For the past two weeks, Dr Somrita Ganchoudhuri has been conducting short livestreams on Facebook in Bengali dialects to keep the Bangladeshi migrant worker community up to date on the latest developments.
The 33-year-old research consultant began doing this because she realised there were not enough avenues for the community to talk about COVID-19 related topics and their mental health.
She is one of several individuals in Singapore who have come forward to offer their linguistic skills to help migrant workers.
Dr Somrita has started out simply by talking about issues such as the latest Government announcements related to COVID-19 or interviews with migrant workers in Singapore.
These livestreams are conducted in the dialects spoken in Bangladeshi cities such as Cumilla and Brahmanbaria, where many of these workers are from.
To reach out to these migrant workers, Dr Somrita sought the help of Mr AKM Mohsin, who publishes the Bengali paper Banglar Kantha in Singapore.
In the two weeks since she began her broadcasts, her audience members have begun requesting particular topics for her to talk about, such as how to avoid falling for scam calls.
Dr Somrita now does the streams four times a week and is considering making it daily.
Another translation-related initiative was begun by Tan Tock Seng Hospital service designer Shaina Tan, 24. Together with designer Jason Leow, 40, she published VisualAid on 4 May, a website where healthcare workers can download illustrated cue cards of commonly used phrases in healthcare settings, alongside their Bengali translations, for free.
Shaina received feedback from clinicians and helped to collect phrases required, while Jason helped to build VisualAid’s website. They also reached out to translators and illustrators to help create the cue cards.
As of 14 May, the site has been visited more than 3,500 times.
One of the translators that helped Ms Tan with VisualAid, Mr Aniruddha Adhikary, 22, also has his own translation project aimed at helping the migrant worker community, TranslateForSG.
He began building a website that offers translations of phrases commonly used between doctors and patients, for nine languages that are spoken by migrant communities in Singapore, such as Bengali, Burmese and Tagalog.
Read more here.
Source: TODAYOnline, 15 May 2020