By now, we’re able to rattle off public health advice about the coronavirus by rote. “Socially distance”, “the R0 rate” and “lockdown” have become regularly-used parts of our lexicon. We know to stay between 1.5 and two metres away from others when outdoors and to don masks. We’re washing our hands more than ever — with potentially enormous effects on other diseases that thrive on uncleanliness.

“It’s not just about translation. It’s understanding that cultures and communities differ in the way they assess something to be meaningful or true.”

But what happens if your culture doesn’t work in metres or feet and inches? Or if the short idioms — in the UK, “stay alert, protect the NHS, save lives” — doesn’t translate directly?

Anthropologists and experts are working on getting the message to indigenous people, who make up one in 20 of the world’s population, in a way they’ll understand. That’s vital because they account for 15% of the world’s poorest people, and are less likely to have sustained health infrastructure and systems that can keep them clean — and the coronavirus at bay.

“It’s not just about translation,” says Mandana Seyfeddinipur, an academic at SOAS University of London, and one of the contributors to the VirALLanguages project, which aims to provide reliable information about the coronavirus to indigenous populations around the world. “It’s understanding that cultures and communities differ in the way they assess something to be meaningful or true.”

The project takes verified information from the WHO and develops a carefully-crafted script that contains the information necessary to impart to an at-risk community

The public health messaging around the Covid-19 crisis has been a top-down one. The World Health Organisation (WHO) establishes the scientific norms around the coronavirus — what we know and what we don’t know, what we should and shouldn’t do — then disburses that information to national governments, who disseminate it through their population by public information campaigns. But the linguists behind the VirALLanguages project are taking the opposite approach: they’re seeding information from the bottom-up in communities in Papua New Guinea, Brazil and Cameroon.

In doing that, the group are trying to tackle a major issue in indigenous health. “There are a lot of people for whom these [traditional] messages don’t reach,” says Seyfeddinipur. The project takes verified information from the WHO and develops a carefully-crafted script that contains the information necessary to impart to an at-risk community. They then work with local partners — speakers of endangered languages in the country they’re targeting, often in high-ranking positions such as mayors or shamans — to translate and record messages in the indigenous language.

That message is then tested on another speaker of the language, who answers questions about the information they’ve learned to ensure it makes sense. Simple things like staying two metres apart can be changed into measures of distances that the population will better understand, while the fact it’s coming from a trusted member of the community, rather than an outsider, means people are more likely to heed the advice.

Then the VirALLanguages project will disseminate the information. This can be by spending money with local radio stations, or market screamers, to broadcast the message to the local population. “It’s not white people telling people of colour how they should tell people something,” says Seyfeddinipur. “It’s a collaborative effort of a lot of people coming together saying how can we get this across in the best way.

That message is also being heard in Australia, where indigenous tribes in the Northern Territory are being kept informed by a separate project by academics at Menzies University. Members of the Aboriginal community with chronic kidney, lung or heart problems — who are most at risk of coronavirus — are being told what to do in different languages key to their tribes. “We saw there was a need to go a bit further than the wash your hands and social distance and stay at home messages put forward by government,” says Paul Lawton, who is a kidney specialist involved in the project.

The top-down government messaging wasn’t even reaching many Aboriginal people, Lawton says. The Australian government’s advice was only released in four different languages, including English, when there are more than 150 different indigenous languages spoken across the country. The project is similar to the VirALLanguages one: the researchers connect with respected figures in the community who record short videos on their iPhones that are posted to Vimeo: within a month, 20,000 people had downloaded the messages.

It’s all part of making sure that as the coronavirus spreads to the most remote parts of the world, those most remote from medical support aren’t left to fend for themselves. — Chris Stokel-Walker

(Photo credit: Unsplash)