The ongoing health crisis has highlighted the importance and also challenges in providing widely accessible and tailored official information to culturally and linguistically diverse communities for the effective management of public health risks. These challenges include the delay in making COVID-19 information available in minority languages, a low implementation rate in applying recommended COVID-preventative measures, a lack of trust in official information, and the absence of multilingualism in crisis management policies. In order to build trust and to successfully influence the recipients’ adherence to official health recommendations, all stakeholders, including government authorities, NGOs and NPOs, community leaders, healthcare professionals, and language professionals, play an important role in communicating health messages and mitigating risks.

Whilst COVID has amplified the communication challenges that we face, these challenges are, unfortunately, not uncommon in times of crisis and emergencies. In multilingual and multicultural societies, effective communication is key to reducing the vulnerability of the communities that do not master the official or de facto national / regional language(s). Hong Kong is a multilingual and multicultural society with especially a considerable population of ethnic minorities (EMs) from South Asia. Although the government has made COVID information available in different EM languages, such as Vietnamese, Bengali, Sinhala, Tagalog, Hindi, Nepali and Urdu, their responses to COVID are still being accused of being slow and lacking cultural sensitivities.

This seed project serves as the preparation for a five-stage action research study on crisis translation involving not only COVID, but also other crises regarding public health, natural disasters and emergencies in Hong Kong. More specifically, participants in this two-day workshop will learn the fundamentals of translation, translating by using digital technologies, as well as explore effective methods in communicating crisis information among communities, particularly South Asian communities.