Multilingual Narratives Of A Pandemic

We narrate everything. We construct the world around us by telling its stories, shaping the language we use to describe what is happening to us; language that is used and adapted in the media in response to moments of crisis. This language in turn shapes how we see the world. This is what we call 'worldmaking'. When we look for solutions to problems, we so often start by telling stories to each other in our communities, stories that set a crisis in context, relate it to our historical experience, help us to understand it in the context of our local communities and contrast those stories to dominant narratives. In this way, language becomes a physical and material force in our world, through which we construct our personal, local, transnational and spiritual identities. 'Worldmaking in the Time of COVID-19', the project that informs this book, was an early response to the experience of living through the COVID-19 pandemic - intended as a contribution to our collective understanding of the COVID-19 pandemic. Following comparison and analysis of over 1.1 million news articles from 117 countries in twelve different languages, this timely reflection follows the course of this investigation, with three main objectives: - to capture the languages of the early pandemic (January- April 2020); - to offer a transferable methodology for exploring world events in multiple languages; - and to share some of the key findings of researchers. Like all the volumes in the Language Acts and Worldmaking series, the overall aim is two-fold: to challenge widely-held views about language learning as a neutral instrument of globalisation and to innovate and transform language research, teaching and learning, together with Modern Languages as an academic discipline, by foregrounding its unique form of cognition and critical engagement. Specific aims are to: · propose new ways of bridging the gaps between those who teach and research languages and those who learn and use them in everyday contexts from the professional to the personal · put research into the hands of wider audiences · share a philosophy, policy and practice of language teaching and learning which turns research into action · provide the research, experience and data to enable informed debates on current issues and attitudes in language learning, teaching and research · share knowledge across and within all levels and experiences of language learning and teaching · showcase exciting new work that derives from different types of community activity and is of practical relevance to its audiences · disseminate new research in languages that engages with diverse communities of language practitioners.

This collection advocates languages-based, translational research to be part of the partnerships and collaborations required to make sense of, and respond to, COVID-19 as one of the major global challenges of our time. Bringing together scholars and practitioners from a wide range of disciplines, this volume is bound by a common thread stressing the importance of linguistic sensitivity, (inter)cultural knowledge and translational mediation in the frontline response to COVID-19. Featuring contributors from around the world and reflecting on the language used to frame COVID-19 in diverse cultural contexts of the Global North and Global South, the book proposes that paying attention to the transmission of ideas, ideologies, narratives and history through processes of translation results in a broadening of social, cultural and medical understandings of COVID-19. Spanning nearly 20 signed and spoken languages, the volume argues that only in going beyond an Anglophone perspective can we better understand the cultural, social and political facets of the pandemic and, in turn, produce a comprehensive, efficient global response to disease management. This book will be of interest to scholars in translation and interpreting studies, modern languages, applied linguistics, cultural studies, Deaf Studies, intercultural communication and medical humanities.

"Pandemics Publics and Narrative explores how members of the general public experienced the 2009 swine flu pandemic. It examines the stories related to us by individuals about what happened to them in 2009, their reflections on news and expert advice given to them, and how they considered vaccination, social isolation and other infection control measures. The book charts also the story-telling of public life, including the 'be alert, not alarmed' messages from the beginning of the outbreak through to the 'the boy who cried wolf' problem that emerged later in the outbreak when the virus turned out to be less serious than first thought for most people. Key themes of the book are the significance of personal immunity for people as they reflected on how to respond the threat of an influenza virus and the ways in which universal public health advice was interpreted quite differently by people according to their medical and biographical situation. The book provides unprecedented insight into the lives of ordinary people during 2009, some affected profoundly and others hardly affected at all. By drawing on currents in sociocultural scholarship of narrative, illness narrative, and narrative medicine, it develops a novel 'public health narrative' approach that bridges health communications and narrative. The book provides therefore important new insights for health communicators and researchers across the social and health sciences"--

What does it mean to advocate - in translation, for translation, through translation? What does advocacy look like, for those who do the translating or for those whose work is translated? To what extent is translation itself a form of advocacy? These 'what' questions are the driving force behind this collection. Translation as Advocacy highlights the innovative ways in which translator-academics in seven different fields discuss their practice in relation to their understanding of advocacy. The book aims to encourage people to think about translators as active agents bringing new work into the receiving culture, advocating for the writers they translate, for ideas, for practices. As such, the book asserts that the act of translation is a mode of cultural production and a political intervention through which the translator, as advocate, claims a significant position in intercultural dialogue. Featuring seven interrelated chapters, the book covers themes of judgement, spaces for translation, classroom practice, collaboration, intercultural position, textuality, and voice. Each chapter explores the specific demands of different types of translation work, the specific role of each stage of the process and what advocacy means at each of these stages, for example: choosing what is translated; mediating between author and receiving culture; pitching to publishers; social interactions; framing the translation for different audiences; teaching; creating new canons; gatekeepers and prizes; dissemination; marketing and reception. This book repositions the role of the translator-academic as an activist who uses their knowledge and understanding to bring agency to the complex processes of understanding across time and space. Moving critically through the different stages that the translator-academic occupies, using the spaces for research, performance and classroom teaching as springboards for active engagement with the key preoccupations of our times, this book will highlight translation as advocacy for students, educators, audiences for translation and the translation industry. Like all the volumes in the Language Acts and Worldmaking series, the overall aim is two-fold: to challenge widely-held views about language learning as a neutral instrument of globalisation and to innovate and transform language research, teaching and learning, together with Modern Languages as an academic discipline, by foregrounding its unique form of cognition and critical engagement. Specific aims are to: · propose new ways of bridging the gaps between those who teach and research languages and those who learn and use them in everyday contexts from the professional to the personal · put research into the hands of wider audiences · share a philosophy, policy and practice of language teaching and learning which turns research into action · provide the research, experience and data to enable informed debates on current issues and attitudes in language learning, teaching and research · share knowledge across and within all levels and experiences of language learning and teaching · showcase exciting new work that derives from different types of community activity and is of practical relevance to its audiences · disseminate new research in languages that engages with diverse communities of language practitioners.

Given the boost in global immigration and migration, as well as the emphasis on creating inclusive classrooms, research is turning to the challenges that teachers face with the increasing need for bilingual and multilingual education. The benefits of bilingual education are widespread, allowing students to develop important cognitive skills such as critical thinking and problem solving as well as opening further career opportunities later in life. However, very few resources are available for the successful practice and implementation of this education into the curriculum, with an even greater lack of appropriate cultural representation in the classroom. Thus, it is essential for educators to remain knowledgeable on the emerging strategies and procedures available for making bilingual and multilingual education successful. The Research Anthology on Bilingual and Multilingual Education is a comprehensive reference source on bilingual and multilingual education that offers the latest insights on education strategy and considerations on the language learners themselves. This research anthology features a diverse collection of authors, offering valuable global perspectives on multilingual education. Covering topics such as gamification, learning processes, and teaching models, this anthology serves as an essential resource for professors, teachers, pre-service teachers, faculty of K-12 and higher education, government officials, policymakers, researchers, and academicians with an interest in key strategy and understanding of bilingual and multilingual education.

'Pandemic and Narration: Covid-19 Narratives in Latin America' sheds light on how, as Covid-19 spread, infecting and killing millions across the world, life not only continued to be experienced but also continued to be narrated. By putting together this volume, we help understand what happened in the region from a perspective in which, unlike most of what we saw during the health emergency, numbers, statistics and percentages are not at the centre of the analysis. The essays gathered here foreground something else: the manifold ways Covid-19 was subjectively and collectively narrated in the news, government reports, political speeches, NGO communications, social media, literature, songs and many other media. From a wide range of disciplinary approaches, the contributors to this edition pay attention to how fictional and non-fictional stories, official discourses, as well as personal and political accounts, documented, represented and shaped the health crisis, laying bare how —in Latin American countries— the spread of the virus intersected with corruption, gender-based violence, inequality and exclusion, as with community, solidarity and hope. Readers will find that the focus on narrative provides an alternative source of knowledge on Latin America’s Covid-19 experience. Our perspective contrasts with the usual emphasis on death tolls, infection rates, weekly cases, vaccination counts, and the plethora of statistics that illustrated the gravity of the situation in the build-up to, during, and after the peak of the crisis. While extremely important to understand the situation, numbers do not tell the whole story. A comprehensive picture of the pandemic can only be achieved when the stories of the virus are accounted for. Health, after all, is no stranger to narrative. And neither is Latin America.

Offering a comprehensive analysis of mediated representations of global pandemics, this book engages with the construction, management, and classification of difference in the global context of a pandemic, to address what it means - culturally, politically, and economically - to live in an infected, diseased body. Marina Levina argues that mediated representations are essential in translating and making sense of difference as a category of subjectivity and as a mode of organizing and distributing change. Using textual analysis of media texts on pandemics and disease, she illustrates how they represent a larger mediascape that drafts stories of global instabilities and global health. Levina explains how the stories we tell about disease matter; that the media is instrumental in constructing and disseminating these stories; and that mediated narratives of pandemics are rooted in global flows of policies, commerce, and populations. Pandemics are, by definition, global crises.

During the first mandatory lockdowns of the Covid-19 pandemic, citizens worldwide turned to »pandemic fictions« or started to produce their own »Corona Fictions« across different media. These accounts of (previously) experienced or imagined health crises feature a great variety of protagonists and their (re)actions in response to the exceptional circumstances. The contributors to this volume take a closer look at different pandemic protagonists in fictional narratives relating to the Covid-19 pandemic as well as in existing pandemic fictions. Thereby they provide new insights into pandemic narratives from a cultural, literary, and media studies perspective from antiquity to today.