ABSTRACT
Manitoba was an outlier province in the early months of the pandemic; unlike other Canadian provinces, its case counts were low and some experts even opined the province had been altogether spared from the first wave that swept across the country. However, in the fall of 2020, case counts increased exponentially and reports began to surface that language, outbreaks and public health communication were indeed intertwined. This chapter proposes an initial investigation of the Government of Manitoba's online COVID-19 translation strategy (or lack thereof). More specifically, this case study focuses on how translated and multilingual content is accessed from a user's perspective (or user experience/UX). The study focuses on the Government of Manitoba website and its official social media accounts, including Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Analysis shows a haphazard approach to translation and multilingualism across COVID-19 website content and the Government of Manitoba's social media accounts relative to the linguistic make-up of the provincial population. This analysis is compared to other social ‘conversations’ on Twitter, relative to vaccine rollout. The case study intends to expand research on multilingualism, language barriers and linguistic and translational justice in Canada beyond the ‘Bilingual Belt’ and the official languages (English; French) in the handling of crisis communication and public health communication during the COVID‑19 pandemic.
