Localising or globalising? Multilingualism and lingua franca in the management of emergencies from natural disasters

Communities are ever more multilingual and multicultural thanks to the free movement of people all over the world and to constant migration flows, hence public communications about an evolving disaster need to account for the different languages spoken within the same community and across borders. Events such as Hurricane Katrina, the Haiti earthquake, the Central European floods in 2013, the heavy rain and snowfall of 2014 in northern Italy or the major flood that struck UK and Ireland in 2016 have shown that natural disasters know no national boundaries and often require collaboration between emergency organisations from different countries to help affected populations and bring disaster relief. Our review of emergency management software systems indicates that they are either not localised at all because they mainly address an English-speaking audience – thus excluding a considerable number of potential users – or are localised into a great number of languages using machine translation, with some labels or sentences left in English. In this article we describe the method we developed and the work we carried out for the (g)localisation of the graphic user interface of the disaster management system and documentation developed within our EU-FP7-funded project, Slándáil. Before a product can be localised, it needs to undergo a process of globalisation, which may be followed or substituted by localisability, both entailing linguistic and cultural evaluations such as the comparison of cultural systems and the translation issues brought about by potential differences. The potential costs incurred and resources needed to localise these systems and attendant documents are also assessed. The present article contributes to account for and map the socio-linguistic variation present in the language of emergency management, as used by different stakeholders. (G)localisation is used to facilitate cross-linguistic communications among emergency operators and aid them in intercultural communication during emergencies.