MIGRANT WORKERS IN SINGAPORE
Migrant Workers' Picture Book
After casual conversations with foreign constructions workers from India, I found out that one of the biggest challenges that they faced in Singapore was the language barrier. When i talked to the workers around my neighbourhood, they said that buying items from the minimart was really difficult for them. They had to scan the isles on their own to find what they wanted, and could not effectively ask the shopkeepers for what they wanted as they could not talk in English.
Hearing this, i decided to try to provide a solution. That solution was the Migrant Workers' Picture Book. The picture book consists of different sections such as 1) Food, 2) Places in Singapore, 3) Helpful Organisations and 4) Translation Apps. Words in each of these categories have been translated into English, Tamil, Hindi and Bengali.
REFLECTION
From the beginning of this project, I had wanted to produce something that could be used beyond the length of this project. I thought that having an Instagram account to raise awareness about the struggles of migrant workers would be sufficient as social media is a very powerful platform and I could easily reach many people. However, i lost focus of the real purpose that I wanted to pursue, which was helping migrant workers. While raising awareness about these workers among Singaporeans would benefit them indirectly, this was not my end goal. I wanted to do something that would have a direct impact on improving the lives of migrant workers in Singapore and I wanted this impact to be sustainable in the long run.
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Through consultations with my supervisor, Ms Fionna, I was guided to focus on my real goal and I managed to come up with the idea of a picture book. I came to this idea after listing down all the challenges that migrant workers faced and thought about which area would be possible for me to work on to make a difference. Thus, after narrowing down the challenges i decided to focus on the area of language barrier.
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What went well:
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I was able to materialise the vision that I had in mind. I had wanted to put pictures and provide translations for every picture, in the four different languages. I was glad that I was able to achieve that. I was also able to improve on my original idea through the guidance given by Ms Fionna, as we realised that providing information on translation applications would be useful as well. The translation apps would allow the workers to not only be limited to the picture book, but be able to translate other words as well.
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What did not go well:
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As I did not know the languages of Hindi and Bengali, it was difficult for me to come up with phonetics translations for them. Another problem with that was ensuring the accuracy of the phonetics translations. Although I really wanted to work on this idea so that the workers could learn to pronounce the words in English by reading the phonetics, it was not something that i could achieve with my resources.
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However, to alleviate this issue, i searched for a translation app that would read out the words in English for the workers to hear. Both the translation apps that have been featured in the picture book have this voice feature. Thus, workers who would like to learn how to pronounce the words in English can simply click on the microphone icon in the respective apps to listen to the pronunciation. They can then mimic the sound and try to pronounce the words on their own.