BUILDING POWER AND TRUST

THE ROLE OF TRANSLATION IN SPREADING INFORMATION IN SOCIAL MEDIA IN THE AGE OF COVID-19 IN MOROCCO

Abstract

This paper falls within a conjunction of translation studies, crisis communication, and social media communication. It sheds light on the critical role of translation in crisis management, with a focus on how the aforementioned elements of scrutiny converge and collaborate in the milieu of the outraging global pandemic. Likewise, the paper seeks to reveal the way translating information and information exchange enhances public trust.  Therefore, it emphasizes how discourse can heavily contribute to building trust during a global health emergency and how translation can offer power to the source language/culture by relocating its emanating knowledge to the rest of the world. Likewise, the paper seeks to discuss the way translating information and information exchange enhances public trust. The present paper is a qualitative study that recovers data from selected translated discourses imparted by organizations as well as a questionnaire inquiring about the communicative content disseminated through social media networks during the COVID-19 pandemic. The article scrutinizes the data in terms of content, based on communication content analysis to shed light on how translation could be a powerful tool of relocating meaning production in establishing trust and the extent to which social media is effective as a crisis management mechanism. The further aim of this study is to demonstrate how internet communities and networking technologies can influence deep-rooted forms of communication adopted by governments and the way social media dynamics enhance or undermine the information-translation process at times of crisis. The preliminary data, contrary to what has been assumed, shows that non-expert reactions, attitudes, feelings, experiences, and trends are transmitted via social media and algorithmically analyzed, influencing the information cycle in real time. The networked-translation paradigm focuses less on a one-to-many communication style that uses language, context, and reasoning to persuade receivers and more on a many-to-many communication style that uses audiovisual means to mobilize crowds. (Van Dijck & Alinejad, 2020)