The generosity of breast screening and cancer groups
The most recent experience I have had of this is when I met a lovely lady called Rajula who works as a volunteer at the Nightingale Breast Centre in Manchester. We were both attending the Asian Breast Cancer support group, run by Prof Anil Jain. I’ve talked about this inspiring group in a previous blog.
I’d been invited along to give a short presentation about the WoMMeN project and hub. This was exciting as we are keen to attract more Asian and ethnic minority women to the WoMMeN forum so that it can begin to represent a more diverse range of cultures and opinions.
The WoMMeN project is more or less unfunded, although the University of Salford has been generous in supporting our work through small Research Impact grants. Nevertheless, the WoMMeN hub resources are generally written in English due to the lack of money to pay for translation.
Translation of WoMMeN
After our presentation, Rajula introduced herself to me and offered to do some translation work for us. I was overwhelmed with gratitude that someone would volunteer to give of their time so freely.
I asked Rajula if she would translate our useful infographic. Her languages are Gujarati and Hindi which, as you will be aware, have completely different characteristics to a standard alphanumeric keyboard. This was therefore quite a tricky task; with lots of ‘copy screen’, and stitching and pasting images into PowerPoint! Still, we got there, and we managed to find a little thank-you gift for Rajula, courtesy of the University of Salford again.
Please feel free to use these infographics (Gujarati is on the right of this page – scroll down for the Hindi version) but we’d be grateful if you could attribute them to the WoMMeN project.
Call to action
We are immensely grateful to Rajula but would like to extend our work to cover all the top 10 non-English languages used in the UK. The 2011 Census tells us these are: Polish, Punjabi, Urdu, Bengali, Gujarati, Arabic, French, “Chinese”, Portuguese and Spanish as indicated in the diagram.
Can you help? Would you be able to translate our infographic into any of these languages (or indeed any others?). Now that would be a really successful use of social media and crowd-sourcing!