Regular
readers of this blog are familiar with the concept and practice of child language
brokering (CLB). It's the translating and interpreting done by the children in
immigrant families for their elders and peers. While a good deal has been
written about it in some areas, including this blog, it’s always interesting to
hear about it in other places, other languages and other contexts.
The Tyee
is an independent, online news magazine from the most westerly Canadian
province of British Columbia. Last year it published an article about CLB in
that province, in the form of interviews with adults who had grown up with CLB
in Vietnamese, Chinese and Punjabi. The article is of particular interest for
the light it throws on the effect of the Covid pandemic.
In Metro Vancouver, the metropolis of British Columbia, people
who have no knowledge of the official Canadian languages, English and French,
total about 136,000. But in terms of what language people are most comfortable
speaking at home, 621,110 people exclusively speak an unofficial language. In these circumstances
we can be sure there is a lot of CLB.
The
following is a condensation of the Tyee article. For more, follow the reference
below.
Mimi
Nguyen, Vietnamese
It was Mimi Nguyen’s older sister Kim who first modelled the
expectation that the children of newcomers should step in as the family’s
translators. Their parents settled in East Vancouver, by a stretch of Kingsway
that many other Vietnamese refugees have called home since the late-1970s.
Growing up, Kim helped these families too, translating teacher’s notices so
that parents could keep up with their kids’ school progress. Because Mimi was
educated in Canada, it was common for her generational peers to translate for
their families as soon as they learned English.
Kim once helped their mother with an English question at just
five years old, with the help of a cousin on the phone and a Vietnamese-English
dictionary in front of her. The well-thumbed volume is still in the family’s
possession.
It wasn’t until Mimi entered her preteens that she took over
helping her parents, translating at in-person appointments and interpreting
documents like bank slips.
“Sometimes it would take the whole community to translate bits
and pieces of a document, calling one person and another to verify words,” she
said. “Nobody in our network was fluent enough to translate everything
confidently, so oftentimes, people felt like they were shooting in the dark.”
Language barriers are an age-old problem for immigrants and
refugees, affecting everything from housing to health care, education to
employment. But the pandemic has meant there’s more to translate than ever —
and there have been dire consequences for those who can’t read the vital
information. Even for people who do speak English in B.C., it’s hard to keep up
with official sources and sort out the bad ones. But the “infodemic”
weighs more heavily on families like Nguyen’s, who don’t get translations of
government information as quickly or completely compared to official languages,
if at all.
Nguyen is now 25, and with her sister living out of town, she is
her parents’ primary translator.
It’s a privilege to be able to access information about the
pandemic, and Nguyen worries about those who don’t have the language, time or
know-how. “Every single day, those inequalities are heightened even further,”
she said.
Mimi Nguyen and two of her friends started Bảo Vệ Collective for Vietnamese Canadians. The group initially
thought if it “translated enough information just to help people to apply for
CERB [Canada Emergency Response Benefit], that would be enough,” Nguyen said. But
there seemed to be no end to important new information related to the pandemic,
from news of various lockdowns to the vaccine rollout.
Kevin Huang, Chinese
I’ve never been a full-time translator like Nguyen, but as an
on-call translator for family members, I’ve had some experience regarding what
happens when facing systems that don’t use your language.
Accompanying grandparents to medical appointments, we’ve always
had pleasant experiences with the doctors themselves. One ophthalmologist, not
a native Cantonese speaker, made an effort to learn phrases in the language
such as “Is it blurry?” and “Look this way” for patients like my grandfather.
But the gatekeepers are another story. A receptionist at
Broadway’s Fairmont Medical Building belittled my grandmother by asking, “No
English? Really? No English?” Another time, accompanying a relative who could
speak English but needed a ride to a medical appointment, the receptionist,
upon seeing us approaching, angrily said, “I can’t help you! I don’t do
anything for Dr. Kwon!” We were not there to see Dr. Kwon.
When it was time for my grandparents to receive their COVID-19
vaccines, my mother and I tagged along without question. We went to the Sunset
Community Centre in South Vancouver, where the vast majority of the seniors
were Cantonese and Punjabi speakers. Not a single one of them went without a
child or grandchild to help with translation.
Kulpreet Singh and Harjeena Heer, Punjabi
Singh, the eldest of three siblings, began translating for his
grandparents at age 12. He provided help as his grandfather navigated a
lymphoma diagnosis and a knee replacement. Over the years, he’s noticed things
like health-care workers speaking louder and more curtly to his ganspaents or ignoring them entirely in favour of speaking with him or an English-speaking
family member.
With as sensitive an issue as health care, messages don’t always
come across word-for-word from English to another language, said Singh. That’s
why interpretations that focus on meaning, use visuals and take cultural contexts
into account are important.
Harjeena Heer and volunteers at the Sikh Health Foundation have
applied this to their work translating for Punjabi audiences. Heer, 20, also
grew up in a household with her grandparents, and began translating for them at
age seven, taking on more responsibility as she got older. She recalls, for
example, helping renew passports and answering calls regarding finances.
“My grandpa had a stroke, so I went with him for all the
appointments,” Heer said. “My mom would come too, but I’d do most of the
translation.”
Because most of the appointments were in Surrey — where Punjabi
is the most common native language after English — her grandfather was
comfortable when the person behind the counter spoke Punjabi as well. He was
more nervous if there was an appointment in Vancouver. But most of all, it was
reassuring to hear medical information in his native language from a trusted
source like his granddaughter. “It definitely made him more comfortable to hear
things coming from me, especially if it was something scary, asking if it was
true.”
It’s not easy for institutions to build the same kind of trust
that exists on an individual level. With so many touch points, it’s easier for
governments or civic entities to sour a relationship with an individual. “It
can take just one time to lose that trust,” said Huang of Hua Foundation. He
understands that it can take governments time to get translation services set
up, and mistakes happen. But whether it’s pandemic information or neighbourhood
planning, approaching large groups of the population who don’t speak the
official language in their native tongue is crucial to democracy, especially in
a diverse place like Vancouver. “You’re enabling community members to become
citizens, to participate in the civic agenda,” Huang said.
Mimi Nguyen’s father often pops into her room to ask what words
mean. One phrase he was confused about last year was “social distancing.” Nguyen
tried to think of a way to explain it in a way he’d understand. It turned out
the key to interpreting it for him was to compare it to “long distance.” “I saw
the light go on in his eyes,” she said. “It was because he and my mom had done
long distance for a while. He was in Vancouver a full year before she joined
him.”
There’s a racist double standard at work, says Hua Foundation’s
Huang: “Why don’t people recognize that not everyone has the opportunity and
privilege to learn English? Why is that when a primary English speaker speaks
an ‘ethnic language’ it’s celebrated, but for people for whom English is their
second or third language, they don’t get the same credit?”
These days, Mimi Nguyen’s father can speak conversationally, but he’s shy about getting something wrong. Paperwork an d appointments have always been “suffocating” for someone in his position, he said. Over the years, he’s feared needing an official translator because of the cost, and he’s also feared having to miss work and lose out on income — a common scenario among immigrant workers during the pandemic. “Có tụi con thì ăn uổi một chút đỉnh (Having you children gives me comfort),” he told his daughter.
While relying on English-speaking family members is one solution, Nguyen said adults like her parents sometimes feel bad for burdening young people like her, and young people also worry about letting their elders down. “When I’m doing it, I get livid,” said Nguyen. “If [something’s] not accessible, I worry about people who don’t have kids at home, or if their kids are abroad. I think about what if I wasn’t born. I know kids who have planned their futures to be close to their parents because they know that this is inevitable.” It’s a big responsibility to take on, especially when her generation might already be struggling with growing up as part of a diaspora, “trying to figure out how to fit in, how to get people to accept you.”
The pandemic has been a dramatic reminder that children like her
can’t do it all.
Source
Christopher Cheung. The translator kids. The Tyee, https://thetyee.ca/News/2021/04/30/Translator-Kids
