Exterior of a pub at an intersection in the shopping hub of Burwood, a highly diverse suburb of Sydney
Editor’s note: Do public health messages about the Covid-19 pandemic match the linguistic profile of Australia’s population? In this latest contribution to our series of language aspects of the COVID-19 crisis, Dr Alexandra Grey, Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Sydney Law School, shares her submission to the Australian Senate’s Select Committee on COVID-19’s inquiry into the Australian Government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The call for contributions to the series continues to be open.
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My submission is based on my current, still ongoing research project, ‘Good Governance in Multilingual Urban Australia’. This submission addresses the important question: How do you access COVID-19-related public health information in Australia in languages other than English (LOTEs)? It is based on preliminary results of my current study and provides recommendations about better reaching the linguistically diverse Australian public with official public health communications.
The Committee will decide which submissions to put on the public record. However, Language on the Move is making a copy of mine available here, because we believe it will be beneficial to draw attention to, discuss and even debate these recommendations. Please read the submission (11 pages plus images) or simply my 6 recommendations, which you can find on page 3, and share your perspectives in the comments below.
The submission identifies these key problems with Australia’s official COVID-19 public health communications in LOTEs, which emerge from the study:
- There are barriers to the accessibility of official public health information for those in the community who are not confident reading/able to read the English-medium public health communications on display in their local areas or available (albeit often buried) on government websites
- State and federal governments have left it to local councils to provide LOTE-medium public health communications in public areas, without any requirement on local councils to actually take up this task, and with varying outcomes even in areas with similar multilingual profiles
- There is an under-utilization of the LOTE-medium public health posters which the NSW and federal governments have specifically produced in response to the COVID-19 pandemic
- Government health agencies’ Twitter feeds have not cultivated LOTE readerships before or during the pandemic and do not appear to be engaging the LOTE-using public; these feeds are haphazard, infrequent and unreliable in their LOTE tweeting as well as in their references to LOTE resources.
Amongst various possible ways of addressing these problems, my recommendations focus on:
- Research: improving the efficacy of both physical and online official LOTE public health communications by increasing the collection and analysis of appropriate data
- Redesigning online communications: improving the efficacy of online official LOTE public health communications through simple, practical changes to government websites and tweets, including increased and consistent use of LOTEs and their scripts
- Standard setting: improving both the quality and the reliability of LOTE public health communications across government agencies through legal requirements, at federal and state levels, for government bodies to plan for, execute and monitor the effective dissemination in LOTEs of official public health information, at least during times of emergency/pandemic, with associated best practice guidelines to be developed and implemented across government. I anticipate that this last will be the most controversial, but potentially also the most impactful.
Acknowledgement
I’d like to acknowledge Dr Allie Severin and Dr Hanna Torsh for their help with data collection in this project, and the Language-on-the-Move Reading Group for insightful discussions of language aspects of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Language challenges of the Covid-19 pandemic
Visit here for our full coverage of language aspects of the COVID-19 crisis.
This work is licensed under a
Thanks for this interesting post. On the surface, government websites providing COVID-related information seem to provide information in languages other than English. However, the COVID crisis has highlighted the lack of consistency in the LOTE provision of this information. Governments need more effective and standardised processes for communicating and liaising with non-English speaking communities to ensure equal access to health information. Lack of multilingual information was an issue during the hard lockdown of public housing towers in Melbourne. I think this situation in particular highlighted the gaps in the provision of easily accessible multilingual health information, which made an already difficult situation even worse for those involved.
Thank you Alex for your post and interesting research which I hope leads to some changes in government policy. It seems the state governments in Australia have made a few blunders in responding to COVID 19, not the least the problem of communication with migrant groups in Melbourne.
It was interesting to read about China’s response early on in the COVID-19 outbreak of engaging linguists from universities to help with the dilemma of relaying health information in various local dialects and languages (Li et al 2020b). I would like to know how many expert linguists are engaged by the department of health in the various state and federal jurisdictions in Australia. We here of the Victorian Governments promise of “deep engagement” with the migrant community from now on but what kind of human resources do they have at their disposal for this task? As was mentioned in a previous comment, it is not helpful to lump all languages other than English, together. Perhaps it would be useful for the government to obtain more meaningful information from the migrant community of specifically what languages and dialects thereof are spoken at home. While it is clear Australia is a multi-cultural/multi-lingual society, the linguistic dilemma that faces us in times of emergency such as at present seems small in comparison to the one faced by other countries in the world such as China and the Philippines. Our biggest problem it seems is the mono-lingual mindset of the government and the general population who tacitly demand that English be spoken for full membership of this society.
Li,Y., Rao, G., Zhang, J., and Li, J. (2020). Conceptualizing national emergency language competence. Multilingua, 39(5): 617–623
Cheers,
Peter
Thanks, Peter! On the plus side, Australia has comparatively good census data about home language use and English language proficiency. On the down side, we are not using them well because Australian policy makers seem almost deliberate in the way they ignore linguistic expertise. Just commented on this the other day in the context of the new English language requirement for partner visas: https://twitter.com/lg_on_the_move/status/1313967996134588416?s=21
I’m sure readers will love to hear about an inspiring effort to make COVID-19 public health information accessible. The woman behind it, Selena Choo, got in touch after my submission (above) became an SBS News story this week. She is working in the refugee support sector and was “on the lookout for government information for refugee communities” which led to a 4-week research project in which Selena (like me) found that there was government information produced in LOTE but it was “buried on government websites that have never been designed around the ‘User Experience’, and certainly not with someone who isn’t literate in English in mind.” So Selena has made a LOTE-medium online library accessible to anyone who would find it useful: https://www.humanslikeus.org/coronavirus.
Selena has curated audio-visual resources from communities, government agencies and universities around the world. Plus, because she “noticed that most websites tended to organise languages in English Alphabetical order (Ethnolink being the exception), which is entirely unhelpful” she has made an effort to make this digital library “a bit more intuitive to navigate (although you’d still need some level of English).” It has resources in:
Languages from Africa: Swahili/Kiswahili, Kirundi, Kinyarwanda, Dinka, Nuer, Lingala, Somali, Maay Maay, Amharic, Oromo/Afaan Oromoo, Tigringya.
Languages from the Middle East: Arabic, Hazaragi, Assyrian, Kurdish Kurmanji, Kurdish Sorani, Dari, Pashto, Farsi/Persian.
Languages from Asia: Bengali, Hindi, Tamil, Urdu, Tibetan, Khmer, Hmong, Chin Hakka/Hakha, Chin Falam, Zomi/Zou, Karen, Karenni, Rohingya, Burmese, Nepali/Napali.
You can read more about the library here: https://probonoaustralia.com.au/news/2020/04/the-project-filling-in-the-coronavirus-language-gap/?mc_cid=627b074e0e&mc_eid=1cea7b0ba3&utm_campaign=627b074e0e-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_08_18_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_source=Pro%20Bono%20Australia%20-%20email%20updates&utm_term=0_5ee68172fb-627b074e0e-147765325
An update: the Sydney Health Literacy Lab at the University of Sydney has been looking into this issue from a public health perspective, undertaking a survey of 4000 people. Their director, Prof McCaffery summarised their findings:
“Our findings show important disparities in knowledge, attitudes, beliefs and behaviours related to COVID-19 that could undermine efforts to reduce viral transmission and may lead to social inequalities in health outcomes in Australia. People with lower health literacy and who spoke a language other than English at home had poorer understanding of COVID-19 symptoms, were less able to identify behaviours to prevent infection, and experienced more difficulty finding information and understanding government messaging about COVID-19. They were less likely to rate social distancing as important and reported more difficulty remembering and accessing medication since lockdown. They were also more likely endorse misinformation/conspiracy beliefs about COVID-19 and vaccination.”
And this is with a survey that was more accessible to younger, English-literate bilinguals than older, non-English-literate respondents, as Prof McCaffery pointed out to me, suggesting that even these worrying findings err on the positive side.
A preprint of their report is publicly available: https://medrxiv.org/cgi/content/short/2020.06.03.20121814v1
Thanks, Alex! While it is great to see increased attention to linguistic diversity, the way this abstract sums up up findings about people who speak a language other than English at home is deeply troubling, for a number of reasons, including the following:
While it is important to raise awareness about linguistic disadvantage, research that lacks basic understanding of multilingualism and perpetuates stereotypes about people who speak a language other than English is not helpful.
I agree with these significant drawbacks, Ingrid. The team behind it are all medical researchers, not linguists – not an excuse, but a reason why they may be open to learning! They have reached out to me to get more input because they wish to expand their survey into something more sensitive. I hope they are able to. Unfortunately, there is very little published research so far in the pandemic in Australia about linguistic diversity and differential health outcomes – I see this one as an indication only, with more research to provide reliable, nuanced results yet needed.
Being able to showcase where the research like this could be much improved, through a public and accessible discussion as in your comment, is very useful. Thank you for making such a thorough and on-point reply.
Thank you for the updates and thought-provoking developments, Alex.
For anyone who missed it, Alex’s research was featured in a recent SBS News article. Alex found major oversights in the NSW government’s Multicultural Health Communication Service’s health communication: https://www.sbs.com.au/news/missing-posters-and-fake-tweets-pandemic-communications-strategy-for-multicultural-australia-slammed
In response to the increasing community transmission of COVID-19 in Melbourne, the ABC quoted Premier Daniel Andrews yesterday on plans for a “very deep engagement with multicultural communities.” The quote is featured in the following bullet point in the article: “Premier Daniel Andrews said “very deep engagement with multicultural communities” began yesterday to make sure people in six COVID-19 hotspots knew the current health advice.” I couldn’t find more information (on the Victorian Gov’s health dept. webpage) on what this engagement will look like in practice, nor what languages the health advice will be provided in. A look at the census data for two of the suburbs in question showed a very diverse population of LOTES spoken at home, but, as has been discussed previously in blog posts here, this data doesn’t account for how multlilingual people use their languages and what the proficiencies in their languages may be.
I wonder whether we have any LOTM readers living in any of these Melbourne ‘hotspots’ who may be interested in recording their linguistic landscape or to report back on what this engagement looks like in practice (in keeping with physical distancing and gov restrictions of course)?
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-06-23/coronavirus-cases-victoria-rise-as-schools-close-in-hotspots/12383106
thank you, Alex (and Hanna Torsh and Alli Severin for their contribution to the research) for an extremely clear and informative post and submission.
Clearly, official government communication has not proven as effective as it should be been; much to do was left to private enterprises or already existing multilingual channels like SBS.
If I may, I would like to add that in the case of COVID-19 clear, informative and concise multilingual information was/is more than ever necessary because of the part of the population that is considered the most affected: the elderly. In Italy, my country of birth, where my family and lifelong friends still live, the number of deaths for COVID-19 has reached 30,000; of them, to date, 24,722 are people older than 70 years of age (I did not need to research the data, they are readily available in Italian newspapers).
In Australia, and in other multilingual and multi-ethnic societies, a high percentange of LOTE speakers is in the same age bracket as the 70+ and they have the right to be provided with clear, informative and concise communication.
True, in some cases, English -dominant second generation family members act as language brokers and pass on relevant information; still, the original migrants, who may already feel vulnerable because of weak health or simply because of an ever-changing world, should and must be entitled to access information in their own language via the media they normally follow and that needs to happen at an official level and not because of private initiatives.
Finally, I’d like to add a personal note: my father who lives not far away from the COVID-19 epicentre in the Northern part of Italy had real troubles in understanding government communication and the “ever-changing” rules, in the language he had learnt, spoken and worked in for a life; he has always been on the top of current affairs because politics has been his life-long passion; still it has proven hard for him to navigate the ‘infodemic’; he also did not have access to social media or computers given he has a total distaste for any form of IT (quite common in his generation in Italy). In the light of my father’s experience, I can only sense how scary it might be for Australians – because, yes, most of them are Australians, especially for tax purposes – who speak LOTE to find their way and create certainties in times of COVID-19 if there is a scarcity of information in the language they know the best.