It’s easy to overlook how important language is for health if you’re on the English-speaking internet, where “”is this headache actually something to worry about?”” is only a quick Wikipedia article or WebMD search away. For over half of the world’s population, people can’t expect to Google their symptoms, nor even necessarily get a pamphlet from their doctor explaining their diagnosis, because it’s not available in a language they can understand.
Just as our best efforts at fighting the virus are a whole bunch of small, unglamorous decisions by many people—staying home, washing hands, painstakingly testing vaccine candidates—the same thing is true on the communications side. There’s still a role for the tech—farming out poster templates and video scripts to translators, keeping track of which languages are up to date so that effort isn’t duplicated, sending posters and videos through family WhatsApp groups. All this would have been impossible in a pre-internet era, especially with social distancing. But they rely on humble, human-mediated tools like shared spreadsheets and email lists and phone cameras, not whiz-bang artificial intelligence swooping in to save the day.
The historian and novelist Ada Palmer has pointed out that this is the first pandemic in human history where we’ve had an understanding of diseases and hygiene, where we’ve actually known what we needed to do to hold it off for long enough to develop a vaccine, making social distancing a realistic strategy, even as it upends all our lives. This is also, therefore, the first pandemic in human history where we’ve to have the power and the responsibility to share this understanding, a network of linguistic care which ultimately spans every corner of the globe.
Do you agree?
