In March 2020 the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic. Various health departments needed to react to this threat: first, conveying information about the virus itself, and later, announcing and promoting vaccinations. Multilingual, multimodal communication is essential during a crisis; lacking translated materials limits communication with groups, e.g., minority language speakers. Studies from early in the pandemic show some positive efforts and shortfalls in inclusivity regarding languages that have official status at the regional or national level (Kretzer & Pfeiffer, 2022), migrant languages (Ahmad & Hillman, 2021), signed languages (Blasi et al., 2021), and indigenous languages (Chen, 2020). We build on these to study the current state of COVID-19 communications with a contemporary issue, vaccination.
We investigated the vaccination campaigns of two countries, South Africa and the United States, as examples from the Global South and North with similarities in their sociolinguistic history and language policy (e.g., a colonial history and the primacy of English), and key differences (e.g., South Africa has multiple official languages; the US has none). We collected online resources in all languages available from national government websites and one sub-national government from each country (Western Cape and Pennsylvania), from February-March 2022 and analyzed them in terms of O'Brien et al.'s (2018) framework of Availability, Accessibility, Acceptability, and Adaptability.
In both countries, at the national and sub-national levels, the number of English resources available exceeded that of other languages. Both countries had multimodal resources (videos, posters), including videos in signed languages. The US offered 'easy to read' material in English and Spanish; no such resources were found for any language in the South African context. Although both countries included resources in non-majority languages, they offered only isolated materials in less populous minority, indigenous, and migrant languages. The Pennsylvania Department of Health relied primarily on automatic translation for non-majority languages, which has questionable acceptability. Websites varied in the accessibility or ease of finding materials in languages other than English. Results will be discussed additionally in the context of the language policies of both research areas.
References
Ahmad, Rizwan, & Hillman, Sara. 2021. Laboring to communicate: Use of migrant languages in COVID-19 awareness campaign in Qatar. Multilingua, 40(3), 303–337.
Blasi, Damián E., Mishra, Vishala, García, Adolfo M., & Dexter, Joseph P. 2021. Linguistic fairness in the U.S.: the case of multilingual public health information about COVID-19. https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.09.27.21264211
Cappuzzo, Barbara. 2021. The importance of multilingual information and plain English in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. European Scientific Journal 17(30), 37-52.
Chen, Chun-Mei. 2020. Public health messages about COVID-19 prevention in multilingual Taiwan. Multilingua 39(5), 597–606.
Kretzer, Michael M. & Pfeiffer, Verbra. 2022. The heterogeneity of language policies and its related health crisis communication about COVID-19 in Lesotho and South Africa. COVID-19 and a world of ad hoc geographies. Springer.
O'Brien, Sharon, Federici, Federico, Cadwell, Patrick, Marlowe, Jay, & Gerber, Brian. 2018. Language translation during disaster: A comparative analysis of five national approaches. International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, 31, 627–636.
