Volunteers Work as Online Interpreters

By Qi Chuanbin

Anqiu Residential Area located at Jiaxing Rd Sub-district had two Japanese returning to Shanghai upon closed-loop transportation from the airport on the evening of March 8. Qian Jing, General Chief of the Party Branch of the Residential Area, worried about talking to them due to language difficulties, for which a volunteer named Lu Xuwei came to the Neighborhood Committee the next day to serve as a Japanese interpreter.

Lu Xuwei is originally a professional Japanese guide. Knowing that there is no interpreter for minority languages at the Residential Area, a member of the Sub-district Chamber of Commerce with travel agency business has immediately adopted the shared-staff mode that is popular now, and has applied minority language guides for communities to support the COVID-19 control at the front line.

The shared guides can speak Persian too.

"The parcels of the two Japanese under home quarantine have been all delivered, and the two don’t have fever, cough or other symptoms of COVID-19", said Lu, who offered the delivery services and reported to Qian a few days ago. Later, Qian filled the relevant information into the "File for Each Household".

Lu has played the role of shared guide smoothly these two days. Introduced by the cadres of the Residential Area, Lu first had contact with the two Japanese who received quarantine and observation, made friends with them upon WeChat, and offered them the Japanese-version hints that we would try our best to guarantee their daily needs during the 14-day quarantine; and they can contact Lu via WeChat or telephone if they have any other questions. In addition to helping Anqiu Residential Area and other ones take temperature for self-quarantined people twice a day, Lu has helped buy goods and delivered the goods for them.

According to the staff of the Sub-district, the guides accompanied by Lu offering translation services have rich experience in tours and strong communication skills, and know the living habits and cultural characteristics of different countries well, so that the cadres of the Neighborhood Committee can work smoothly. Besides, there is a Persian guide. According to Qian, some cadres firstly plan to talk to Japanese with the translation function of WeChat, but it has errors more or less by generating non-sense sentences. "The volunteers are better in translation, and they can reassure the foreigners in a timely manner, which the machine can’t do."

The Sub-district leads to establish a translation team with 8 young Party members, in order to further 14-day home quarantine and health observation for personnel returning to Shanghai recently and to win the support and understanding of domestic and foreign residents. By now, the team has all helped residential areas.

20 persons make an online translation team.

Supporting the offline forces, the Sub-district sets up an online translation team according to the needs to hand out professional multilingual translation, including English, Japanese and Korean, for 24 hours through WeChat group.

The communities can ask for help in time if having difficulties in language communication, according to the staff of the Sub-district. Relying on the advantages of the Party branch and the member units of the regional Party construction, the Sub-district has lately issued an online notice of volunteer recruitment call to enterprises in Hongkou, which promptly arises responses from a lot of enterprises.

So far, the team has 20 interpreters of various languages, such as English, Japanese and Korean. Among them, there are full-time staff working for translation companies or foreign-funded companies who care about public welfare, and young white-collar workers working at home right now. The team assists in translation and production of information including multilingual-version notices, which will be issued to the communities.

According to the heads, the Sub-district will make a reasonable deployment of online and offline services on the basis of multilingual translation in accordance with the principle of proximity, and jointly finish the last part of closed-loop management as a good communicator.