Intercultural crisis communication in an interconnected and globalized world emphasizes the need for translation
to be put in place as foreign nationals with cultural and linguistic barriers might rely on it to prepare for a possible crisis or
make informed decisions when already affected by a crisis. However, translation is an underdeveloped tool in crisis management,
particularly in China. Considering it a special branch of public service translation, the author investigates crisis translation
by using a case study of the disruptive outbreak of novel coronavirus disease in Wuhan. Based upon the author’s first-hand
experience as a crisis manager at the Office of Foreigner Affairs in the Municipal Government of Wuhan, this article describes how
government translators with the help of external volunteer translators made language services available and accessible to affected
foreign nationals in the response phase from 8 January 2020 to 7 April 2020. It analyses these translation-mediated activities
from a crisis manager’s perspective. Despite the preliminary nature of the findings, which still call for further validation, it
is hoped that insights from this article will be of interest to those who are engaged with crisis translation services and to
those who research crisis translation.
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Cited by
Cited by 7 other publications
Dreisbach, Jeconiah Louis & Sharon Mendoza-Dreisbach
2021. Unity in Adversity: Multilingual Crisis Translation and Emergency Linguistics in the COVID-19 Pandemic. The Open Public Health Journal 14:1 ► pp. 94 ff.
Dreisbach, Jeconiah Louis & Sharon Mendoza-Dreisbach
2021. The integration of emergency language services in COVID-19 response: a call for the linguistic turn in public health. Journal of Public Health 43:2 ► pp. e248 ff.
Jiang, Mengying
2021. Translating Against COVID-19 in the Chinese Context: A Multi-agent, Multimedia and Multilingual Endeavor. In COVID-19 Pandemic, Crisis Responses and the Changing World, ► pp. 229 ff.
O’Hagan, Minako & Julie McDonough Dolmaya
2021. Introduction. The Journal of Internationalization and Localization 8:2 ► pp. 81 ff.
Ruiz Rosendo, Lucía & Maura Radicioni
2022. Humanitarian Interpreting in the Age of COVID-19. In Translation and Interpreting in the Age of COVID-19 [Corpora and Intercultural Studies, 9], ► pp. 165 ff.
2022. Citizen Translators’ ‘Imagined Community’ Engagement in Crisis Communication. In Language as a Social Determinant of Health [Palgrave Studies in Translating and Interpreting, ], ► pp. 293 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 26 september 2023. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.