Biosecurity briefing for Hmong farmers

Do you know that there are Hmong farmers in Northern Queensland? The Hmong are an Asian ethnic group from the mountainous regions of China, Vietnam, Laos, and Thailand. Multicultural Marketing and Management helped the Australian Government Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry to organise a bio-security education briefing for them.

Bio-security fact sheet in Hmong

A few years ago, we translated a bio-security flyer into Hmong because there are some farmers in far northeast Australia who speak the Hmong language. That was quite an interesting job.

While there are more than 4 million Hmong speakers in the world, there are many varieties of the Hmong language. For example, the Hmong Daw (White Miao) and Mong Njua (Green Miao) dialects are only widely known in Laos and the United States, but not in China, Vietnam, or Thailand. Translating into Hmong so that all Hmong speakers understand something – well, it is much more difficult than understanding the differences between Australian English and U.S. English.