Translation Quality in Nigerian Government Health Communication: Assessing Yoruba and Igbo Health Pamphlet Translations

The translation quality of government health communication materials into Nigerian indigenous languages directly affects the reach and effectiveness of public health campaigns targeting populations with limited English literacy. This study assesses the translation quality of selected government health pamphlets translated from English into Yoruba and Igbo for distribution in Osun State and Imo State respectively, examining accuracy, fluency, cultural appropriateness, and health communication effectiveness. A corpus of twenty health pamphlet pairs, ten English-Yoruba and ten English-Igbo, produced by the Federal Ministry of Health between 2021 and 2024 was assembled. Each translation pair was assessed by two bilingual translation quality assessors using a modified multidimensional quality assessment framework covering semantic accuracy, lexical naturalness, cultural-conceptual equivalence, and readability. Community reception testing was conducted with forty Yoruba-speaking and forty Igbo-speaking community members with secondary school education or below, assessing comprehension and health message retention. Quality assessment results indicate significant accuracy problems in approximately thirty percent of assessed translation units, with Igbo translations showing higher rates of lexical and semantic inaccuracy than Yoruba translations. Cultural-conceptual equivalence is problematic for biomedical terminology in both language pairs, with translators frequently defaulting to English technical loans rather than seeking indigenous equivalents. Community comprehension testing confirms that translation quality problems reduce message retention. The study recommends professional translator accreditation standards for government health material translation. Keywords: translation quality, health communication, Yoruba, Igbo, government pamphlets.