Public health information for minority linguistic communities

PPersrpsecptivesctives Public health information for minority linguistic communities Pierpaolo Di Carlo,a Bradley McDonnell,b Lisa Vahapoglu,c Jeff Good,a Mandana Seyfeddinipurd & Katarzyna Kordase Crisis and emergency risk communica- academics and communities have re- Failure to communicate effectively with tion guidelines1 stress that the success sulted in the translation of COVID-19 the public [...] To 6 counteract the lack of trust and potential 5000 ineffectiveness of COVID-19 prevention 5 messages, we call for additional transla- tion efforts aiming to disseminate infor- 4000 mation in all the 7000 languages of the 4 world. [...] The text is not limited to tion of endangered languages has been through the transdisciplinary collabora- the illustration of COVID-19 preventive growing,9 and this new development has tion of documentary linguists, public measures and contains general informa- brought increasing numbers of linguists health specialists and social scientists, tion that would allow native speakers to into direct con [...] Native to 5 minutes long) in 47 minority or preferences in language, cultural norms, speakers are required to read a five-page marginalized languages of Cameroon, nuance in communication and current reference text and pass a comprehension Indonesia and Pakistan. [...] Doing so project, it was impossible to systemati- Weak health systems and pre- is now an ambitious but attainable goal, cally evaluate the public health impact existing health disparities exacerbate thanks to recent advances in linguistic of the resources created in the initial the COVID-19 pandemic, which will field-based research and communica- phase of the project or to scale it up to remain a