Abstract
Affected by mobility restrictions brought up by Covid-19 pandemic, global citizens increasingly turn to digital communities for information sharing and emotional interactions. However, previous study on translation and social media communication in the context of public health crisis is limited. The book edited by Tong King Lee and Dingkun Wang, is a timely and empirically rich collection of such writing. Focusing on the relation between translation and social media communication, this book collects work by established and emerging researchers and conducts a series of investigations into how the two aspects of inquiry intersect with each other against the backdrop of the pandemic.
The book has six chapters and an introduction at the beginning. In the first chapter, Susan Bassnett gives an overview of the challenges that the teaching staff met at Glasgow University during the pandemic. To explore how people cope with isolation from mobility restriction, she examines a short work by the French aristocrat Xavier de Maistre published in 1794, who was sentenced to 42 days of house arrest following a dueling incident. Bassnett finds similarities between de Maistre who fought against isolation by systematically exploring his room and the isolated people during the pandemic who try to expand their territory by ‘translating’ themselves via social media (p. 9).
From Chapter 2 to 4, the concept of ‘trust’ is frequently noticed and brought to the foreground. In Chapter 2, José van Dijck and Donya Alinejad investigate how social media dynamics affect public trust in scientific expertise during a health crisis. Based on the notion of communication as translation, the authors compare two scientific communication models. One is an institutional model which assumes linear vectors transmitting information from experts to nonexperts, and the other is a network model which regards social media as a centrifugal force (p. 28). The authors use the two models to analyze the role of social media in a public debate after the COVID-19 outbreak in the Netherlands. It is found that social media both undermines and enhances public trust in scientific expertise during pandemic times. The network model transforms the institutional model instead of replacing it, by adapting the dynamics of social media to enhance institutional authority.
In Chapter 3, Pym and Hu Bei contribute to the study on the degrees of public trust in COVID-19 related translations disseminated in different media in Melbourne, 2020. The authors argue that in the age of post-truth epistemology, effective communication is no longer premised on the representation of truth or reality, but rather on performative simulacra, a model of behavior-change communication. The key feature of this model is that the receivers have to trust the simulacra in order for the representations to perform (p. 45). In light of this theoretical perspective, the authors give a sketch of public trust in media about the COVID-19 information at the national level of Australia by quoting Park et al.’s (2020) survey. It shows that 85% of the respondents deemed ‘experts’ to be the most credible source of COVID-19 related information, while only 21% agreed that social media were reliable (p. 48). However, the following three case studies indicate a contrary result. The case studies involve a linguistically diverse public-housing tower in inner-Melbourne, Australia NGOs for Chinese immigrants, and a Chinese community in Melbourne. It is indicated that official media are generally less trusted by CALD (culturally and linguistically diverse) communities during the pandemic. Social media such as WeChat is considered as a more trustworthy simulacra for minority groups, especially in Chinese communities.
The relationship between trust and translation is further explored by Sharon O’Brien et al. in Chapter 4. The authors examine the role of micro-influencers in translating COVID-19 related information and the factors affecting trust in the translation dynamics. They conducted semi-structured interviews with nine stakeholders. The result of the interview illuminates that trust is complex and context-dependent, influenced by the source of the information, the context, and the information receiver’s prior experience (p. 74). Micro-influencers who usually share the identity with the targeted groups can ‘not only broke through the language barrier, but also through an invisible trust barrier via social media in translation’ (p. 69). The chapter identifies a right direction that micro-influencer is an underestimated resource that can be bridges between official institutions and specific communities in the future.
In Chapter 5, Renée Desjardins gives a context-oriented case study that examines the data related to the COVID-19 translation strategy on websites and social media of the Government of Manitoba. Manitoba is a province of Canada where 22% of the population do not have English as their mother tongue. Taking translational justice as theoretical lens, Desjardins finds that disjointed online translation strategy does little to help indigenous people to acquire critical health information, which reflects the failure of Canadian language policy in some respects to demonstrate the translational justice of a diverse population at a time of crisis. Her article successfully raises the audience’s awareness of the need for concerted multilingual public health messaging to help guide citizens through different phases of crisis (p. 83).
The concluding chapter wraps up the book with an in-depth conversation between the renowned semiotician Ilan Stavans, and professor África Vidal, on the topic of memes and translation on social media. Stavans argues that an Internet ‘original’ meme is not original but a translation. Memes are semiotic units that reconfigure, rewrite, and translate contemporary issues based on a multimodal original such as an image, a film, or a song which the target audience recognizes (p. 99). In this sense, this chapter broadens current view for social media communication in that the lively topics in the social media could also be interpreted as multimodal rewritings. Stavans and Vidal provide the readers with a new perspective of memes to understand the translation in multimodal social media.
To sum up, the book provides engaging inquiries to the convergence between translation and social media in public health exigencies. Its contributions reside in the following three aspects. First, it serves as a timely intervention in observations of ethnic minorities, immigrants, and other vulnerable groups marginalized by language barriers during the pandemic. These articles provide much-needed theoretical rumination and how-to solutions in the post-pandemic era. Second, the book raised pertinent questions about the relation between translation and digital communication against the background of a perpetual health crisis. The authors convincingly demonstrate that technological advances brought about a global digital community which further empowered human creativity and cooperation. It is worth pondering that how translation can use these technologies to break down communication barriers and allow for the emergence of new forms of expression in multilingual contexts of crisis management. Third, it extends current understanding of the concept of translation. The notion of communication as translation mentioned in the book, emphasizes the need for new tropes in a rapidly changing media landscape and shed light on the importance of adopting a transdisciplinary approach that highlights an outward turn in translation studies.