The language of lockdown: Excuse me, do you speak Covid?

The proverbial biblical tale of the Tower of Babel doesn’t come close to conveying the somersaults expected of indigenous language practitioners called upon to translate Covid-19-speak from English into the other 10 official South African languages.

“The information coming from the World Health Organisation, the National Department of Health and the Institute for Communicable Diseases came in English; so the first call was to translate the information into indigenous languages,” says Dr Napjadi Letsoalo, a language professional based at Unisa.

Prof Franz Kruger, head of Wits Journalism and director of the Wits Radio Academy, says “de facto, English has become the pre-eminent national language in all sorts of respects, whether it is in the president’s speeches or whether it is in court, whether in schools or in broadcast. 

“There is a lot of discussion to be had about how to safeguard and give due respect to all the other languages that are spoken, particularly the smaller ones, in terms of language.”

The Pan South African Language Board (PanSALB), NGOs and individual linguists were contacted at short notice to get involved in communicating the language of the pandemic to all South Africans in accessible language.

Given the urgency, the process of consensus-seeking that is the norm for coining new terms was not possible. 

“Coining doesn’t involve one person. You have to consult. I did my best to consult. Informal feedback was that people got the message,” said Xitsonga language specialist, Delwah Mathevula.

Dr Bulelwa Nokele, an IsiXhosa language specialist, points out that “some of the new words will be accepted; others will be rejected by the communities. Those that are accepted will then become part of the IsiXhosa lexicon.”

Letsoalo said language practitioners worked informally in silos rather than as a formal collective. His group, focusing on Sesotho sa Lebowa (Northern Sotho/Pedi/SePedi), turned to traditional healers based in Limpopo, who are at the interface between communities and healthcare facilities, to come up with language that people – especially those in deep rural areas – would understand. 

Linguist Pule Welch says “if you are dealing with issues around particular technical topics – in this case, epidemiology – you need to go to the experts in the field, who, in this case are traditional healers.”

Grassroots medical practitioner and logotherapist, Dr Alphonse Kanda, agrees: “I think we don’t realise that traditional healers are very much in contact with their community... they are in tune with and informed about what is going on in the community. 

“They have not only the language but even the way words are used, the rituals that are used – all of that transmits a particular message. So with a condition like Covid-19, which is a new illness, you will need to find new concepts to communicate it to people.”

“We took those terminologies and tested them with sample groups of speakers and found out that they understood them – so that is how we came up with Covid-19 terminologies,” Letsoalo said.

Sesotho sa Lebowa newsreaders and current affairs presenters worked with the linguists to standardise Covid-19 language used on air: “Initially there was confusion around the word ‘virus’. Three different words were used on the same radio station,” Letsoalo said.

“One can define a virus by how it looks and by what illness it produces. The coronaviruses are called that because of how they look – they have tufts of interlocking proteins around their surfaces that look like a crown when observed under a microscope,” Welch said. 

“I used ‘amagoda’ to signify these tufts. A particle floating in air or water is ‘igciwane’, and viruses are very small so I diminutise to ‘igciwanyana lamagoda’ for coronavirus.”

For IsiXhosa, a new term for Covid-19 (umbuthalala) was developed, according to Nokele. 

“Even the word pandemic was new,” Ramokone Monene, a translator and newsreader for Thobela FM, said. 

“I asked a presenter of a sports show how he would use the term and he said it is a sickness that attacks a lot of people: ‘bolwetši bja go fetša setshaba’, so I used the term for about a week while my editor was away.  

“When he came back, I asked him if there was a simpler way to refer to the pandemic, and he said, “Just say ‘Leuba’.  That’s when I realised we have a term in our language, although I didn’t find the word when consulting my dictionaries.”

Mathevula discovered that suitable terms did exist in his language. “They were not used, but they were there. I just had to liberate them,” he said.

Newsreaders from Thobela FM (Sesotho sa Lebowa), Munghana Lonene FM (Xitsonga), and Phalaphala FM (Tshivenḓa), who share office space in Limpopo, discussed how to tackle some of the Covid-19 terms. 

“Some of the presenters said that coronavirus can be compared to HIV, while Covid-19 can be compared to Aids. We ended up agreeing that the simplest way was just to use the terms as they are, because if you end up translating terms that you yourself are not sure of, it will confuse the listeners,” Monene said.

Terminology such as “self-isolation” and “quarantine” were also challenging. Interestingly, in the European context, the term “self-isolation” was first recorded in the 1830s. It originates from the Latin insulates, “‘insulated”, from insula, “island”.  The term “quarantine” comes from the Italian term, quarantina, and refers to Jesus’ 40-day fast in the wilderness. 

“The bubonic plague, the tsunami, when the Web started developing... there was a whole vocabulary that developed. It is universal.  It is not unique to Covid, but there are new words that erupt very suddenly and people have to scramble – within an hour sometimes – to find a term that will work.”