Comprehension and trust in crises: investigating the impact of machine translation and post-editing

We conducted a survey to understand the impact of machine translation and postediting awareness on comprehension of and trust in messages disseminated to prepare the public for a weather-related crisis, i.e. flooding. The translation direction was English–Italian. Sixty-one participants—all native Italian speakers with different English proficiency levels— answered our survey. Each participant read and evaluated between three and six crisis messages using ratings and openended questions on comprehensibility and trust. The messages were in English and Italian. All the Italian messages had been machine translated and post-edited. Nevertheless, participants were told that only half had been post-edited, so that we could test the impact of post-editing awareness. We could not draw firm conclusions when comparing the scores for trust and comprehensibility assigned to the three types of messages—English, post-edits, and purported raw outputs. However, when scores were triangulated with open-ended answers, stronger patterns were observed, such as the impact of fluency of the translations on their comprehensibility and trustworthiness. We found correlations between comprehensibility and trustworthiness, and identified other factors influencing these aspects, such as the clarity and soundness of the messages. We conclude by outlining implications for crisis preparedness, limitations, and areas for future research

Translation facilitates comprehension of health-related crisis information: Kenya as an example

This paper examines the relationship between translation and comprehension when communicating health-related information during a crisis. It tests comprehension levels among a population of rural and urban Kenyans of health-related crisis communication presented to them in an English source text and a Kiswahili target text. These data were gathered in Kenya in collaboration with a non-profit organisation, Translators without Borders, and the overarching aim of the project was to assess empirically the potential impact of translation on comprehension of health-crisis content. Findings indicate that English is not a suitable medium for the transfer of important health-related information among the cohort of participants in this study, despite English being an official language of Kenya. In contrast, Kiswahili, also an official language, seems to function well. As a result, a need for translation into Kiswahili in this context has been empirically shown. It was further found that written modes of communication are not necessarily the most appropriate modes for the dissemination of health-related crisis information among this cohort. This presents interesting challenges for governments, crisis response agencies, and translators alike, and these challenges are discussed

Management and training of linguistic volunteers: a case study of translation at Cochrane Germany

Cochrane is a global, non-profit organisation that synthesizes health-related research evidence. It established a translation strategy in 2014 to increase the significance of its information beyond the English-speaking world. Under the strategy, translation at Cochrane is achieved mostly through the efforts of linguistic volunteers. Translation in crisis settings, too, relies on the work of volunteers; however, appropriate ways to manage and train these volunteers are unclear. We carried out a study of the case of translation at one part of Cochrane, Cochrane Germany, to learn about the management and training of linguistic volunteers there and in Cochrane more broadly. Thematic analysis of data gathered by the researcher during a two-month secondment to the offices of Cochrane Germany– including data from formal interviews, informal meetings, field notes, a reflective journal, and a large corpus of grey literature – generated three main themes. The themes relate to appropriate conceptualisations of linguistic volunteers, project management in the assurance of quality volunteer work, and feedback as a form of volunteer training. Recommendations are made to apply these lessons learned to future work on crisis translation and for possible improvements to linguistic volunteer management and training at Cochrane

Communities of practice and translation: An introduction

A community of practice is a concept that can be used to examine how groups of people share knowledge and learn. Researchers in Translation and Interpreting Studies have found value in the concept to study translator and interpreter education and to research knowledge sharing and collaboration among networks of professional translators, fansubbers, translation activists, and public service interpreters and translators. Many of these previous studies examined how translators and interpreters (or those who saw themselves as translators and interpreters) learned by doing and formed communities around a shared practice. Our motivation for this special issue was to explore settings in which individuals who might not identify themselves as translators or interpreters share knowledge about translation or interpreting. We use this introductory article to expand on this motivation, outline fundamental ideas related to communities of practice, summarise each contribution to the issue, and suggest themes and future directions that can be derived from the research presented

Translation and interpreting in disaster situations

Disasters negatively affect the health and wellbeing of those who experience them. People communicate with each other to prepare for, respond to, and recover from these effects. In a context of linguistic and cultural diversity, this communication may involve translation and interpreting. Therefore, the study of translation and interpreting in disasters is worthwhile for an understanding of translation and health, especially because the future is likely to bring more disasters that will cut across linguistic, cultural and regional boundaries. This chapter reviews research on language, culture, translation and interpreting in a variety of disaster settings. It explains the potential of translation and interpreting to unlock the knowledge and participation of local communities in disasters, improve their decision-making and risk awareness and achieve equity, justice and dignity. It also reveals common characteristics of translation and interpreting in the disasters studied – including their ad hoc, local, and voluntary nature, as well as the importance of cultural issues – and recommends future avenues for research

Translation and trust: a case study of how translation was experienced by foreign nationals resident in Japan for the 2011 great east Japan earthquake

This thesis examines translation and interpreting in a particular context: the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake. Motivated by the researcher’s experience of being resident in Tokyo when the disaster struck, a study was carried out to better understand translation and interpreting in this context using the case of foreign residents who experienced the disaster. A constructivist philosophical approach and the academic traditions of ethnography were adopted when designing the case study, and face-to-face, individual interviews with 28 participants from 12 nationalities (Irish, Dutch, French, German, Sudanese, Tunisian, Chinese, Bangladeshi, American, Canadian, Australian, and New Zealander) made up its core primary data. The diverse linguistic and demographic profiles of these participants provided access to multiple perspectives on the objects of enquiry. These perspectives were then analysed over six phases of thematic analysis to describe and explain how foreign residents communicated and gathered information, how translation and interpreting formed part of these activities, and why any of this was important. The analysis suggested that the objects of enquiry can best be understood as written and oral interlingual and intercultural transfer, dominated by the Japanese-English language pair, carried out mostly by volunteers known to the user, to create products that were not always received as translations, but that were valorised when seen to produce timely information of adequate quality. It also suggested that a lack of sufficient resources and a strongly culturally-bound space of interaction created problems for translation and interpreting. Furthermore, the analysis revealed that trust was a significant category in these data. For this reason, a socio-cognitive model of trust was selected and applied to the data to describe and explain the role that translation and interpreting played in some foreign residents’ decisions to trust and to argue for the importance of these phenomena to the existence of trust in this and other disasters

Translation in disaster and crisis settings: a New field of research

Research on translation in disaster and crisis settings • My study of the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake • Findings about translation in this context – Types of data requiring translation – People involved in translation – Places in which translation took place – Translation with respect to trust • The EU-funded research network INTERACT, the International Network on Crisis Translation • Conclusion

Translation, interpreting, language, and foreignness in crisis communication policy: 21 years of white papers in Japan

Japan, a country of some 126 million people, is exposed to many hazards— including earthquakes, tsunamis, tropical cyclones, and floods— and regularly experiences large- scale crisis events. Japan also possesses resources and experience that allow it to cope well with many of the crises and disasters that can arise in its hazardscape. The aims of this chapter were to investigate the extent to which translation and interpreting of foreign languages have been present in this coping capacity in recent history using a computerised corpus analysis of an influential policy instrument: Japan’s annual White Paper on Disaster Management. The chapter continues in the section on “Research context” with a review of literature on crisis translation and interpreting policy and a discussion of Japan’s main policy problems, instruments, and actors. The third section, “Research methodology”, explains how a computerised, monolingual, lexical analysis of a diachronic corpus of policy texts written and analysed in Japanese was conducted. The fourth section follows with a discussion of what the use of Japanese equivalents related to “translation”, “interpreting”, “language”, and “foreignness” in the corpus suggests about policy- making developments in Japan in the last two decades. The chapter closes with conclusions that include a test of findings against the 2021 White Paper, limitations, and suggestions for future work