Abstract：
The role of language in maintaining asymmetries of power in global public health and biomedicine has become a central part of the broader movement to \"decolonize Global Health.\" While considering how language engenders inequalities in Global Health, hinders interventions, and inhibits medical care, this article contends that colonially derived theorizations of what language is undergirding top-down health communication efforts labeled as \"decolonial\" can thwart efforts to make biomedical care and public health clearer in postcolonies. We do this through outlining predicaments found in a linguistic anthropological exploration of cancer terminology in Coastal Tanzania. In the small town of Bagamoyo, saratani-the official translation for cancer in Tanzania created by the government in the 1980s as part of a larger effort of decolonial state-building-is dominantly understood as a different or unequivocal disease than kansa-the English-adapted name. As the dissemination of the term saratani into a linguistic arena where colonially derived word kansa is dominantly registered as the biological disease \"cancer,\" this linguistic disjuncture between saratani and kansa has not only created a plethora of problems for oncological care in Bagamoyo, but also illuminates the perils of creating more just health communication in an unequal global political economy. Through showing how binary conceptualizations of language as \"colonial\" and \"local\" can reproduce incommunicability-the rendering of racialized subjects as fundamentally unintelligible in hegemonic regimes-we contend that the afterlives of this past effort to decolonize medical language has important lessons for the present of \"decolonizing Global Health.\" Moving beyond static conceptualizations of language, we argue for a fluid \"translanguaging\" perspective of medical linguistics that facilitates the dismantlement of incommunicability and the global ordering that creates it.
摘要：
语言在维持全球公共卫生和生物医学中的权力不对称方面的作用已成为全球卫生非殖民化运动的核心部分。“在考虑语言如何在全球健康中造成不平等的同时，阻碍干预，并抑制医疗护理，这篇文章认为，殖民地衍生的关于什么语言是自上而下的健康传播努力的理论，这些努力被标记为“非殖民化”，可能会阻碍使后殖民地生物医学护理和公共卫生更加清晰的努力。我们通过概述在坦桑尼亚沿海对癌症术语的语言人类学探索中发现的困境来做到这一点。在Bagamoyo的小镇，saratani-政府在1980年代创建的坦桑尼亚癌症官方翻译，作为非殖民化国家建设的更大努力的一部分-被主要理解为与英文改编的名字kansa不同或明确的疾病。随着saratani一词在语言领域的传播，殖民地衍生的kansa词主要被注册为生物疾病“癌症”，“saratani和kansa之间的这种语言差异不仅给Bagamoyo的肿瘤治疗带来了很多问题，但也阐明了在不平等的全球政治经济中创造更公正的健康交流的危险。通过展示语言的“殖民地”和“本地”的二元概念化如何再现不可沟通性-使种族化的受试者在霸权政权中从根本上无法理解-我们认为，过去为使医学语言非殖民化所做的努力的来世对于“全球健康非殖民化”的当下具有重要的教训。“超越语言的静态概念化，我们主张医学语言学的流动“跨语言”观点，以促进不可沟通性的瓦解和创造它的全球秩序。
