Difference between Outbreak, Epidemic and Pandemic:
How to Translate them Into Arabic?
Difference between Outbreak, Epidemic and Pandemic: How to Translate them Into Arabic?
Everyone is talking nowadays about the Covid19, some call it outbreak, epidemic and others call it Pandemic. People use those terms interchangeably however knowing the difference is vital and important, not only for the public awareness and the undertaking of the necessary measures, but also to know how to translate those terms into Arabic accurately and convey the right message.
Let’s start by defining those terms:
- AN OUTBREAK is a greater-than-anticipated increase in the number of cases in an area.
An outbreak is small but unusual.
- AN EPIDEMIC is a disease that affects a large number of people within a community, population or region. It is an outbreak that has spread over a larger geographic area.
An epidemic is bigger and spreading.
- A PANDEMIC is an epidemic that has spread beyond borders, over multiple countries and continents.
A Pandemic is international and out of control.
Therefore, as we can see, the difference between those three is in size, and we have defined them as per their scale, from the smallest to the largest.
It is to note that the World Health Organization has classified the Covid19 as a Pandemic.
Now, how to translate Outbreak, Epidemic and Pandemic into Arabic?
MACHINE OR AUTOMATED TRANSLATION: If we go to Google translate and type those three terms, we would probably receive the same translation for the three terms which is: وباء
And that would happen on multiple similar machine translation platforms.
HUMAN TRANSLATION: Human translators invest time in researching the topics they are working on unlike automated translation which converts terms word-for-word. Therefore they would translate those medical terms based on their definitions as follows.
Outbreak: فاشية / تفشي
Epidemic: وباء
Pandemic: جائحة
Researching terms is very important in order to provide an accurate translation especially in the medical field.
Relying on Human translators provides you with the best translation vs machine translation which becomes irrelevant facing technical terminology.
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Read more about Machine Translation VS Human Translation
Read about the misconceptions about translation