Analysis: in a crisis situation, we need to get accurate information in a language we can understand from sources we can trust
Imagine for a moment that you are on business or holiday in a country where you don’t speak the language. You rely on the assumption that English will help you get by – the world speaks English, doesn’t it? You are woken up in the middle of the night by a trembling and thrown out of your hotel bed. Is this a bad dream?
The trembling continues, alarms are sounding, so you turn on the TV. There is a news reporter in a shaking studio reporting something in Japanese. Alarming icons appear on the screen. But you don’t speak Japanese, so you don’t understand.
You come to the realisation that this must be an earthquake. Coming from Ireland where we are not prone to this hazard, you are not really aware of the drill, unlike the Japanese who are drilled in earthquake response from an early age. What’s your first inclination? Probably to get out of the building? Wrong choice! You need some information and advice on what to do in a language you can understand…
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From RTÉ Radio One's Morning Ireland, a 2011 report on the situation at the Fukushima nuclear plant
This sounds like a very bad dream, but could have taken place during the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011. That disaster was to worsen through the tsunami that followed and the damage to the nuclear reactor at Fukushima. If you were a business person or holiday maker in Japan, you would have needed information on the dangers posed by the damaged nuclear reactor. You would have had to decide if it was necessary to leave the country. Where would you turn to for trusted information in a language you could understand? TV stations, social media, the Irish consulate? All of these require power and/or operational phone lines…
This is just one example of a crisis situation where it becomes clear how dependent we are on timely and accurate information in a language we can understand from sources we can trust. The importance of timely and accurate information in crisis communication is well recognised. In fact, a breakdown in communication is often pinpointed as one of the major problems in crisis response.
Surprisingly, the question of which language that communication is provided in has frequently been overlooked. This is why the EU has funded a project to raise the profile of the role of translation in crises. The International Network in Crisis Communication (INTERACT) is led by translation researchers from the School of Applied Language and Intercultural Studies at DCU and involves researchers from around the globe as well as SMEs and NGOs.
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From RTÉ Radio One's News At One, Clare-based diver Jim Warny returns home after Thai cave rescue
More recently, we saw the importance of multilingualism and translation in the Thai cave rescue. One of the project’s collaborators, Minako O’Hagan from the University of Auckland, wrote about why language matters in a crisis. She explains that the ability of one of the Wild Boars to communicate with the foreign divers who were first on the scene contributed to the successful outcome of the rescue mission.
This brings home the fact that emergency response is often an international effort, meaning that affected people and the international responders themselves will probably speak many different languages. To assume that they can all communicate clearly in one language in a high pressure situation where lives and well-being are at stake is folly.
Just use pictures then? Yes, these have a role to play in international communication, but have you ever tried to assemble a piece of IKEA furniture?
For example, translation was required for 18 languages during the dreadful Grenfell Towers disaster in London. We might be forgiven for thinking that translation is not something we in Ireland need to consider for crisis communication. London is a much more multilingual and multicultural city, right? However, since 2002, there has been an increase of almost 139 percent in the number of people without Irish nationality living in Ireland speaking 72 different languages.
The recently published National Risk Assessment Strategy acknowledges that we need to be more responsive to the needs of a multilingual society in Ireland and highlights the potential for language to be a barrier in accessing Government communications and services. Our own recent experience with snow and drought demonstrates that our country is not exempt from emergencies. And an emergency does not need to be on a national scale: think about the number of tourists who visit our country every year and consider that many of them have little to no English.
In the Google era, we might be tempted to complacently suggest that Google Translate will do the job. Our project includes research on computer-driven automatic translation. DCU is an international research leader on this topic so we can confidently say that automatic translation services like Google Translate or Microsoft Bing Translator have a - limited - role to play in emergencies.
Think about this: would the technology have worked deep down in a Thai cave? Or if the internet services are down due to damage by a tsunami? Less dramatically, but just as scary, would you want to rely on a potentially inaccurate automatic translation engine to communicate your penicillin allergy to an emergency nurse? These are just some of the reasons why automatic translation is not a complete solution.
Would you want to rely on a potentially inaccurate automatic translation engine to communicate your penicillin allergy to an emergency nurse?
Just use pictures then? Yes, these have a role to play in international communication, but have you ever tried to assemble a piece of IKEA furniture? That was, presumably, not in a crisis situation, but nonetheless stressful! Research has shown that pictures on their own are open to subjective interpretation and are age-, gender- and culture-specific when it comes to understanding.
The INTERACT project’s ultimate goal is to raise the recognition and implementation of multilingual translation in emergency response. We are hoping to achieve this through researching collaboration across different disciplines and sectors by examining policy, technology and training aspects.
The INTERACT project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 734211.
The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ
