On 26-28 February 2020, the Thai version of the “Journalism, Fake News & Disinformation” handbook was launched in Bangkok at the Youth Camp on Media and Information Literacy.
As disinformation escalates amid the pandemic, so too does the urgency of fighting disinformation and strengthening independent journalism so as to secure public interest information. To help journalists report effectively through the haze, and explain how disinformation works, UNESCO launched an appeal on 19 March through the network of the International Association on Media and Communication Research (IAMCR), requesting volunteer scholars to translate its publication “Journalism, Fake News & Disinformation” into as many languages as possible for the widest possible dissemination.
This unique handbook is already available in 11 languages (English, French, Arabic, Russian, Portuguese, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Tajik, Indonesian, Thai and Vietnamese) and 10 more (Spanish, Chinese, Farsi, Khmer, Malaysian, Burmese, Tetum, Albanian, Bosnian and Macedonian) were in the pipeline.
Thanks to the response to the appeal for translation, which received more than 200 proposals, 20 new crowd-sourced translations are now also in progress: Italian, German, Dutch, Polish, Bulgarian, Romanian, Greek, Georgian, Turkish, Hindi, Bengali, Japanese, Korean, Filipino, Pashto, Urdu, Tamil, Telugu, Igbo and Hausa, bringing to 30 the number of translations currently underway.
All of these translations should be published by June, so stay tuned!