Five or six months ago, the phrase “social distancing” was barely known, and was just starting to be introduced. Every time a news anchor mentioned it, they had to explain its meaning, maybe even show a little diagram to illustrate the concept. Now, unless you’ve been living under a rock, you hear anyone and everyone talking about “social distancing” several times a day. The same is true for other COVID-19 related terminology, including phrases like “flatten the curve.”

People are endlessly creative, even during pandemics. This is seen in the fact that people across the world are coming up with new words to express new concepts that have emerged due to coronavirus. One of the most popular examples of this in English is the word “covidiot” (“covid” + “idiot”) which describes people who willingly don’t follow the guidelines around COVID-19 to protect themselves and others. This is a fun list that gives some more examples of new and repurposed words in many different languages.

The COVID-19 guidelines that we are following might also change how we actually speak. We are wearing masks when we go outside and staying at least six feet away from people we encounter. Both of these practices protect our health, but also make it much more difficult to talk and hear each other. Sometimes we end up almost yelling just to have a brief conversation. For some of us, the difficulties of having an in-person communication make us weigh our words more carefully and focus on communicating as efficiently as possible- we don’t want to spend energy yelling about things that don’t matter!

As always, it is important to consider people who communicate differently than us, and do what we can to help them. One group of people facing particularly difficult communication challenges now is the deaf and hard-of-hearing community. Many of them rely on lip reading and seeing facial expressions to understand others, and with masks, this is now impossible. People have designed and started creating masks with clear plastic windows in them to allow for lip reading; there are several places now to purchase such masks online, or you can make your own by following a guide like this.

As professionals in the language industry, we at Monterey Language Services are fascinated by how this pandemic is changing our language and communication styles. We like to stay on top of these changes so that we can continue communicating as effectively as possible!

The same is true for technology usage in the translation and interpretation industry. Technology was already quite a buzzword for language professionals. Many people have been singing praises of tech such as neural machine translation, remote interpretation tools, etc. Now it is time to optimize this technology to help us share information as accurately and quickly as possible.

Providing translation and interpretation is absolutely vital during the coronavirus pandemic. In normal circumstances, it has been shown that people who don’t speak English well or at all tend to have worse health outcomes after many types of routine procedures. This effect can be even worse when the situation is critical, like when patients potentially have COVID-19. Since interpreters can’t be in the room to interpret for patients, doctors must rely on phones as an interpretation platform. This still poses some difficulties, like connectivity issues, and trouble hearing due to doctors keeping physically distant from patient. This is better than nothing, but certainly can be improved. Just as doctors have a duty to their patients to provide the best care possible, language professionals and technology developers have a duty to optimize their services to support health care workers in these times.

However, any technology that is used for health care purposes must have legally a certain level of security. This is one reason that certain platforms like Zoom can’t be used for remote medical interpretation: they need end-to-end encryption, among other requirements, to ensure patients’ privacy.  According to this Time article, many hospitals are doing their best to transition to providing remote interpretation, but they don’t have the infrastructure. We hope to see more platforms implement stricter security measures, so that health care workers can have more tools available to them.

Machine translation is another tool that, when used properly, can greatly speed up the sharing of important information and significant news about the coronavirus. It can also help researchers and doctors understand medical studies and reports on the coronavirus that have come out of other countries. This is why SDL, a major provider of language services and technology, is offering health science researchers free access to their proprietary machine translation tool. This tool offers translation of over 120 languages, so researchers will have a wealth of information from different sources available to them. Please see this article for more information!

We have outlined a few ways in which translation and interpretation technology is important, but we have just touched the tip of the iceberg. There are many ways that this technology is being used to prevent the spread of COVID-19, and to help those people who are working on the front lines of this pandemic and those who have gotten sick. We are proud to offer remote interpretation services ourselves. We believe that this technology plays a significant role in keeping people healthy and saving people’s lives, and we are grateful to everyone who develops and uses this technology.

On Tuesday April 14, California Governor Gavin Newsom laid out all of the conditions that would have to be met before the stay-at-home orders could be lifted altogether. California would have to have:

• “The ability to monitor and protect our communities through testing, contact tracing, isolating, and supporting those who are positive or exposed;
• The ability to prevent infection in people who are at risk for more severe COVID-19;
• The ability of the hospital and health systems to handle surges;
• The ability to develop therapeutics to meet the demand;
• The ability for businesses, schools, and child care facilities to support physical distancing; and
• The ability to determine when to reinstitute certain measures, such as the stay-at-home orders, if necessary.” (cnbc.com)

It’s unclear when all of these conditions are expected to be met. Some people hope that this could happen as soon as the first week of May, but others are prepared to stay at home for much longer. The current stay-at-home order is set to expire on May 3 in the Bay Area and on May 15 in Los Angeles. We will see then whether the orders will be renewed or lifted.

Some states, however, are already beginning to reopen public places. Over the weekend, some areas in Florida opened access (still with some restrictions) to beaches, and many Floridians took advantage of this to spend time on the beach. Unfortunately, it appeared that social distancing recommendations were often not being followed. Of course people are eager to get out of the house and get “back to normal,” but it is important to remember that we are not out of the woods yet. Even when the shelter-at-home orders are lifted, experts recommend that social distancing measures should continue to be taken for a while longer. We want to continue to “flatten the curve”; the worst outcome would be to lift these measures all at once and cause a large outbreak of the virus, essentially negating all of the positive effects of the strict stay-at-home measures we have been living by.

On Friday April 10, small business owners were able to apply for loans from the Small Business Administration to help them continue operating while their income is impacted by COVID-19. The Paycheck Protection Program is one program to help provide loans to small business owners, and it has already run out of money. According to Forbes, “In less than two weeks, $349 billion has been claimed by around 1.6 million small business owners. While that may seem like a lot, 1.6 million is a mere 6% of America’s small businesses.” The program needs more funding to help the people who were unable to receive a loan this time around; fortunately, this is already being discussed in Congress.

These are difficult times for everyone. People are understandably stressed out and eager to return to life as normal. However, we must remember the ultimate goal of the social distancing and stay-at-home measures put in place: to protect our own health, and to protect the health of the people around us, especially the vulnerable. At Monterey Language Services we are doing our part by working from home, and only going out for essentials. We are proud to help how we can, and we encourage everyone else to do what they can to help us get through this together!