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Issue 31, February 2008
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Welcome to the readers of HIV@MSD, the monthly newsletter from the MSD Interpharma HIV Team
How Do You Talk about AIDS in a local language (without getting into trouble)?
Finding the right words to talk about issues is one of the challenges facing educators, counselors and other persons working on HIV and AIDS issues in non-Western languages. Even small differences in the meaning of a word from one language to another can have a big impact (or a very limited) on speakers of other languages. For example, posters urging "girls" to avoid risky sex failed to deliver the message to young unmarried women over the age of 18 in Zimbabwe because in their language, "girl" means a child or pupil of school age.
Trying to talk about topics such as sexual modes of transmitting the HIV virus is difficult if there are not socially-acceptable terms to describe sexual activity. Similarly, terms like "virus" need to be adopted by languages that lack medical and scientific vocabularies. Some languages have coined descriptive phrases like, "the illness that kills its host" as the equivalent of AIDS or "put on the little plastic thing" meaning to use a condom.
Developing an appropriate vocabulary needs to be a participatory process. The sociolinguistic approach allows speakers of a particular language to choose ways of describing HIV and AIDS - related issues in ways that will not offend speakers of that language.
In countries like Jamaica and Nigeria, a creole or a pidgin is the lingua franca despite the status of English as the official language. Communicating on HIV and AIDS with less educated and low-income persons requires the use of these languages, even though some of their terminology sounds racy or crude in standard English. What's important is that the message gets across.
The Ivory Coast has developed HIV and AIDS vocabularies for 16 of its 60 vernacular languages with the help of REPMASCI Réseau des Professionnels des Médias des Arts et du Sport. To know more about the use of vernacular languages in the field of HIV/AIDS. Click here...
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Lettre d'information HIV@MSD en français