Emilie Taylor, Artist and Embedded Researcher at Sheffield Hallam University, writes about the experiences of those whose first language is not English – within cultural activities, local services and healthcare – and creative solutions to the issues they face.
‘Sitting with incomprehension is an uncomfortable act- for those of us whose mother tongue is English, it is also an unfamiliar one, given the way in which our preferred system of communication has been imposed on the world’
Aruna D’Souza ‘Imperfect Solidarities’, 2024, p.34
Language has been on my mind due to one of the action research projects I am leading at Cast, the theatre in Doncaster. The project, part of the wider Creative Health Boards research funded by UKRI, involves supporting men and women who use Conversation Club to access Cast for the first time and watch a performance. (Conversation Club befriends and supports people seeking asylum and new refugees, helping them promote their asylum claims, settle into a new life in the UK and integrate into Doncaster). For people attending English will not be their first language and for many it will be a language they have recently begun learning.
As I was thinking about how to translate materials it was suggested by Nic Doyle, Community Engagement Manager at Cast, that I talk to Sharon Wilson. Sharon is Senior Specialist BAME Worker at Changing Lives, a charity in Doncaster. She works predominantly with men seeking asylum housed in the hotels and dispersed properties in Doncaster. Fourteen languages are spoken in the centre, and for some languages translators are not available in Doncaster. Sharon was keen to meet to discuss translation and explained that in her experience ‘translation is fundamental and critical to certain parts of [peoples] lives, but it can also become a barrier to access.‘
A practical example of this, familiar to a lot of local services, occurs when translators are unavailable or unaffordable. Sharon describes supporting a woman who had a lump in her breast, referring her to a GP but having the appointment cancelled several times over a three month period due to their not being a translator available. Changing Lives then accompanied the woman and she was seen without translator and referred for surgery the same day.
‘It’s not about the language, its about patience and empathy and relationships. When somebody approaches us we have the understanding that it has taken them weeks, days, hours, to get into our doors and to say I have a problem. We then have a duty of care to not leave until we know what this is. And if a translator is not available then that duty of care does not change.‘
Sharon describes the collaborative approaches Changing Lives workers might initiate:
‘We use drawings, the internet to share images, friends help, key words. Sometimes the misunderstandings are hilarious. It’s about patience and letting the person you’re with know we are in this together, we are going to get to wherever this is.’
This resonates with my training in Psychotherapy and work in voluntary sector services where it is widely acknowledged that the strength of the relationship is the greatest predictor of engagement and change. (‘Therapeutic Alliance and Outcome of Psychotherapy: Historical Excursus, Measurements, and Prospects for Research’, Ardito & Rabelina, 2011). Here, demonstrating patience, respect and care take precedence over the assumed accuracy of language.
Preparing translated resources can help a service and a service provider feel they have accomplished in what is required of them, but for the person receiving the resource this may be a very different version of, say, Arabic to the one they speak in South Sudan. Or the person may have had limited schooling and not read. They may take the leaflet either offended or unable to explain about the language or the reading due to limited language or embarrassment, and the opportunity is lost. A warm personable reception without the literature, as above, may actually have been more conducive to relationship building and helping.
Author Aruna De Souza takes this further in her essay ‘Imperfect Solidarities’ published this year, and references the Poet and Post Colonial Theorist Edouard Glissant’s work ‘Poetics of Relation’ published in 1990, particularly his idea of the right to opacity, suggesting that the West’s ‘need to know’ is too loaded with colonial context to ever be purely innocent curiosity or simply desire for connection:
‘When a postcolonial subject demands opacity… they are asserting the right to remain untranslatable into Western thought, the right to remain unrecorded by the colonizing institutions of the West, the right to remain irreducible to Western categorizations, and- most importantly for us- the right to remain unknown by the knowledge gatherers of the West.’ (D’Souza, A. 2024, p. 53)
I see in the attitude Sharon describes, the way she approaches collaborating with someone who is not fluent in English, recognition of the value of this right to opacity.
De Souza highlights that in French (the language Glissant was writing in), the word for understand, ‘comprendre’, suggests ‘seizing’ or ‘taking hold of’. This brings to mind the idea of the long awaited translator in the GP surgery above arriving and taking notes, taking the information from the individual and passing it on to higher authorities themselves. Then I think about what Sharon describes and the beauty in the trickiness, the awkwardness and the mess of collaboration. The moments of unexpected humour and connection, the forging of new mutual understandings. The beginnings of a new relationship. D’Souza’s words echo this:
‘And yet, even in this chaos, solidarities emerge- momentary alliances based not on empathy but on imperfect understandings of others motivations, desires or values.’ (D’Souza, A. 2024, p. 36)
Ultimately, to return to my project, we have had the materials for the performances and the activity translated into eight languages-Sorani, Arabic, Pashto, Dari, Tigrinyan, Farsi, Oromo and Vietnamese. But Sharon’s words and experience have been an education for which I am grateful.
Creative Health provision can be guided by Sharon’s example and the ideas presented in D’ Souza’s text in prioritising the service/ service user relationship and leaning into opacity as it occurs. Using that space to collaborate creatively and playfully rather than relying first on translation services. Connections with people in local services that have Sharon’s expertise will be useful in developing the tools and techniques Creative Health staff can draw upon in developing alliance in the absence of common language.
‘When we can respect the unknowability of the other and still care for and with them, without translating ourselves into their terms, perhaps we will fare better at building political bridges.’ (D’Souza, A. 2024, pp.34)
With thanks to Sharon Wilson for her insight and Nicola Doyle for the introduction, and in recognition of all the fabulous work Cast and Changing Lives do, thanks to women like them!
