Crisis Translation in Facilitating Linguistic Justice in Multilingual Disaster Settings

Abstract

There is an increasing rate of natural hazards happening all over the world and it could be observed that the most recent crises took place in multilingual contexts, such as earthquake in Turkey - Syrian border, flooding in New Zealand, Bangladesh, refugee crises in warzones and pandemics. It has been forecasted that the many natural disasters would occur in the time to come all over the globe. In the aftermath of any crisis, the first respondents are the local authorities followed by international aid workers. The government authorities and the aid organizations continue to face many challenges in the context of the natural disasters and conflicts particularly in multilingual societies. The present study aims to identify the key linguistic challenges that might erupt in a multilingual disaster setting in order to effectively mitigate them in future disasters. The study was conducted examining the risk management review reports produced by the respective governmental organizations, non-profit organizations and NGO's on refugees and disaster resilience, UNHCR, WHO in post crisis phases. The news articles published in the aftermath of crises in the related local settings were also taken into consideration. Accordingly, the findings reveal that providing emergency messages, health guidelines, precautionary measures, evacuation notices, distribution of aid, are some of significant challenges faced by the authorities in a multilingual disaster setting. The data further testified that the need for an effective mechanism of crisis translation is an ethical obligation in terms meeting epistemic justice and linguistic justice in crises. The study thus recommends developing crisis translation as an emerging discipline in the field of translation studies corresponding to the requirements of disaster-prone areas worldwide.