Translating Covid-19 information into Yiddish for the UK Hasidic community
Zoë Belk, Lily Kahn, Kriszta Szendroi, Sonya Yampolskaya
July 2021
 

This article documents a recent project translating Covid-19 information into Yiddish for the benefit of the Hasidic Jewish communities in London’s Stamford Hill and Manchester in the UK. The translation work developed as a response to the urgent need for Yiddish-language resources specifically designed for the Hasidic community near the beginning of the pandemic. The translations were undertaken by a team consisting of linguists and native speakers of Hasidic Yiddish and took place within the framework of an AHRC (UK Arts and Humanities Research Council)-funded research project dedicated to linguistic and sociolinguistic analysis of contemporary Hasidic Yiddish worldwide. In this article we discuss the sociolinguistic background to the translations and investigate the reasons why they were so urgently needed, before going on to address the issues encountered during the course of the translation process and the decisions taken in order to resolve them. These issues include the type of Yiddish chosen for the translations, the translation of medical terminology, gender-based linguistic differences affecting the translations, and specific cultural considerations that needed to be taken into account.
Format: [ pdf ]
Reference: lingbuzz/006085
(please use that when you cite this article)
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keywords: covid-19 linguistics, hasidic, yiddish, stamford hill, translation, morphology, syntax
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