Pre-existing, unresolved language barriers are thrown into sharp relief when a global pandemic requires the rapid dissemination of information. As governments around the world struggle to develop effective communications strategies to keep their citizens up to date with ever-changing information on Covid-19, some minorities are being particularly badly hit by a crisis that is linguistic as well as medical. In the refugee camps of Bangladesh - where displaced Rohingya muslims number into the hundreds of thousands - misunderstandings, mistranslations and misinformation are dangerously common.
When Myanmar’s brutal and systematic ethnic cleansing of Rakhine state began in the summer of 2017, the Rohingya muslim minority had already been excluded from the national census and denied citizenship for many years. Since the outbreak of violence in the region, and murder of 7000 civilians in the first month alone, significant numbers have fled over the border into Bangladesh. Hundreds of thousands of Rohingya who managed to escape are now sheltering in Bangladeshi refugee camps.
One of these, a camp known as Kutupalong, is home to over 860,000 displaced persons and it is considered by the UN to be the largest refugee settlement anywhere in the world. Such a concentration of displaced persons living in unsanitary conditions constitutes a potential health catastrophe during such a highly infectious pandemic, especially when communication is far from easy.
As an ethnic and religious minority who have long been prevented from accessing basic services in Myanmar, the Rohingya people are particularly disadvantaged when it comes to literacy and intercommunication with foreign aid organisations. Many Rohingya who were denied access to education in Myanmar are unable to read the languages typically used in regional public health communications. The latter are often produced in English, a long-standing lingua-franca in the area due to the legacy of the British colonialism, yet it is not only the official use of English which results in dangerous language barriers. In the refugee camps of Bangladesh the national language, Bengali, can also be seen on signage and much spoken communication occurs in Chittagonian, the regional minority language of Southern Bangladesh. Despite having no mutual intelligibility with Bengali, Chittagonian and Rohingya are often erroneously dismissed as a ‘nonstandard dialects’ of the national tongue and many assume that they are simply regional names for the same linguistic variety.
This is far from the truth. The assumption is so pervasive, however, that Chittagonian has been adopted by various aid groups in the mistaken belief that it is identical to Rohingya. In fact, whilst these two minoritised languages are undoubtedly linguistically related and share some mutual intelligibility, they contain differences of vocabulary significant enough to cause frequent misunderstanding and miscommunication. Indeed, a study published by Translators Without Borders (TwB) showed that 36% of Rohingya refugees could not understand a simple message reported to them in Chittagonian. TwB has also told of the confusion which arose between Chittagonian interpreters and the incoming refugees in 2017 when neither group was able to understand the other’s term for ‘safety’: respectively ‘nirafot’ and ‘hefazot’. These vocabulary differences are also true of terms such as ‘danger’, ‘rescue’, ‘cyclone’ and ‘rain’, making warnings about natural disasters particularly difficult to convey via Chittogonian.
To compound the issue, Verena Hölzl reported in her article for The New Humanitarian that stark contrasts also exist between the language of the Rohingya speakers who have lived in Bangladesh for a generation or more, and those who fled across the border from Myanmar after the horrors of 2017. This sort of linguistic divergence is common when linguistic communities are separated by geographic or political divides over many years, but these nuances often go unaddressed in the scramble to rapidly translate new health information.
These often subtle differences in language use and vocabulary can have serious and profoundly dangerous consequences. In the context of the camps, where people already feel vulnerable and mistrustful, a simple misunderstanding can quickly become a risk to people’s health and security. Women and girls are particularly badly affected, due to the fact that they are even less likely than their male family members to have been able to access the education system in Myanmar and therefore tend to be monolingual Rohingya speakers. They are also more likely to feel compelled by social convention to rely on euphemistic language to describe health complaints, making it difficult for health professionals to understand their needs. In one reported example of a classic taboo subject, women were discovered to be using the term for ‘taking a shower’ when covertly referring to menstruation. Meanwhile, translators encountered unforeseen problems with the concept of ‘gender-based violence’ which proved difficult to translate without inadvertently conveying the meaning ‘violent women’.
After international condemnation and the appearance of leader Aung San Suu Kyi before the International Court of Justice in late 2019, Myanmar’s own Independent Commission of Enquiry (ICOE) has now admitted that its military may have committed "war crimes, serious human rights violations, and violations of domestic law". They continue, however, to deny all accusations of genocide in spite of a 2018 United Nations report which accused Myanmar's military of carrying out mass killings and rapes with "genocidal intent". A resolution to the situation therefore seems far from imminent, making the linguistic work of organisations such as TwB all the more vital to the long-term sustainability of aid work and advocacy for the victims.
The unprecedented conditions of the Coronavirus pandemic are set to compound the pre-existing language problems in the refugee camps as misinformation is spread by fear, and miscommunications lead to misdiagnosis. The current global health crisis highlights beyond any doubt the necessity of clear and accurate communication, and ought to draw our attention to the invaluable and often overlooked contribution of translators and interpreters working tirelessly alongside medical staff to save lives.
