Response-able, collaborative adaptations of multilingual health messaging: a case study from Australia and Hong Kong, SAR

Abstract

This article explores how citizen adaptors in Australia and Hong Kong (n = 22) work collaboratively with a not-for-profit health organisation (NGO), one another and Generative AI to produce accessible, multilingual public health messages. There is an urgent need for multilingual health communication, given that it is a human right and a social determinant of health, and without it, lives may be put at risk. To address this, a process of translation is often required. Many organisations require these translations to be performed by professionals, making them cost-prohibitive to access. Hence, in this article, we propose the notion of citizen adaptors who collaborate with GenAI as a non-professional option for generating multilingual health communication. We engaged citizen adaptors to adapt three sets of health messages about neurofibromatosis from English to Chinese Mandarin, Cantonese, Indonesian, and Russian. Drawing on Donna Haraway’s notion of response-ability (the capacity to respond), we consider the skills, knowledge, and other responses the citizen adaptors highlighted as important for the collaborative adaptation of multilingual health messages. They noted that reciprocity, biliteracy, and affective attachments were phenomena that they were capable of responding to in the context of response-able, collaborative, multilingual adaptations. These findings support calls for more flexible language practices to be incorporated in the process of translation as well as for the role of non-professionals to be more carefully considered. It also cautions against the unscrupulous use of GenAI and provides strategies for response-ably working with the technology.