Overcoming disaster linguicism: using autoethnography during the COVID-19 pandemic in Denmark to explore how community translators can provide multilingual disaster communication

ABSTRACT

This article presents an autoethnography (AE) of my experience of improvising disaster communication with community translators in Denmark through the early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic. Like the author, who is a novice in Danish, those who are not competent in the dominant language(s) of communication are deemed to be more vulnerable in disaster situations, such as the current pandemic, due to language barriers and disaster linguicism. However, using AE, this research explores the potential, and the evidence, for using community translators to foster inclusive, interactive and spontaneous disaster communication to overcome disaster linguicism, and to protect Indigenous/Tribal, Minority and Minoritized languages and peoples’ (ITMs) communication rights. My critical self-reflection and observation from an ITM perspective challenge the traditional unidirectional top-down disaster communication schemes which are still dominant in disaster management.

KEYWORDS:

• Autoethnography
• community translator
• disaster communication
• disaster linguicism
• disaster risk reduction

Acknowledgement

The author would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers and the journal editorial team.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 Citizen translator is the original term coined by Federici and colleagues (e.g. Federici & Cadwell, 2018; O’Brien & Federici, 2019). However, as suggested by Jay Marlowe (personal communication, 2021), I prefer community translator as a more inclusive term, since citizen translator does not include non-citizens.

2 According to United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) (n.d.), disaster is ‘a disruption of the functioning of a community or a society at any scale due to hazardous events interacting with conditions of exposure, vulnerability and capacity, leading to one or more of the following: human, material, economic and environmental loses and impacts’ (para. 1). Epidemic diseases like COVID-19 and Ebola viruses are slow-onset disasters which are defined as one that emerges gradually over time.