An exploration of how linguistic barriers, ontological reality, and cultural hyperobjects impact survival and human dignity in emergency response.

Accurate information contextualized is an essential prerequisite for any initiative towards a vulnerable population to succeed. Besides the obvious logistic difficulties, delays and confusing situations the language barrier may create, there are very practical distresses individuals endure because of it.

I am persuaded everyone has experienced at some point in their childhood a moment, similar to my experience, where they had to go to some distant office at school for some reason. And found themselves alone and disoriented, unsure of which office door they should knock on, or if they dare ask anyone. Well, this was just a very privileged and very distant experience of someone, being in an emergency situation, navigating in a space that is unknown and confusing: there are lots of signs with writings on them, but they can’t read the script because it’s all Latin, and they only know Ajami script. And even if they can identify the language people around them are using, no one seems to be able to identify theirs. They speak a minority language. A language people of the area know by name, but can’t communicate with. And that the staff, foreign or from distant places, never even heard about.

But enough of this embarrassing romanticized pseudo-fiction, and allow me to use a very serious, very real massive public health issue being absolutely sabotaged by the lack of multilingual support. In “Multilingualism and strategic planning for HIV/AIDS-related health care and communication” (Lalbila Aristide Yoda, 2019), a mixed approach is used to evaluate the impact of the lack of multilingual documentation around the HIV/AIDS epidemic, containing vital information such as the ways of transmission and information about protection and awareness.

“Of the 314 documents analysed, 35 mention language or translation, but the majority of the mentions are made in passing or in the context of providing background socio-cultural information, the implications of which are not explored. At donor level (DFID), no mentions of language issues were found. Only eight of the documents (2.5%) outline concrete actions for addressing multilingualism in HIV/AIDS-related health communication.” (Lalbila Aristide Yoda, 2019)

This cold, uncompassionate number tells a lot about the need for multilingual, sensitive, and culturally informed initiatives being taken.

This disturbing problem is explored further in depth in “Linguistic challenges in the fight against HIV and AIDS: an analysis of Doctor-Patient discourse in Kenyan health centres” (Serah W. Waitiki, 2010).

In this qualitative approach, a series of interviews are conducted with doctors, nurses and counsellors in Voluntary Counselling Centres, Kenya.

“Most of the nurses and VCT counsellors felt linguistically inadequate in counselling or attending to patients who only understood little Kiswahili or only their mother tongues. One way of solving this problem would be to employ medical personnel who are competent in the local language of the community. However, due to the limited number of trained medical personnel in the country, it would not be possible to have enough doctors from every ethnic community to work in their respective ‘catchment areas’. Therefore, at the moment, the only solution to the language barrier is the use of interpreters. 95% of the informants agreed that they require interpreters quite often and that they mostly use family members of the patient.” (Serah W. Waitiki, 2010, p.71)

Followed by:

“The fact that interpretation can be a hindrance to effective communication became apparent during my interviews with a number of nurses and doctors in health centres in Eldoret town. One nurse actually felt that communication between her and a patient through a third party was only 50% effective, while the majority of the health service providers felt that it was 70% effective.” (Serah W. Waitiki, 2010, p.72)

Serah W. Waitiki then shows that a discourse bluntly translated with no consideration for the audience’s ontological reality was potentially breaking disturbing rules for the patient, using forbidden words referring to taboo objects. This is most important to produce an informed, sensitive and actually useful translation. As Waitiki (2010) compellingly illustrates, a translation that ignores the lived reality and cultural ontology of its audience risks doing real harm. When sensitive discourse is translated bluntly, without accounting for local taboos, it routinely introduces prohibited terms that alienate or distress the recipient. Respectful communication demands more than technical accuracy; technical accuracy is not enough. It requires a deep sociolinguistic awareness that honors the community’s worldviews and ensures the information and meaning are delivered with dignity.

I may add that amongst the many fields of cross-disciplinary knowledge a translator may desire, the one of anthropology and epistemology can be useful in practice, not just theory. To cite a favorite researcher of mine, Timothy Morton, building on Graham Harman’s 'Object-Oriented Ontology' gave agentic and almost Lovecraftian traits to his 'Hyperobjects' concept: entities so massively distributed in time and space that they transcend any single localized interaction, yet exert palpable pressure on every localized interaction they touch. Languages and cultures are precisely such hyperobjects: they cannot be held or fully observed in a single encounter, but they are unmistakably there, shaping every gesture, silence, and taboo a translator must navigate.

Treating them as complex living objects rather than as static codes to be decoded is, I would argue, the single most important epistemic stance a translator can adopt. A language is not a dictionary: it is a sedimented accumulation of migrations and wars, rituals and humiliations, jokes and griefs: ways of knowing that no glossary can exhaust. A culture is not a Wikipedia infobox: it is a living organism with internal hierarchies and taboos. Unspoken rules about what may be said, to whom, in which context, and through which rhetorical posture. To translate is therefore never a neutral transfer of information. It is an encounter between two hyperobjects, each with its own internal weather, and the translator is the porous membrane through which they briefly negotiate a shared meaning beyond common cognitive biases and structural technical translation.

This is why cultural context, discourse meaning, and epi-linguistic features demand an almost anthropological attention. Cultural context determines what is sayable at all: the ontological reality (to borrow Waitiki’s phrasing) of the audience the text will eventually reach. Discourse meaning determines how it is sayable: the genre conventions, register, power dynamics and cultural etiquette between speaker and listener, and the expected rhythm of an utterance that will be heard as natural rather than foreign. Epi-linguistic features such as sighs and hesitations, code-switches, honorifics and prosodic contours, pragmatic implicatures and culturally specific speech acts travel around the words themselves: they are what carry the affective and relational weight of any utterance, and they are precisely what a word-for-word, decontextualized rendering silently destroys.

To conclude on the importance of language, I will rapidly discuss power dynamics, colonialism, and cultural erasure. The book “Vanishing Voices” by Daniel Nettle and Suzanne Romaine (I shamefully admit I had to google the authors) really moved me in a disturbing, revolting, but fertile way. These languages’ extinction, resulting from centuries of brutal colonialism and active efforts to erase the people’s memories, traditions, beliefs, rituals and yes… languages. In a word, accomplish the pinnacle of what white western society considers a successful colonial expansion: the assimilation of the savage into the civilization where he will do the most harassing, degrading, unbearable jobs, and at a low cost at that.

Translating and promoting multilingualism, fighting glottophobia, advocating for vanishing voices is not only interesting for academics and minority language speakers: it is fighting against a core dynamic of domination and building resilient defenses against total assimilation — that is to say, total annihilation — not of a language, but of a whole piece of reality.

Sources -

Batchelor K, Yoda LA, Sanon Ouattara FEG and Hellewell O. Multilingualism and strategic planning for HIV/AIDS-related health care and communication [version 1; peer review: 4 approved]. Wellcome Open Res 2019, 4:200 (https://doi.org/10.12688/wellcomeopenres.15584.1)

Waitiki, S. W. (2010). Linguistic challenges in the fight again HIV and AIDS : An analysisi of Doctor-Patient discourse in Kenyan health centres. Journal of Language, Technology & Entrepreneurship in Africa, 2(2), Article 2. https://doi.org/10.4314/jolte.v2i2.61522