COVID-19 crisis communication in Sepedi: the quality of translation by the Limpopo Department of Health

Abstract

There is a paucity of literature on the importance of translating health risk messages into South Africa’s indigenous languages as a tool for crisis prevention and management. This article focuses on the quality of translations of COVID-19 information from English into Sepedi by the Limpopo Department of Health. Sepedi translations that are already available in the public domain are selected by means of the purposive sampling technique. House’s translation quality assessment (TQA) model is applied to evaluate the quality and accuracy of the translations as part of the strategic crisis response. Based on House’s model, errors in the translations are identified and classified as either ‘dimensional mismatches’ or ‘non-dimensional mismatches’. It is found that, in pursuit of covert translation, the target text from the Limpopo Department of Health does not retain the equivalent function of the source text. It is also observed that House’s model of TQA is applicable and useful in the field of translation of communications of health information. Furthermore, current studies in effective health communication miss the importance of translation during a crisis. Thus, this article bridges this gap by investigating the role of translation during the COVID-19 pandemic in South Africa. The article suggests that future research could investigate the experience of translators during the pandemic.