“In the first nine months, if people had been given proper messages, all this could have been prevented.” That sentiment, expressed by Claudia Evers, MSF Ebola emergency coordinator, Guinea, late in the Ebola epidemic speaks to the crisis of information that permeated the Ebola response.
The epidemic killed more than 10,000 people in three countries where more than 90 languages are spoken. More than 25,000 people were directly affected. And as Mark Frohardt, Internews’ Vice President for Africa at the time, explains, the crisis of information was compounded by lack of communications in local language:
“What they desperately needed was access to local information in a language they understood – could they go home? Where were the local services and who were all these foreigners who said they were coming to help?”
The Translators without Borders (TWB) Ebola Learning Review explores the issue of communicating with communities in the right language. Funded by the Humanitarian Innovation Fund and the Indigo Trust, TWB took its Words of Relief crisis program to Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone in November 2014, to work directly with aid organizations and responders to provide information to affected populations in the right language. The Words of Relief West Africa response consisted of three main components:
• Recruitment and training of translators to become ‘Rapid Responders’, translating posters, audio announcements, and video into key West African languages, especially Krio, Fula/Pular/Fular, Mende, Themne and French. With professional translators scarce in many of the important languages, the TWB team used its community translation training, developed in Kenya, to train translators resident both in West Africa and diaspora throughout the world.
• Translation of more than 106 items between November 2014 and February 2015 into 30 languages. Focus was put on easy to understand written information, such as posters, and audio and visual content.
• Dissemination of the informationwidely to aid agencies on the ground. The goal was for content to be made open and available to the broad humanitarian community. Major portals, such as humanitarianresponse.info, ReliefWeb and the Ebola Communications Network, were major points of distribution, as well as internal aid sites and social media.
Overall response was positive. Agnès Matha from the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) explains that the use of local languages is fundamental. “It allows us to reach a greater number of people. It is fundamental to use messages that are translated in a wide variety of local languages.”
Throughout the four-month project, the TWB team faced many challenges. Encouraging aid organizations to make translation a priority – and, subsequently, provide solid content to be translated – was difficult. Issues of illiteracy also were acute, forcing the team to refocus on audio and visual content. Finally, extra work was needed to ensure quality of translations and to keep teams motivated throughout the four-month period.
The key learnings from the project have been incorporated into TWB’s Words of Relief program, especially in the areas of advocacy for local language communications and training of community translators.
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