Veranderende vertaalpraktijken en -beleid: vertrouwen en partnerschappen in crisiscommunicatie in de gezondheidszorg in Melbourne tijdens COVID-19

Translation policies in superdiverse jurisdictions are important for social justice, inclusion, and equity. These policies function to ensure that linguistic minorities have equal access to information and services, and can participate in public life, without discrimination. Policymakers increasingly face the choice between using traditional professional translators or supporting community-led communications. The many factors involved in this choice can optimally be explored in a case study of crisis communication, where trust becomes the variable that determines the success or failure of a translation. The COVID-19 pandemic exposed critical gaps in multilingual crisis communication and public health messaging in Melbourne, Australia. Early in the pandemic, it was widely reported that translations were delayed, out-of-date, contained errors, and were difficult to access. While many of these issues stemmed from the Victorian Government not following their own language policy regarding providing timely, professional translation or bypassing stages in the translation workflow, the situation created a perception that translations were ineffective. This accelerated a trend towards participatory engagement that was already occurring in other policy domains. In response to perceived translation quality issues and to regain community trust, the government began prioritising community-led communications, the dissemination of information by trusted messengers, and partnerships with communities. This was essential at the time and rewarded community groups that had already been filling gaps in government communication. However, while translations cannot and will not reach all language users, a policy of funding community-led communications in substitution of translation risked excluding those who did not have well-established communities, representational leadership, or access to community infrastructure and resources. The government risked not providing equitable access to information and losing control of its message. This study focuses on Dari- and Arabic-speaking communities in Melbourne to explore government approaches to a language of high reach (Arabic) and a language of high need (Dari). Using a mixed methods approach combining policy analysis, surveys, and semi-structured interviews, it focuses on the role of trust in multicultural health communication. This research utilises a range of government documents, policies, legislation, reports, media releases, and interviews with policymakers to understand the translation beliefs underpinning policies and practices. The study also draws on surveys and interviews on the use of translations, information-seeking behaviours, the role of trust in others and in institutions, and reasons for vaccination with Dari- and Arabic-speaking community members, community representatives, translators and interpreters, as well as language services providers, and broader multicultural community representatives. This study detects four distinct communication phases in which policies and practices evolved and interacted with the growing participatory turn in Victorian Government policymaking. While the changes outwardly appear to have facilitated community-led mediation during a crisis, my research finds that a policy-practice disconnect prevented a more permanent implementation of partnership models. Correspondingly, while the pandemic led to greater awareness of the need for simplified source texts and accessible and tailored translations, it was perceived by policymakers and the language service sector that progress was often prevented by a lack of experience and expertise in those tasked with procuring translations, as well as by post-COVID economic rationalism. This study therefore draws attention to some underlying reasons why translation policies fail at the implementation stage. It concludes that both translation and community-led communications are essential during crises and that translation should be considered an ethical responsibility of governments. The study further recommends that translation should feature in crisis communication and that it should be used to support two-way government-citizen communication.