Cabrini University students in an Italian language class joined the international fight against the coronavirus recently, when they collaborated with a high school in Italy to provide translations for an online educational video game that helps teach young kids how to stay safe during the ongoing epidemic.
Italian instructor Tiziana Murray, a native of Italy, learned about the online game in early March through her cousin, a teacher at D’Ascanio Scientific High School in Montesilvano, Italy. Students and teachers at the Italian high school had created the game with the intention of keeping young schoolchildren engaged during the country’s virus lockdown, earning praise and media attention throughout Italy in March.
“I have seen a new generation of very community-minded young people in Italy and the United States,” Murray said. “Community is also a core value at Cabrini and seeing how these students embraced the Internet as a healing tool for their community in Italy, I thought we should work together to make an English version.”Murray saw an opportunity for a hands-on, international learning experience and suggested her students collaborate with the Montesilvano students to create English translations for the Italian game. The collaboration came together quickly and the English version of the game debuted on April 6.
The game turns the World Health Organization’s official recommendations for social distancing and sanitization into a series of 10 nursery rhymes that each pair with a colorful cartoon image as part of an interactive memorization challenge. While WHO published translations of its recommendations in English, Italian, and many other languages, Murray’s students at Cabrini worked to translate the original nursery rhymes of the Italian game into English—a tricky task for a translator.
“At first, my students’ translation attempts came out very awkward,” Murray said. “They couldn’t just directly translate the rhyme into English. They had to understand the concept of the Italian rhyme and use different similes and metaphors that rhyme in English.”
Although Murray’s students were participating in the translations as an extra credit assignment around the same time as mid-term exams, the Cabrini instructor said her students were incredibly engaged with the project and soon started crafting rhymes of their own.
“There will always be hope, as long as you wash your hands with soap,” goes one rhyme that’s paired with a cartoon image of hand washing. Murray said her cousin’s class in Italy enjoyed the “funny and new” perspectives the Cabrini students brought to the project.
In the final slide before the English game’s conclusion, the player is greeted with a catchy version of the same lesson being taught to people of all ages worldwide: “If everyone does these things, the bad virus will lose its wings.”