Translating the COVID-19 Pandemic Across Languages and Cultures: The Case of Argentina

Abstract

This proposal aims at contributing to the broader discussion of the role of translation in the communication of health risks and hazards across linguistic, cultural and health systems through the example of Argentina. Unlike other crises, the so-called COVID-19 pandemic has penetrated every aspect of our lives, transforming the way we experience, perceive and talk about reality, and affecting once and for all what had been traditionally understood as ?normality? (Alexander 2016). These increasingly critical times have shown how scientific research, which typically translates into research papers and circulates among the scientific community, is now quite rapidly reframed through intra/interlingual as well as intermedial/modal operations into news articles, reports, commentary, editorials, and explanatory videos and then disseminated locally and globally in the (social) media for wider and, no doubt, diverse audiences. While COVID-19-related scientific advancements, risk protocols and recommendations made in Argentina are communicated in Spanish in nation-wide newspapers, a relevant portion of the news in this field is introduced in the local Argentinean scenario through the translation of materials originally disseminated in English in Anglophone spaces, which appear as significant to form public opinion, understand and prepare for the different stages of a cascading crisis (Alexander and Pescaroli 2019; O?Brien and Federici 2019; Grimson 2020). Thus, translation plays a key, albeit seldom recognized, part both in building and communicating risks and hazards (Federici 2016; O?Brien and Cadwell 2017). In the context of an unprecedented crisis which perpetuates and increases inequalities, the social and ethical role of translators is crucial for raising awareness, securing access to health services, and reducing risks and hazards. I will argue that translation in the media is instrumental in shaping discursive configurations with a strong but different impact on the perception of COVID-19-related risks and hazards in the various sectors and regions of Argentina. Accordingly, this paper seeks to investigate the specific role of translation in locally communicating those risks and hazards. The corpus for this study consists of the Spanish translated versions of a set of news articles published in the online versions of Clarín, La Nación, Infobae, Página 12 and Perfil during the ongoing pandemic crisis. Originally disseminated in English in The New York Times, The Washington Post, BBC News and The Guardian, this selection of texts representsfour main areas: the way in which COVID-19 crisis is named and key words are introduced or resemantized according to local health policies, linguistic, and cultural systems (Federici and Al Sharou 2018); the methods implemented to slow the spread of the virus; the actions taken to accelerate a response to the pandemic crisis through treatment and the development of safe and effective vaccines; and COVID-19-related health, emotional, social, political, and economic effects and risks. Through a qualitative comparative methodology, the analysis firstly looks at the general mechanics of news translation; i.e., the reshaping, synthesis and transformation of information to accommodate to new receiving conditions (Bielsa and Bassnett 2009; Scamell 2018), to later focus on the situated socio-discursive reconfiguration of meaning performed through translation into Argentinean-Spanish. Overall, this proposal explores the extent to which translation and translators contribute to effectively communicate and reduce COVID-19-related risks and hazards and to challenge the social and economic inequalities made evident and exacerbated by the pandemic in Argentina.