LANGUAGE TRANSLATION CAN BE A GREAT  TOOL TO FIGHT COVID-19

One may wonder how Language Translation can be a great tool to fight covid-19. The Covid-19 pandemic has created unprecedented harvoc to the world over. Never had it happened before that the entire world was brought to its knees by a pandemic. Businesses have either collapsed or dwindled , jobs lost and lives lost across the world.

When the Covid-19 pandemic was first reported in Wuhan, China in December 2019, it looked too far to the rest of the world and was news far away. However  it was later declared a pandemic by the world health organization  following its massive spread across the world. In a few months, the virus had exponentially spread across the world with many lives lost especially in countries such as Italy, France, Spain, United States of America, China, United Kingdom and many more. What was unknown at first was the fact that the virus was highly contagious and had the capacity to kill thousands in a single day. It was soon afterwards that the world witnessed similar daily deaths as it was during the Spanish flue that occurred between  1918-1920 that resulted to the death of about 50,000,000 people

The entire world was put in panic  and on its knees . Governments across the world with assistance of World health organizations put up stringent measures to contain the spread of the deadly pandemic. The standard operating procedures we put in place and partial or total lockdowns imposed across the world except in a few countries. In some countries, the Covid-19 induced lockdown in itself had far reaching consequences on the economies  and citizens across the world.

In countries such as Australia, the standard operating procedures were massively translated into several languages in view of easy comprehension by different target audience. The standard operating procedures were translated into languages such as Nuer, Dinka, Juba Arabic to cater for the immigrant communities of South Sudan origin  in Australia.  Translation was used as a tool to disseminate information about how contagious the virus is and how it could be contained. In fact, the information could be viewed in the government run websites in different languages to cater for non-English speakers in the country. This shows how important translation is in fighting a pandemic such as Covid-19