Abstract
Abstract This article documents a recent project translating COVID-19 information into Yiddish for the benefit of the Hasidic Jewish communities in London’s Stamford Hill and in Manchester in the UK. The translation work developed as a response to the urgent need for Yiddish-language resources specifically designed for the Hasidic community near the beginning of the pandemic. The translations were undertaken by a team consisting of linguists and native speakers of Hasidic Yiddish and took place within the framework of a research project funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, dedicated to linguistic and sociolinguistic analysis of contemporary Hasidic Yiddish worldwide. In this article we discuss the sociolinguistic background to the translations and investigate the reasons why they were so urgently needed, before going on to address the issues encountered during the course of the translation process and the decisions taken in order to resolve them. These issues include the type of Yiddish chosen for the translations, the translation of medical terminology, gender-based linguistic differences affecting the translations, and specific cultural considerations that needed to be taken into account.
Highlights
This article documents our recent project translating COVID-19 information into Yiddish for the Hasidic Jewish1 communities in the London and Manchester regions of the UK
The translation work developed as a response to the urgent need for Yiddish-language resources designed for the Hasidic community near the beginning of the pandemic
We offered to provide these institutions with Yiddish-language translations of the COVID-19 guidance that they had produced in English, targeted for the Stamford Hill and Manchester Hasidic communities
Summary
This article documents our recent project translating COVID-19 information into Yiddish for the Hasidic Jewish communities in the London and Manchester regions of the UK. Yiddish was the traditional language of Eastern European Jews and had around 10–12 million speakers before World War II. Since the beginning of the project our main focus has been on collecting and analysing linguistic data from Yiddish speakers in the main Hasidic centres worldwide, with extended fieldwork conducted in London’s Stamford Hill, the New York area, and Israel. Owing to the rapid and unpredictable developments in the early stages of the pandemic, we soon found ourselves with an unexpected role to play during the crisis
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