Languages, Cultures, and Health in a Global City: Translating and Communicating Covid-19 Among London’s Multilingual Communities

This collection examines how linguistically diverse diaspora communities experienced and translated the COVID-19 pandemic in London, exploring nuances of difference across them to better understand how these communities mediate public health discourses in the globalized city.

Drawing on scholarship from cultural translation and an emic approach, the volume features rich and varied perspectives on the unfolding of the COVID-19 pandemic from scholars working and living in over a dozen Asian and African language communities in the city. Building on data from online surveys and face-to-face-interviews with almost 200 community members, the book charts how information about the pandemic was disseminated across these different minority communities and, in turn, how these communities understood and translated it into their own cultural framework and against prevailing public discourses. The volume also looks forward to the recovery process and the needs of these communities, reinforcing the value of a socio-cultural translation approach in better understanding how to support these communities in the wake of global health crises moving forward.

This book will be of interest not only to scholars in translation studies, intercultural communication, crisis communication, cultural studies, and post-colonial studies, but also to public health practitioners and community leaders.

Lutz Marten is Professor of General and African Linguistics at SOAS University of London. His work focusses on the study of language in its structural, historical and social aspects, with particular reference to the languages and cultures of Eastern and Southern Africa. He has conducted descriptive, theoretical and comparative studies with respect to different African languages in Kenya, Tanzania, Namibia and Zambia. He is currently involved in collaborative research projects on the study of variation in Swahili, on the description and promotion of the Kenyan Bantu language Kitaveta, and on the cultural translation of Covid-19 in London’s community languages. He is a member of the Academia Europaea and currently serves as the president of the Philological Society.

Nana Sato-Rossberg is Professor of Translation Studies. She is a leading scholar in the field, with expertise in Japan and East Asia. She is currently Chair of the Centre for Translation Studies of SOAS. She is also an Executive Council member of International Association of Translation and Intercultural Studies and the co-founder of the East Asian Translation Studies conference series (since 2014). She is author of two monographs and five co-edited books in relation to Japan and East Asian Translation Studies. She has worked extensively on Japanese ethnic minority community and the translation of their cultures. She was PI of the UKRI/AHRC funded Covid-19 project Cultural translation and interpreting of Covid-19 risks among London’s migrant communities.