Communicating COVID: The key role of language in countering misinformation

Bryan Montpetit 00:00
I basically want to introduce the next speaker, who will be coming up in this in a few minutes. Stella Paris, who is the head of language services at translation translators without borders. And I'm sure we'll start getting some, some interest to her in the sense that she's been, while she's been in the industry for I think 20 years now varying roles, having what I think worked as a freelance translator in house translator, vendor manager, she's worked in marketing, she's, I think she's pretty much done it all, to be quite honest. She's worked for I think, top global 100 companies around the world and now she she's basically a on the, the Italian chapter of women in localization as part of number of management teams. And I think she's also a team on the leadership team of the translators without borders. So I'd like to welcome her. And I'm sure we'll have some. She'll pop in in one brief moment. There we are, she's coming in now. So again, I'm going to be handing this off to Stella in a brief second. Warm Welcome to everybody. From Thanks, bye, Quebec, south shore of Montreal, where we have beautiful blue skies minus one degree. So I see that stellar has hopped on, can you can you hear me so I can hear you. Can you hear me? Perfectly Fantastic. Thank you for for hopping on. I appreciate you doing this. And we're going to have a great topic, which is a communicating COVID The key role language in countering misinformation, which misinformation is huge these days. So I really want to thank you for bringing this forward. And and talking about it. I'm sure it's going to be excellent. So I'll hand it over to you.

Stella Hodkin Paris 02:01
And much. Thank you so much, Brian. And quite an introduction. Thank you. I hope the presentation is going to live up to the expectations now. Just want to check that you can see the the opening slide. Okay. I've got that set, right.

Bryan Montpetit 02:24
See the don't necessarily see it just yet in terms of sharing your screen.

Stella Hodkin Paris 02:29
Yeah, no, I'm getting some Yes, answers. So I take that's okay. I think that's good. All right, then. So I will kick this off. And first of all, I just want to thank you, Brian, and everyone at SmartCAT for inviting translators without borders to participate in this unique event. And considering the extraordinary global situation, we're now experiencing, the idea of having a virtual conference dedicated to the language services industry seems incredibly appropriate, given our strategic role and responsibility. So never before has language service industry being so well placed to help mitigate a global crisis on the scale. During this presentation, I hope I'm going to show you how our combined skills and efforts are going to be instrumental in helping control the spread of COVID 19 by ensuring that everyone around the world can receive critical fact checked information in a language and format they understand. So to kick things off, I'm going to start out with a couple of quotes not from me. See if I can advance the slide. Okay. So way back when in February, which was just two months ago, but it seems like a lifetime ago. The director general of the World Health Organization, Dr. Tedros, adhanom, Ghebreyesus, he came out and said that we're not just fighting an epidemic, we're fighting an info demic. And I think it was already very apparent that this something special was happening. It really highlighted that the COVID 19 pandemic was being accompanied by another disease. So an infographic that is just as dangerous and spreading even faster than the virus itself. And then the significance of this phenomenon was echoed just last week by the Secretary General of the UN, Antonio Guterres, who reconfirmed that solving the info demic is going to be key to slowing the spread of the virus. So what is an info demic? The term it's a relatively new term. It was coined back in 2003 during the SARS outbreak, and it was described by the New Oxford American Dictionary as being a surfeit of information about a problem that is viewed as being a detriment to its solution. And what is misinformation because we've all been hearing an awful lot about myths. Information and probably receiving a lot of misinformation at least I have misinformation it refers to false or inaccurate information that is spread by a user, who may well believe that the content is true, either through a lack of understanding or because of their own insecurities, or perhaps because of their own fears and anxieties, and also because of biases, personal biases and belief systems. disinformation. On the other hand, it refers to information that has been created intentionally to harm or disrupt individuals and groups. So that's the kind of content that may claim to come from respectable media or government sources, and it's what it is often referred to as fake news. So the reason why misinformation has been spreading so easily and quickly and readily during this epidemic is partly due just to the massive increase in social media penetration across the globe in recent years. But it's also due to the fact that people are hungry for information in the lack of knowledge of what this virus is. Rumors are so much more powerful when they are the only source of information that people have. And another characteristic of misinformation is that rumors that trigger strong emotions are more likely to become clickbait, and to be shared, adding further fuel to the fire. And we don't need to go very far to to understand the dangers of misinformation. This is just a couple of examples from the past few weeks, both related to the COVID 19 outbreak, 27 people killed by alcohol poisoning in Iran trying to protect themselves from Coronavirus and likewise in Nigeria, poisoning from the drug Chloroquine, which had been purported to be a possible treatment for COVID 19. So how do we cure an info demic? It's it's apparent that accessible fact checked information in a language and format people can understand is the key to halting the epidemic. So basically, accessible fact checked information is to the info demic. What locked down and physical distancing is to the pandemic is the only way we have of, of slowing this down. And how do we go about curing an info demic. So, while the science world races to find and test medical treatments and vaccines, the best chance we have is to focus on the cure of the info demic. Just like a virus, the first thing we need to do is to identify the symptoms. In this case, the main symptom is a proliferation of misinformation. By diagnosing the symptoms, we can work to identify the gaps in understanding and the lack of information that is leading to the spread of false information. And finally, we can work to treat the disease by disseminating clear and reliable information in local languages that people can understand. So over the past two months, two web has been working to cure this info demic with a whole range of partners, and together with our community, a massive collaborative effort. And we've been focusing on the following key areas. First of all, language data and mapping, I'm going to show you a little bit more about this on the next slide. Social media monitoring, developing language resources. Translation, of course. And last, but by no means least dissemination. So let's start off with identifying the symptoms with our language data, and mapping. So on the on the screen, you can see that we have a dynamic map. And this is available on our website. And it's it pulls data from various reliable sources to provide an overview of the language and literacy situation with respect to the spread of the virus. So if we consider the speed at which the this crisis is evolving, having real time data is vital to help inform the risk communication and the communicate via communicate the community engagement strategies of non governmental organizations. So for example, if we look at this map, I've just highlighted Bangladesh here, and you can see that it has a 90% growth rate in terms of COVID-19 cases, which is doubling every five and a half days. And if I were to scroll down, you would be able to see also information about the number of languages spoken in Bangladesh which is 45. And the fact that the literacy rate is at 71% for women and 77% for men, so that can then help organizations understand okay, I need to be making sure that my information is translated into these languages. And also if At 29% of the female population is not literate, maybe I also need to be considering some audio content. Right now onto the social media monitoring. So far, what we've been doing initially is we've been focusing on five Asian languages. Of course, when we started this in February, The scenario was quite different to where we are today. And we've been looking at different channels, logging and categorizing misinformation from a number of different social media platforms. In terms of the content, what we've been looking to do is to analyze the misinformation. So we can identify the underlying reasons for the misinformation. So as we mentioned before, rumors only exist where there is a gap in knowledge and information. What we want to try and do is to use this misinformation to almost to find the clues to help us understand what information is lacking. And we do this, we've been doing the social media monitoring using a combination of automatic tool, so automatic analysis of social media data, and automatic feeds, combined with human analysis, and translation and annotation. What we're currently doing is, we are using tools for the social media monitoring. And that is being compiled into a dashboard, together with weekly insight reports. And that's being shared with relevant organizations, such as the World Health Organization and the International Federation of the Red Cross. And then this is going to help these organizations create the targeted content, they need to address the information gaps. As you can see from this slide, it's quite interesting that the predominant theme is the methods for cure and treatment of the virus, which accounts for more than half of the post. But then there are other common themes, including the cause of the virus with all sorts of conspiracy theories, or all sorts of unusual hygiene practices, plus a good dose of stigmatization. So particular groups or individuals being stigmatized because of COVID-19. Next, we have our language resources. So this is what we're starting to call the treatment, we've created a COVID specific terminology database, covering the key terms that we've come across during our work. So both by extracting terminology from the content of our NGO partners, but also including the topics and trends from social media. And the aim is that this terminology resource, it's open, completely open, and can be used by content creators or translators, civil society organizations, frontline medical workers, community health workers, anybody who will have a use for this. The first version is already online, available with 12 languages in text and audio format. But we're about to publish an additional eight languages, and we've got more in the pipeline, hopefully coming through relatively quickly. And at the same time, we're also working to enhance the functionality of the of the glossary, to include additional, richer metadata so that you could have additional information about the context or, or the specific geographic usage of a term. I'm sure I don't need to convince anyone on this webinar today about the importance of terminology. But for other T WB we do do a lot of research into particular terms and how they might be problematic. So we need to make sure that they're translated appropriately, so they can be conveyed and understood by local communities. In this COVID 19 outbreak, one of the terms that keeps coming up as being problematic is one that you've all heard of, for sure. It's the term social distancing. So currently, within TW V, we've been added, advocating for the use of physical distancing as an alternative to social distancing. We've seen in India, for example, the concept of social distancing, it reinforces existing class hierarchies, and it's considered to be a privilege of the middle classes. Likewise, in many other countries, the concept of social distancing, it simply doesn't translate like you cannot translate it literally. in Swahili, for example, we found that it made much more sense to have a more meaningful translation such as keeping a protective distance from other people. Okay, Then next, we're moving on to our translation. Of course, this is, of course, part of the treatment. We have been translating COVID-19 related content since January. If you check the chart on the left hand side of the slide, it's interesting to note that the COVID related translation work that we've been doing actually seems to mirror that epidemiological curve of the virus itself. So it's kind of starts off really slowly in January. And then as the time goes by through February, March, with the peak coming right up in April, I kind of looks like I'm looking at the world AMITA website. Our community has been incredibly busy translating content from our NGO partners. And we've been focusing in particular on community facing messaging, and content intended for health workers, such as training and guidance. On the other side of the slide, you can see the top languages if you like, but we're approaching, let's say, a million words into 78 languages so far. So this is really amazing work by all our language leads and by the community. Next, dissemination, which is the final piece of the treatment, but interestingly, it's actually been the most challenging for us to ensure that information is effectively disseminated. So we've been working with a number of different partners, including NGOs specialized in media and communication, such as into News and BBC media action. In other countries where we have an ongoing presence, such as in Nigeria, or the Democratic Republic of Congo, or Bangladesh, we're working with NGOs, to find the most effective way to cut through the noise of misinformation, and to reach the people who need the information the most. So to do that, we need to make sure that the information is as accessible as possible. And then it can be consumed in the best possible formats, whether that be via multilingual chat bots, or through the development of language technology tools to support telephone, and online helplines, including basic speech recognition in marginalized languages. So this is just the work we've been doing over the last few months, more or less. And we're now looking to further scale and expand our work to respond to the increased need for information in local languages as the virus continues to spread. So the road is still long. But what we have seen so far is unprecedented collaboration and support from a cross section of different language industry players. So here on the slide, I've just put a sample of some of the organizations and companies who've already been collaborating with us, but there are many, many more that aren't included here. But this is our supporters do include language service providers, tech, technology providers, language organizations, associations, really just the the response has been amazing so far. And how can you get involved? So one of the ways that many LSPs, or tech companies have been helping out is by providing in kind support, whether that be Technology Services, or solutions, or translation support as well. Then we also have donations and fundraising. If you want to organize a fundraising initiative, we're always ready to support with that. And we do have funding campaigns specifically for COVID-19. We also have launched the COVID-19 community translation program. So if you have a favorite charity, or a community based organization that you know of who may benefit from translation support, you can let them know about this community translation program. What what this does, it basically provides open access to our translation platform so that the community based organizations can be directly connect connected with our translation community to translate specifically COVID-19 related content. And finally, you can join the TWC community either as a translator yourself, or we also look for other profiles as well. We have lots of things to do these days because we don't just do translation. Or if you work for an LSP we would be happy to organise a campaign together inviting your translators to sign up to our community. So what does the what does the future hold? Well, we'd like to be optimistic because it's the best thing to be done. I think that the key takeaways are that misinformation, it is here to stay. We all know about misinformation it's been around for a number of years ago, it's often in the news. But the current crisis has really highlighted its importance. And the need to find ways of preventing the spread of information, whether that be through the improvement of automatic detection in order to flag content, but also through the creation of dynamic content creation, and dissemination strategies. So getting language, getting content translated and published, as fast as possible. And as more people speaking, more languages continue to engage via social media, the need for language services, and support in this area can only increase. The next trend that I'm sure everybody has been seeing is that there's there's currently a massive acceleration of technology, both in working practices and language technology, here at T WB. We were already in remote organization. And I think, as an industry with this is a pretty common way of working, we're all pretty tech savvy, I'd like to say, I've been I've always struggled to explain how my work could possibly work while I'm sitting in my home speaking to people all around the world. And many of my friends just really didn't understand that. Now, this is becoming the new normal. And as a result, our working practices are going to become more flexible in the future. And I think this has helped people understand that actually, people who may have been reluctant to engage in a remote business relationship in the past, may become more accustomed to doing so which of course, creates more opportunities to grow on a global scale. So in some ways, even though we are now looking more internally in terms of our own countries, because we can't leave them. But at the same time, because we are all using virtual, remote working platforms such as zoom, it's becoming easier to engage internationally. And finally, greater collaboration. What we have seen has been quite amazing, we've received so many offers of support so many amazing projects. We've seen so many translator initiatives, actually community based translation initiatives popping up all over the place. And it's been amazing to see. And we are ourselves, we're involved in an initiative with a number of tech companies to accelerate the development of language technology for marginalized languages, which is something we've been trying to do for a long time. Now all of a sudden, it's happening very quickly. This is a project that would have been incredibly difficult to initiate just a few months ago. And now we've done it in the space of a few weeks. Of course, another example is this conference today. So who would have thought that a 12 hour language conference could be put together in the space of just a few weeks? So as we move forward to the next phase, I really hope that all these relationships and initiatives and all the momentum that we've that we've built over the last couple of months, that we can really try and move that forward into the future. Thank you.

Bryan Montpetit 23:21
Thank you so much. No, that was that was fantastic. You guys are doing wonderful work. We do had we do have a lot of questions that have come in or a lot. Well, we have this couple that have come in that are relatively broad in terms of the the scope, one was simply asking if you could share the map that you had in your, your presentation. And if that's possible, perhaps in the Slack channel or in the chat here, just a link to your presentation or the map itself. And the other one was asking if someone how do people collaborate with you if for example, they are already developing pro bono content themselves?

Stella Hodkin Paris 24:00
Okay, sorry, first of all, I was just distracted because I was looking for the link for the

Bryan Montpetit 24:04
I'm throwing everything at you. So yeah, now,

Stella Hodkin Paris 24:07
I've just got the link. I do one thing at a time. Problems. Yeah. So if people are already translating pro bono content themselves. So currently, we have our own translation memories. Everything that we're trying to do it is we want it to be as open as possible. But we do have some issues around sharing content as everybody does. So it's another sticking point, if you like that we do have the its permissions and privacy and anonymization. And unfortunately, automatic anonymization is not foolproof. So that is something we definitely want to do. And we're working on it actually to do with COVID-19 working on a project that will publish datasets to GitHub, so that then they will be open accessible to all Yeah, so that's So that's that one

Bryan Montpetit 25:01
group. If perhaps we kind of take a, I guess a different direction on that question is, how do people get involved? Generally to help out if they wanted?

Stella Hodkin Paris 25:10
Yeah, so I gave a few suggestions during the presentation. Other ways are, yeah, just we have a lot going on right now. So if somebody does have a particular interest, if they can get in touch, or if you want to get involved either on that, as an individual, we do have quite a lot of things going on. But also, as an organization, we're happy to discuss with various organizations, depending on on what you can do to try and find the right match. So as I mentioned, we sent out we had a few LSPs, where we're arranging to send out the communication to all their translated databases, to invite them to sign up to our community, which is a relatively straightforward way of doing things because then it's it doesn't create a lot of overhead for the LSP themselves. But yeah, okay, we've also got quite a few opportunities coming up in terms of because we are getting a lot of work at the moment. So there may be opportunities as well to collaborate directly with us.

Bryan Montpetit 26:22
Great, thank you so much. The other thing I think you touched on was the, obviously the epidemic. And that's, I'm going to be a little bit better at Scrabble after your presentation. So I think my partner should look out. But I think one of the things that I wanted to inquire about is the responsibility that language companies as a whole have with respect to the spread of misinformation. So obviously, there's been a concerted effort with respect to translators, without borders, to trying to weed out all the misinformation to ensure that you're delivering proper proper info when it comes to other agencies. I mean, do you see that there's a lot of misinformation being spread through them? Just as general and I'm not trying to point fingers, it's just that obviously, when when people get projects into an LSP, they may not have the, for example, the the background check capacity or whatnot, in terms of the information sources that they're they're actually working on? So have you seen that happen? In the past?

Stella Hodkin Paris 27:22
Yes, I do. I think that there are a lot of issues with with content, you know, we're all overwhelmed with content. I do think that this as a as a language service industry, this is where the more evolved, let's say players can can make a difference, right? Because if you receive information, you should be questioning, you should be developing a relationship and a partnership with your client, and you should be able to quit, you should be able to question and talk to them about it. Another thing is actually, not misinformation. I didn't mention that in the in the presentation today, but it's really important is the plain language. So I know a lot of LSPs do this. So if if there is some content that just isn't clear, doesn't make sense, they will go back to the partner and to the customer, and try and talk that through try and develop ways to develop content that is clear. And that can be translated more easily, or if there is ambiguous or it's just really badly, as is often the case. But so that is something else, that we've focused very much on the concept of plain language, so clear, unambiguous language. And we encourage, well, we talk to NGO partners, but to be honest, it applies to everybody, right? Like why do we need to write in an overly complicated way using lots of big words and rich, really long sentences? It's not good for anybody. So we're trying to advocate also for everybody to speak in plain language. And I think that it's something that the language service industry as a whole is well placed to do as well.

Bryan Montpetit 29:00
Fantastic. I think that's that's a really good point. I just want to remind everybody that the the poll has been launched, so please do do fill it out. Also wanted to thank you still, it was it was great. We've currently got I think just under under 500. People watching the watching the presentation, joining us with our activities, please do everyone share as much as you can on the social media. Everything about Stella's presentation, everything about work from home. So again, I just want to really thank you, Stella, for everything. Is there anything that you wanted to add as a last comment or statement before we record always?

Stella Hodkin Paris 29:39
Um, I don't really have so much I see that my colleagues because the panel had been sharing all the information in the chat.

Bryan Montpetit 29:47
So that was very happy about that.

Stella Hodkin Paris 29:54
And yeah, just made me reiterate on the pro bono content ourselves. So community, the community translation program that I did mention. So this is open to any, if there are community based initiatives, whether it's an individual, if you are translating COVID related content with a group of friends or whatever, that if it's useful, you're welcome to use our platform for that. So we have, we have a special page on the website for that within a short application form. And it's pretty easy to get set up. So for example, we had a lady in France, who is taking it upon herself to translate all the information from the French government into the local migrant languages. Fantastic. Okay. So she's, she's managing that through our platform.

Bryan Montpetit 30:44
Wonderful. Okay. Well, thank you. Thank you so much, again, very, very much. Appreciate you taking the time to stay with us. It was it was great.