Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic and its consequences have shown that in order to tackle the problems encountered during a health crisis of this scale, it is necessary to work on communication strategies that reach out to the whole society, including linguistic minorities, who are often one of the most vulnerable groups in such situations. In Estonia, one of the main focuses of the government during the pandemic was the vaccination campaign, as the uptake of vaccines was quite low, especially among the Russian-speaking population. In this country, the ethnolinguistic Russian minority makes up one-third of the society, but communication with and inclusion of this segment of the population has not always been satisfactory. This study aims to understand how the government’s intercultural communication strategies have impacted this minority by focusing on the reactions to vaccination and the different narratives that emerged in response to the posts on the Facebook page of the Republic of Estonia Health Board (Terviseamet). The narratives point to a distrust of the government that, while already existing prior to the pandemic, has had a huge impact on the reception of information during this period.
Keywords: Crisis communication, Vaccine hesitancy, Government trust, Social media, Health inequity, Intercultural communication
How to cite
Escudero, T. and Maadla, J. (2023) “Vaccination Narratives in a Multilingual Society. On Intercultural Communication and Trust” in Declercq, C. and Kerremans, K., Routledge Handbook of Translation, Interpreting and Crisis. London: Routledge, 304-318. DOI: 10.4324/9781003207580-25.