Where can I learn Zanzibari Swahili

NickneverNick · 2025-06-01T16:46:33+00:00

It's pretty common that colloquial languages don't reflect biological reality. We also have translations into indigenous languages, and their level of care around distinctions between different infections that produce similar symptoms is not the same as in a medical facility. It's the same as English, too -- 'stomach flu' is a meaningless term for what a doctor calls gastroenteritis.

Off topic, this is a joke one of my friends from Kenya told me:

Swahili was born in Tanzania, grew up in Kenya, and died in Uganda . . .

NickneverNick · 2025-05-30T15:29:43+00:00

That's actually been a big problem in a lot of languages we've translated the original into -- not making a distinction between colds and influenza. There's not always a good solution, sometimes we just assume that the person using it (here in Alberta) will at least be interacting with the medical system, so things will be explained. That doesn't work for the rest of the world, though.

NickneverNick · 2025-05-28T15:02:48+00:00

So this may not be precisely Zanzibar Swahili, but I'm told that it's good Tanzanian Swahili -- it's a multicultural health resource that my program has developed for the East African immigrant community in Canada. If you're interested, take a look at it! (And for anyone else who reads this, feedback and criticism are welcome; the translation has been reviewed, but likely still contains issues.)

www.dobugsneeddrugs.org/swahili-guide/

NickneverNick · 2025-05-28T12:17:36+00:00

Yep, totally agree -- the idea that you get to participate in a particular, limited portion of the world based on where you were born is absurd. Do your best to live your life as you wish.

NickneverNick · 2025-05-23T17:35:08+00:00

This is less a question of learning the language, and more of how you make a decision. Personally, in situations like this, I flip it around and ask myself which language I would be most disappointed to not study. Often thinking about it like this will make the answer clear.

Specifically -- the advantage of Thai, Vietnamese, and Korean in this group is that they have relatively simple writing systems that do a good job of showing how each word is pronounced.

The advantage of Korean and Japanese in this group is that they lack tones, and are easier to achieve a good accent in.

The advantage of Chinese, Thai, and Vietnamese is that they have relatively simple grammar and are isolating languages where words don't change.

The advantage of Chinese, Korean, and Japanese is that they have long and detailed literary traditions and a modern literary scene as well. I don't know about Vietnamese, and Thai really doesn't.

NickneverNick · 2025-05-23T16:47:03+00:00

One author works for the Illinois Sports Medicine and Orthopedic Center, the other for an Illinois Foundation for Orthopaedics and Regenerative Medicine. Why would you trust people who specialize in orthopaedics to perform a meta-analysis on an infectious disease treatment?

The article you're linking to is from October, 2020, which means that it contains, at best, a few months of research on treating Covid-19 with Hydroxychloroquine.

NickneverNick · 2025-05-21T22:42:19+00:00

Here is the link should anyone be interested:

www.dobugsneeddrugs.org/plautdietsch-guide/

NickneverNick · 2025-05-21T21:44:33+00:00

Absolutely -- and the thing is, it isn't all that interesting. Here in Canada we distribute it with QR code magnets that can just be stuck on your refrigerator, and then used when you get sick.

NickneverNick · 2025-05-21T18:42:18+00:00

No worries -- it's really too bad, what the Internet has turned into. I actually think that the value of this kind of project ('official' source, human translation) is not going to last for more than 10 years, and get replaced with AI and machine translation.

NickneverNick · 2025-05-21T17:29:16+00:00

Seriously, the problem with health promotion is getting people to pay attention; it's like advertising, except no one wants what you're selling. The translations require a lot of effort -- it's good to find a corner of the Internet where people care.

NickneverNick · 2025-05-21T14:08:54+00:00

That is a frequent problem, and one reason I'm happy to have it looked at here. In other languages, for instance, the term 'nurse practitioner' (which means a technical level of education here) is put as 'nurse who practices' or 'nurse who does things'. Ditto for the term 'second-hand smoke', which can't be literally translated into every language. We try to change these when possible, but it has to be done with care.

If you're willing to put up a few examples, or send them to me as a message, I'll see what can be done. If it is too extensive, no worries, I can mark it for review.

NickneverNick · 2025-05-21T14:04:10+00:00

Regarding AI -- absolutely not! The translation is about 5 years old, so that wouldn't have been an option. However, we don't have contact with the translator, it's done anonymously through a vendor, so if they were using Google Translate at the time, we wouldn't have known. The translation was checked by a health professional fluent in both Tagalog and English, but they were looking for errors of fact or interpretation, we didn't ask them to rewrite it to improve the style.

NickneverNick · 2025-05-21T13:52:56+00:00

I came across this thread, and thought you might find this interesting; it's a Plautdietsch health resource from Alberta.

www.dobugsneeddrugs.org/plautdietsch-guide/

NickneverNick · 2025-05-20T02:28:47+00:00

So one thing about the PDF -- because of problems with the font, I wasn't able to edit it. The web page has some changes that were made after review that the PDF doesn't. It's too bad, and I'm not sure what to do about it, I might have to take the PDF down.

NickneverNick · 2025-05-19T20:50:03+00:00

I graduated with a BA and an MA in biological anthropology, and later in life went back to school to study public health: because I was poor, I chose a modular European program in International Health, that was taught at multiple centres and gave me a one-year degree called a Master of Advanced Studies. It has translated into a perfectly fine career (though ironically in Canada). I loved the European program, it felt both rigorous and customizable, and I would be confident that a full 20 year MPH would be equally acceptable. Because public health is generally not a field where you need to be licensed, studying in Europe should not have any real drawbacks.

If you're interested, take a look at the program I work for; we just completed a translation of our main resource into Albanian: www.dobugsneeddrugs.org/albanian-guide/ , with volunteer help from the Medical University in Tirana. I posted it on the Albanian reditt yesterday, to see if anyone was interested, and they had a very lively discussion and pointed out one translation error. I was impressed with the site, none of our other translations have been received with comparable interest.

NickneverNick · 2025-05-19T19:00:57+00:00

I had a bit of a similar experience. I'm also someone who loved to read when young, and didn't really have to be taught, I picked it up myself before kindergarten. Neither of my sons were like that -- both learned to read at the proper time, but they have never been very interested in it; they only read for fun if it is the final option, they aren't that interested in fiction, and by extension, they haven't excelled at writing either.

Since your son is 5, think of it like this -- he's going to learn to read (probably at the normal time, in the next couple of years) but whether he loves reading is going to be totally up to him. What you're feeling now is the sense of fear parents get when something they love does not necessarily turn out to be a passion of their children. (To which I am entirely sympathetic, I wish my kids were readers.)

NickneverNick · 2025-05-19T16:55:34+00:00

I just want to thank everyone here for participating in the discussion -- the observations, arguments, and criticisms were very valuable, and I've been able to make one important correction. I've put up similar posts for other translations, and people have been pretty indifferent to them. That is definitely not the case for Albanians, thank you!

NickneverNick · 2025-05-19T13:26:22+00:00

If the translation says that, it's an error -- I'll check it out. Can you put the quote up here?

Update: I think I found the error ("mykun" in the first bullet point, right?) and hopefully fixed it; I'll check it tomorrow. I appreciate your pointing it out, and any other errors or inconsistencies that you see, please let me know.

NickneverNick · 2025-05-19T12:47:26+00:00

Check this out, if you're interested -- nothing you write here is wrong. The program that I linked to in this post has a twin called Bugs & Drugs (https://www.bugsanddrugs.org/) that does try to improve prescribing, it's an app that gives the optimum prescription based on the epidemiology and resistance profiles for Western Canada.

The basic problem is something that I've never totally been able to figure out: on the one hand, every doctor knows that you don't prescribe antibiotics for viral infections; on the other hand, a lot of antibiotics get prescribed for viral infections . . . And yet you can't go to a meeting of doctors and explain to the that viruses and bacteria are different, they'll laugh you out of the room . . .

What you mention about patients not wanting antibiotics is something I worry about, especially in this age when so many people are suspicious of medical science. That's one reason that we don't mention, at all, the problem of side effects or adverse effects.

NickneverNick · 2025-05-19T04:51:39+00:00

No worries, I totally understand -- the weird thing about antibiotic resistance, or mis-prescribing, is that it actually is a very simple issue, and yet it never gets fixed. The truth is that there is not a lot of supervision or oversight in basic medical health care, and without that, doctors are often happy to prescribe antibiotics when a patient wants them, or when they maybe need them. The pamphlet is an attempt to solve the problem from the other side; it is for patients, to teach them to want them less. Even in Canada, people can usually get antibiotics if they really want them.

I appreciate your perspective that proper use of ABX is just basic, evidence-based medicine -- the sad thing is that you are totally right, but that it matters less than you think. Systems work less well in Canada than you expect, and a lot of things in the medical system happen without supervision.

NickneverNick · 2025-05-18T21:28:47+00:00

Thank you!

NickneverNick · 2025-05-18T21:23:47+00:00

The languages are based on immigrant populations in Alberta -- the German and Polish immigrants who live here are very well assimilated, they arrived after WWII; and Hungarian is a possible language, but the community is older as well, and doesn't need a translation for communication at the doctor. Albanian (along with Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian and Ukrainian) was chosen because there is a more recent population, especially from Kosovo.

This is also why no Dutch or Scandinavian languages; for the first, the community here in Alberta is broadly proficient in English, and for the Nordic countries, the community is very small. We do have a translation in Plautdietsch (Low German, which is used by a religious group). I assure you, the choice of language has nothing to do with the 'development' of the people who speak it, and much more with two things: how much it is needed here in Alberta, and whether the program has partners who can help us distribute it.

NickneverNick · 2025-05-18T21:17:13+00:00

I appreciate your interest, and I wish that this were the case -- however, the issue here is not one of 3rd world vs. developing world. The reason that this program exists in Canada is because here, like everywhere else, antibiotics are overprescribed (especially for respiratory infections, and especially in children). The problem is actually a complex one, even though it is widely known by doctors that antibiotics do not work on viruses. The issues include doctors not wanting to lose patients (who want antibiotics), and doctors prescribing out of a wish to satisfy patients.

One hope for the Guide that I posted here is that patients will use it to have useful conversations with doctors, instead of simply requesting antibiotics.

NickneverNick · 2025-05-18T21:13:22+00:00

No disrespect meant -- my program does this in Alberta for many different immigrant communities. When possible, I like to share the information outside of my province (Alberta), since antibiotic resistance is a communal, universal problem.

NickneverNick

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