Interpreting the Administration: Burkina Faso's Courts in Translation

The court, a state organization, defines and sets the rules of the game in what regards the handling of trials in plurilingual Burkina Faso. In spite of around 60 languages being spoken in the country, French is the only official language, codified as such by the constitution. In Bobo Dioulasso, second largest city in Burkina, the language of the public space is Jula, a large, international language spoken throughout western Africa. Citizens who, through a chain of unfortunate circumstances, are brought to court, need a court interpreter to translate for them. They thus need to be made to fit the French space that is the court. Court interpreters themselves, however, are everyday citizens and not trained in interpreting techniques. The decision to hire court interpreters is a purely bureaucratic one and not based on either merit or training. On the one hand, I will describe these daily bureaucratic practices in the judicial system in Burkina Faso and their forms of rationalization, drawing on court interpretation. On the other, I will analyze the challenges to and shortcomings in these rationalization processes. The goal is to understand the role French plays in Burkina Faso’s courts – who insists or demands on using French in the courtroom? – in order to grasp the role the court interpreter plays and is made to play in this context

The Language of Justice: when the colonial past is invited into the courtroom

In courts throughout Burkina Faso only French is admitted for all communication, a heritage left over from colonial times. Since the vast majority of defendants cannot use French fluently, they need an interpreter. Interpretation has a long history in Africa, but the interpreter's role has never been as vaguely defined as it is today. The use of French, which has "invited" itself into the courtrooms of Burkina Faso, will be analyzed here as a continuation of a colonial past and the astounding return of a well-known literary figure

Review: Claudia Roth (2012)†, Willemijn de Jong, Manfred Perlik, Noemi Steuer, and Heinzpeter Znoj (eds), Urban Dreams - Transformations of Family Life in Burkina Faso (2018)

The book Urban Dreams was published as an edited volume posthumous- ly by four close colleagues of Claudia Roth and reunites selected articles she had written for different academic publications over the span of a 20-year time period. Roth's long-term ethnographic involvement in the same neighbourhood in Bobo-Dioulasso, Burkina Faso, her repeated interviews with the same interlocutors, and also the fact that she looked at the same research topic - how people manage to secure their liveli- hoods - from a number of different angles makes her work particularly dense. The theoretical lenses through which Roth looked at her diverse research interests are gender studies, anthropologically oriented social security studies, and practice theory (Bourdieu). She also shows in her work how everything is interconnected: the economy, politics, history, and of course tradition, lived out daily. As a welcome side effect, Urban Dreams provides a walk through the canon of publication conventions of the past two decades

The language of justice : when the colonial past is invited into the courtroom

Dans les tribunaux au Burkina Faso seule la langue française est admise, tel un héritage du colonialisme. Comme les justiciables, dans leur grande majorité, ne parlent pas cette langue officielle, ils ont besoin d’un interprète. L’interprétariat a une longue histoire en Afrique, mais le rôle de l’interprète n’a jamais été aussi mal défini qu’aujourd’hui. L’emploi du français, qui « s’invite » dans les tribunaux du Burkina, est analysé ici comme une continuation du passé colonial et le retour étonnant d’une célèbre figure littéraire

Evolutionary Dynamics of Vibrio cholerae O1 following a Single-Source Introduction to Haiti

ABSTRACT Prior to the epidemic that emerged in Haiti in October of 2010, cholera had not been documented in this country. After its introduction, a strain of Vibrio cholerae O1 spread rapidly throughout Haiti, where it caused over 600,000 cases of disease and >7,500 deaths in the first two years of the epidemic. We applied whole-genome sequencing to a temporal series of V. cholerae isolates from Haiti to gain insight into the mode and tempo of evolution in this isolated population of V. cholerae O1. Phylogenetic and Bayesian analyses supported the hypothesis that all isolates in the sample set diverged from a common ancestor within a time frame that is consistent with epidemiological observations. A pangenome analysis showed nearly homogeneous genomic content, with no evidence of gene acquisition among Haiti isolates. Nine nearly closed genomes assembled from continuous-long-read data showed evidence of genome rearrangements and supported the observation of no gene acquisition among isolates. Thus, intrinsic mutational processes can account for virtually all of the observed genetic polymorphism, with no demonstrable contribution from horizontal gene transfer (HGT). Consistent with this, the 12 Haiti isolates tested by laboratory HGT assays were severely impaired for transformation, although unlike previously characterized noncompetent V. cholerae isolates, each expressed hapR and possessed a functional quorum-sensing system. Continued monitoring of V. cholerae in Haiti will illuminate the processes influencing the origin and fate of genome variants, which will facilitate interpretation of genetic variation in future epidemics

TMPRSS2-mediated SARS-CoV-2 uptake boosts innate immune activation, enhances cytopathology, and drives convergent virus evolution.

The accessory protease transmembrane protease serine 2 (TMPRSS2) enhances severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) uptake into ACE2-expressing cells, although how increased entry impacts downstream viral and host processes remains unclear. To investigate this in more detail, we performed infection assays in engineered cells promoting ACE2-mediated entry with and without TMPRSS2 coexpression. Electron microscopy and inhibitor experiments indicated TMPRSS2-mediated cell entry was associated with increased virion internalization into endosomes, and partially dependent upon clathrin-mediated endocytosis. TMPRSS2 increased panvariant uptake efficiency and enhanced early rates of virus replication, transcription, and secretion, with variant-specific profiles observed. On the host side, transcriptional profiling confirmed the magnitude of infection-induced antiviral and proinflammatory responses were linked to uptake efficiency, with TMPRSS2-assisted entry boosting early antiviral responses. In addition, TMPRSS2-enhanced infections increased rates of cytopathology, apoptosis, and necrosis and modulated virus secretion kinetics in a variant-specific manner. On the virus side, convergent signatures of cell-uptake-dependent innate immune induction were recorded in viral genomes, manifesting as switches in dominant coupled Nsp3 residues whose frequencies were correlated to the magnitude of the cellular response to infection. Experimentally, we demonstrated that selected Nsp3 mutations conferred enhanced interferon antagonism. More broadly, we show that TMPRSS2 orthologues from evolutionarily diverse mammals facilitate panvariant enhancement of cell uptake. In summary, our study uncovers previously unreported associations, linking cell entry efficiency to innate immune activation kinetics, cell death rates, virus secretion dynamics, and convergent selection of viral mutations. These data expand our understanding of TMPRSS2's role in the SARS-CoV-2 life cycle and confirm its broader significance in zoonotic reservoirs and animal models

Safety and efficacy of the ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 vaccine (AZD1222) against SARS-CoV-2: an interim analysis of four randomised controlled trials in Brazil, South Africa, and the UK.

BACKGROUND: A safe and efficacious vaccine against severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), if deployed with high coverage, could contribute to the control of the COVID-19 pandemic. We evaluated the safety and efficacy of the ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 vaccine in a pooled interim analysis of four trials. METHODS: This analysis includes data from four ongoing blinded, randomised, controlled trials done across the UK, Brazil, and South Africa. Participants aged 18 years and older were randomly assigned (1:1) to ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 vaccine or control (meningococcal group A, C, W, and Y conjugate vaccine or saline). Participants in the ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 group received two doses containing 5 × 1010 viral particles (standard dose; SD/SD cohort); a subset in the UK trial received a half dose as their first dose (low dose) and a standard dose as their second dose (LD/SD cohort). The primary efficacy analysis included symptomatic COVID-19 in seronegative participants with a nucleic acid amplification test-positive swab more than 14 days after a second dose of vaccine. Participants were analysed according to treatment received, with data cutoff on Nov 4, 2020. Vaccine efficacy was calculated as 1 - relative risk derived from a robust Poisson regression model adjusted for age. Studies are registered at ISRCTN89951424 and ClinicalTrials.gov, NCT04324606, NCT04400838, and NCT04444674. FINDINGS: Between April 23 and Nov 4, 2020, 23 848 participants were enrolled and 11 636 participants (7548 in the UK, 4088 in Brazil) were included in the interim primary efficacy analysis. In participants who received two standard doses, vaccine efficacy was 62·1% (95% CI 41·0-75·7; 27 [0·6%] of 4440 in the ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 group vs71 [1·6%] of 4455 in the control group) and in participants who received a low dose followed by a standard dose, efficacy was 90·0% (67·4-97·0; three [0·2%] of 1367 vs 30 [2·2%] of 1374; pinteraction=0·010). Overall vaccine efficacy across both groups was 70·4% (95·8% CI 54·8-80·6; 30 [0·5%] of 5807 vs 101 [1·7%] of 5829). From 21 days after the first dose, there were ten cases hospitalised for COVID-19, all in the control arm; two were classified as severe COVID-19, including one death. There were 74 341 person-months of safety follow-up (median 3·4 months, IQR 1·3-4·8): 175 severe adverse events occurred in 168 participants, 84 events in the ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 group and 91 in the control group. Three events were classified as possibly related to a vaccine: one in the ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 group, one in the control group, and one in a participant who remains masked to group allocation. INTERPRETATION: ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 has an acceptable safety profile and has been found to be efficacious against symptomatic COVID-19 in this interim analysis of ongoing clinical trials. FUNDING: UK Research and Innovation, National Institutes for Health Research (NIHR), Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Lemann Foundation, Rede D'Or, Brava and Telles Foundation, NIHR Oxford Biomedical Research Centre, Thames Valley and South Midland's NIHR Clinical Research Network, and AstraZeneca