Information in Vietnamese, Arabic and Chinese

Most of us who have sons and daughters diagnosed with Down syndrome have felt overwhelmed at times, especially in the early days, by what that very big label means for our little baby, and for our family, and we have sometimes struggled with finding the information we want. How much harder would that be if you had to do it in a second language, or had no access to any information in a language you could understand? And possibly with little family support if they are living on the other side of the world, or isolated by cultural values or differences?

New South Wales is a culturally diverse community, home to families from many different language and cultural backgrounds. Those families have babies and some of those babies will be born with Down syndrome.

Down Syndrome NSW is working with diverse communities to locate and produce information resources to help provide the information that is available to English speakers to other groups. It is time-consuming and exacting work, as literal translations of English material is not always appropriate, and there is little or none available elsewhere in some languages - but we are working with some wonderful groups, to good effect. We are currently concentrating on Vietnamese, Arabic and Chinese because they are the most frequently needed languages. We have sent the Vietnamese resources to fasmilies around the world -including one package to the family of a baby born to Vietnamese parents in Norway, via a contact in England.

You will find more about what we have achieved so far, and links to the information resources here.

The most recent addition is an Arabic translation of Our son has Down syndrome - an article written by the Australian mother of a young man, as he is about to move from school into the next phase of growing up. The English original is here for the English original.

This week we are holding a seminar on health concerns for children with Down syndrome with a group of Arabic-speaking families, working with an English-speaking presenter and an Arabic interpreter. More than 20 families have signed up so far. We have a long way to go, and a lot to learn, but we know from our work with the Vietnamese parents support group that it is worth doing, and worth working directly with the families.