4 May 2020, NIICE Commentary 4475
Neha Bansal
The scale of disruption caused by the COVID-19 Pandemic has been very high for people to be able to accept. As the initial shock of the pandemic wears off and economies open up, the loss that humans face will tempt many to look for somebody to blame. In the United States, for example, the Trump administration has already launched a ‘serious investigation’ blaming China for the spread of the ‘invisible enemy – the COVID-19’, seeking more than USD 140 billion in damages. Closer to home in Pakistan, the ‘scanty dresses of women’ were claimed as the cause of the COVID-19 by a senior Pakistani cleric, during a telethon conducted in the presence of Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan. In India, political groups and citizens blamed the country’s sizeable Muslim minority for the spread. In Nepal, people blamed the Government for using the pandemic to consolidate power and for using old lessons of the 2015 earthquake to respond to a new problem. The list moves beyond the blaming of scapegoats. There have been a large number of reports of attacks on doctors and nurses. On the policy side – perhaps with good reason – people are blaming the inadequate capacity of health infrastructure of their country, the economic policies, the intelligence, the governance systems, and so on.
Whoever we chose to blame, COVID-19 has shown us that in our fast paced growth, we went too fast and bypassed many important areas of development. We also bypassed the fixing of our most fundamental, oldest and ugliest human impulse – the tendency to blame those who are different, or are the ‘others’. Therefore, those predicting a new World order must return back to the actual work that needs to be done – putting together a sincere intention to co-exist. Any preparations we make today cannot afford to omit this work that was not done before. It is a dangerous distraction to the task of improving combined human survival in a world where mankind could be faced with continuous and even more threatening disruptions in the future.
What can be done?
Recently, the author had conversation with a friend from Israel who runs an Israeli NGO that mobilises the senior police and military officers against racism targeted at Arabs and Ethiopian Jews. Given her area of work, her understanding was that she did not have a role to play in the COVID-19 response until she decided to visit the site where Israeli military was handing over food packages to the Arabs and asking them to stay indoors. Questions and suspicions only multiplied as the minority group felt they were once again being targeted. And then suddenly, her organisation stepped in to perform just one basic task which was to translate the objective and intentions of both sides for each other, and to raise the unique needs of the Arab groups to the military officers. It is a small idea with big potential for success in the world, especially in South Asia. As the economy opens up, who we urgently need is interpreters and semantic translators, trained for objectivity and conflict mediation, and are placed alongside the community of doctors, medical care givers, law enforcement officials and providers of food and other essential services and this is going to work in number of ways.
Firstly, in South Asia, there are more than 7000 languages spoken, over 500 subcultural groups, 10 religions and a great variance in economic and social stratification. How are we to understand the intentions of each other? So far, we have witnessed the role of religious translators and brokers between man and God – the priests and the clerics. Instead, as relief groups move across regions, the help culture and semiotics interpreters will provide in objectively understanding the intentions of signs and languages of these different communities could prove to be a beneficial endeavour for the region. A simple example of this could be, that if the Government mandates that citizens provide their identification details to receive ration and cash transfers, the role of a cultural and semantic interpreter in this situation will be to anticipate those groups who might view this as a threat. Thus, employing deeper communication and explanations to bring down this threat perception would be an important part of the interpretation process. At this point, some may indulge in their urge to dismiss this idea as irrelevant to the universe of big ideas, intelligent-sounding economic statistics and policy wizardry. However, the need for a go-between or an interpreter is placed at the foundation of any service, idea, product or action. These factors are only as strong as their weakest link; their weakest link being that the people who they are intended for, do not even understand why they have been put in place. More so, communication and understanding will be an absolute necessity when a vaccine is released for the deadly Coronavirus, and mass inoculation drives and medical and passports clearances become part of daily existence.
Secondly, up to now we have focused on statistics, that is, how many have been infected, death tolls and graphs that flatten and peak. But for many decision-makers, these statistics blur the cultural nuances and the important outliers that can completely determine whether to address a community’s needs or not. Explaining this further, approval ratings for all Governments, i.e. formal authorities, have gone up. This includes democracies, autocracies, hybrids, governments in developed, developing, emerging, and tired countries. The only exception is perhaps the Presidency of America’s Donald Trump. At this time of massive disruption, people require someone who will give them a direction. Formal authorities basing planning on data that has been inadequate and on science which is still emerging, may not always be able to take the right decision. But they have the authority to take a risk and impose a direction – which people need. Other communities that have arisen in informal authority, such as doctors, food suppliers, etc. may have more data but not the risk-taking ability to impose a decision or direction. These formal and informal authorities debate the decisions on whether a lockdown should continue or should economic activity opened up, how to divide the national budget between economic stimulus for the country and relief for the citizens, and reforming the health care systems or environment policies. Picking one solution implies losing the opportunity for the other, and the world cannot afford one option right now for we just do not know what solutions may be right. Instead, this is the time we must refer to high level outlooks, but very grassroots approaches, reaching villages and districts, because that is where the pandemic is – not in the graphs, but among individuals and communities. The cultural translators, in this case, would serve as the medium for people to tell policy makers and health workers what they want, what they have experienced, and reveal authentic data buried in massive amounts of inaccurate information.
Lastly, translators and interpreters have already begun to enter our response mechanism. The Chinese doctors from where the information of COVID-19 first came in, partnered with the Centre for Medical Language Service of Guangdong University of Foreign Languages to make sure the world received curated information on lessons that they were drawing from their treatments. Translators are already improving collaboration between laboratories and scientists worldwide, and are helping researchers to work better and faster. In Singapore and India, bipartisan intervention has started translation services across different states and ethnic groups. Therefore, nature is giving us another chance. This time, let us avoid the trap of intellectual-sounding ideas and focus on more fundamental and granular aspects – the most important one being to simply understand each other better.
