Last Page: 97
Publisher ID: TOPHJ-14-94
DOI: 10.2174/1874944502114010094
Article History:
Received Date: 4/10/2020Revision Received Date: 20/12/2020
Acceptance Date: 1/1/2021
Electronic publication date: 22/03/2021
Collection year: 2021
open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode. This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
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.