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Freetown, Sierra Leone. November 2020
Jonas Knauerhase was working for YMCA Sierra Leone. Together with his colleague Pious Mannah, they were delivering workshops and youth training, often engaging in activities about risk reduction, resilience, and sustainable development. They both felt that discussing these principles always in English risked excluding many Sierra Leoneans. Jonas emailed Federico M. Federici (UCL) after coming across INTERACT’s Crisis Translation YouTube Channel.
Communicating across languages is a natural feature of Sierra Leoneans’ lives. Multiple languages and continuous codeswitching pepper most conversations. However, not all topics and subjects can easily be covered in all the languages spoken by the country’s population. In particular, some language groups may remain excluded from debates, activities, and campaigns about sustainable development goals (SDGs) or disaster risk reduction (DRR). The cascading effects of unresolved legacies from conflict and culturally inappropriate communication strategies adopted during the 2014 West Africa Ebola epidemic persuaded YMCA personnel that the language diversity of Sierra Leone had to be better served. The linguistic diversity of the country does not necessarily have to be an obstacle to communication; linguistic diversity becomes an obstacle without due consideration and planning.
It all started with an email about crisis translation and snowballed into a three-year project subdivided into 3 phases, which has so far involved over 140 people. Jonas and Pious managed the activities in Sierra Leone, Federico coordinated the project overall, enabling training delivered by Chloe Franklin and identifying activities that could support the development of translation capacity. INTERACT’s coordinator Sharon O’Brien and Patrick Cadwell (DCU) serve as members of the Advisory Board together with Kathryn Batchelor (University College London), Christophe Declercq (University of Utrecht/University College London), and Jorge Diaz Cintas (University College London).
The first phase
The first phase
Increasing translation capacity in Kono, Krio, Limba, Mende, and Themne languages was the priority. Community engagement activities about preparedness, risk awareness, and sustainable development use specialist terminology in English. The technical terminology is common currency politically and institutionally, but it may exclude people who do not master English from debates that matter to all. The terms are glossed and collated in the document entitled United Nations’ Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) Terminology. Widely used among disaster managers, national, and international organizations operating in Sierra Leone, the scientific and technical English of this text does not translate easily into local languages. So, even if the concepts included in the UNDRR Terminology may be familiar to many experts worldwide, they present conceptual, cultural, and linguistic problems when used to discuss preparedness and community-driven risk reduction activities in languages other than English. Expecting to be able to gist or sight-translate on the spot some of the concepts expressed in the terminology is, at best, optimistic.
Therefore, translating the UNDRR Terminology seemed an ideal project to enhance access to terms regularly used to talk about risks and development. The English terminology is itself a negotiated document based on the work of an open-ended intergovernmental expert group. It includes “basic definitions on disaster risk reduction to promote a common understanding on the subject for use by the public, authorities and practitioners” (UNDRR, 2017, online). Translation is not the only solution, nevertheless, it contributes in a small but visible way to decolonise discourse in the area of disaster risk reduction and to support a more equal access to information for all residents in Sierra Leone to actions in favour of sustainable development.
By training students of linguistics and disaster managers, who are bilingual, on fundamental principles of translation, the project intended to increase awareness of the complexity of language mediation. The sessions and workshops were animated by the possibility of discussing translation issues from the different perspectives of those who need to coordinate responses or developmental activities, and those who need to support and communicate with local communities. The lively debates on points of translation were an implicit objective of the translation project itself. Chloe Franklin delivered the training, with additional facilitation by Shaun Pickering. Based on the INTERACT training designed by Cadwell, O’Brien, and Federici, the sessions delivered by Franklin were followed by intensive, hands-on workshops supported by experienced linguists (translators, mediators, and interpreters) working in Kono, Krio, Limba, Mende, and Themne. The translations into 5 languages were completed in collaborative teams intended to develop a better understanding of translation among crisis and disaster managers, while increasing translation capacity locally.
The translations are available in parallel texts, supported by pictograms designed especially for this project by AmberPress. The translations were collected in a free book, also downloadable online, featuring a bespoke new font type that supports all the diacritics of Kono, Krio, Limba, Mende, and Themne. Bilingual files collate the segmented, aligned, and revised translations, intended for use in computer-aided translation technologies. They must be revised prior to being used. As the target languages are predominantly spoken languages, the usability of the aligned, bilingual files needs to be tested, independently, and separately – they are available for download https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5772299. Also, translating the text into 5 languages was a minimum target. Our team is aware that translations into more Sierra Leonean languages are needed in the future, as having access to some of the terms can initiate discussion of the concepts and the benefits of addressing risks in terms of disaster, public health, and sustainable development.
The publication of the UNDRR Terminology translated into Kono, Krio, Limba, Mende, and Themne was celebrated with an official launch on Friday 29 October 2021. Pictures of the event are available here.
The second phase
This blog signals the end of the first phase and the beginning of the next two phases of the project. The publication of the final report Community Preparedness and Linguistic Equality in Sierra Leone, which describes the project in full marked the end of the first year of activities.
In January 2022, the project entered its second phase. The printed translations will be evaluated in focus groups involving real users, among the language communities that use one or more of the five languages in which the UNDRR Terminology has been translated.
Meanwhile, Pious Mannah manages and supervises the interactions for the design of specific features of a mobile phone app. Designed by Harry Daintith, Anelia Gaydardzhieva, Bobi Martens, and Wenyong Lai (UCL Computer Science graduands), the app sets out to make the UNDRR Terminology more accessible. The app will be later maintained and updated by Njala University in Sierra Leone.
To engage with the importance of the spoken language over the written language and to accommodate for different levels of literacy, the UNDRR terms are accompanied by audio files that correspond to the translations. The app will make the translated terminology available online and offline for use in disaster response by local residents and members of the National Disaster Management Agency of Sierra Leone.
Over the course of 2022, the app will also be tested and evaluated in the field. Workshops and community-led activities focusing on disaster risk reduction and preparedness will be used to evaluate the terminology as a tool to increase potential participation in shaping the risk reduction and sustainable development agenda locally and nationally.
The third phase
The third phase
The beginning of 2022 also signalled the start of the two-year activities to create and establish a new association of linguists in Sierra Leone. The aim of increasing translation capacity continues building on the collaborative relationships created around the revision and translation of the UNDRR Terminology. At the time of writing, the group is working on writing its bylaws and constitution. Pious Mannah is coordinating the efforts as first chairperson of the Sierra Leone Association of Language and Mediation (SLALM).
This part of the project will also have a long-lasting legacy in pursuing the objective of increasing translation capacity. Members of the INTERACT team continue to coordinate and advise role in a project that has created, and immediately cemented, new partnerships.
The INTERACT project created a network that is now in turn able to support and steer projects that may possibly contribute to making translation one of the tools used in risk reduction practices.
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