Diffusion of technology for language challenges in the South African healthcare environment

Abstract

Even though mobile technologies are increasingly used to enable communications between providers and receivers of healthcare services, there remain severity challenges owing to the use of various indigenous languages in many Africa countries. Some of the challenges get worst in a countries like South Africa where there are eleven official languages. As a result, interpreters and technology-enabled translation become inevitable. However, technology-enabled translation is even more complex because of the semantics that exists in the languages. The study was undertaken to identify the critical challenging factors that exists in the use of South African languages for healthcare services. The interpretivist approach was employed, and Rogers’ diffusion of innovations (DOI) theory was applied in the analysis of the data, to examine and understand how indigenous languages affects healthcare services. From the analysis, six factors were found: confidentiality, translation, interpretation, synchronisation, spoken language, and integration, and categorised into three groups, namely ethics, services and systems.