This collection advocates languages-based, translational research to be part of the partnerships and collaborations required to make sense of, and respond to, COVID-19 as one of the major global challenges of our time.

Bringing together scholars and practitioners from a wide range of disciplines, this volume is bound by a common thread stressing the importance of linguistic sensitivity, (inter)cultural knowledge and translational mediation in the frontline response to COVID-19. Featuring contributors from around the world and reflecting on the language used to frame COVID-19 in diverse cultural contexts of the Global North and Global South, the book proposes that paying attention to the transmission of ideas, ideologies, narratives and history through processes of translation results in a broadening of social, cultural and medical understandings of COVID-19. Spanning nearly 20 signed and spoken languages, the volume argues that only in going beyond an Anglophone perspective can we better understand the cultural, social and political facets of the pandemic and, in turn, produce a comprehensive, efficient global response to disease management.

This book will be of interest to scholars in translation and interpreting studies, modern languages, applied linguistics, cultural studies, Deaf Studies, intercultural communication and medical humanities.

"With its revelatory observations on language, translation and culture during the COVID-19 pandemic, from a broad geographical, multimodal and cross-disciplinary perspective, this extensive and impressive volume provides a significant contribution to our understanding of the importance of language in health crises."

– Sharon O’Brien, Dublin City University

"Never before the intricate relationships between linguistic identity, mental and physical health have been as visible as during the COVID-19 pandemic. Engaging with trust, cognitive and emotive impact, metaphorical and semantic meaning, national and transnational contexts of healthcare communication, and many subtle interconnections in between, the contributors of this volume call us to reassess language as a factor in discourses of personal, national, and global health. A necessary reading."

– Federico M. Federici, University College London

"The Languages of COVID-19 provides an eloquent demonstration of how ‘following the science’...is no longer an effective or adequate response to global health crises such as COVID-19...The volume is to be recognised as a key intervention, from the perspective of what Ostherr dubbed the translational humanities, in the area of understanding the multiple impacts of COVID-19 past, present and future...This book deserves to be widely read across a range of disciplines and fields, with its implications integrated to policy and practice."

– Charles Forsdick, University of Liverpool, The Translator

Piotr Blumczynski is Senior Lecturer in Translation and Interpreting at Queen’s University Belfast. He is the author of Ubiquitous Translation (Routledge, 2016) and editor-in-chief of the journal Translation Studies. In 2022–2024, he is co-directing the research programme MISTE exploring various sites of translation and cross-cultural encounter on the island of Ireland.

Steven Wilson is Senior Lecturer in French Studies at Queen’s University Belfast. He is the author of The Language of Disease: Writing Syphilis in Nineteenth-Century France (Legenda, 2020) and has edited medical humanities-themed journal special issues on French Autopathography (2016), French Thanatology (2021) and Cultural Languages of Pain (2023).