The Age.Vol.A App and Weportal: Bridging the communicative gap between the elderly, their families and foreign caregivers

With this paper, we wish to present the Age.Vol.A (Ageing, Volunteers, Assistants. Multilingual Tools for Assisting the Ageing) App, whose pilot version is currently being finalized at the Universities of Varese and Milan (Italy), and is being released in June 2022. The App is the main practical output of a four-year research project bearing the same name (2018-2022) that received major funding by Fondazione Cariplo (2021), one of the world’s main philanthropic organizations. The project’s aim consists in facilitating communication between elderly Italian citizens living in the northern Province of Varese (Italy) and assisted by foreign caregivers, the elderly’s families and the foreign caretakers themselves. The wider scope of the project is to ultimately improve the health and wellbeing of all the social actors involved in these often delicate family settings (Vicentini/Grego 2019). For example, (foreign) caregivers, who “are not family members but often end up making up for weak or non-existent family networks, and their relationship with the older people they look after often merges into that of an unofficial relative. They are relied upon, confided in” (Brannigan et al. 2020). Age.Vol.A started off with the objective of shedding light on the experience of assisted ageing in a country which ranks among the four oldest countries in the world (Istat 2020) and provide technological tools for bridging the communicative and cultural gaps between the three above mentioned social groups. Specifically, the Age.Vol.A App is introduced, illustrating the mixed-method – linguistic, statistical and sociological – research applied in the collection of the data, administration of interviews and needs analysis carried out among the interested social groups, in order to determine the content of the App (Russo et al. 2020). The selection process of the material to include is then described, together with the recommendations received by local institutional parties (the Varese Town Council, health authority and welfare institute) about specific themes and aspects they considered relevant. Finally, the step of translation and localization into six languages (English included) of the output of the research is outlined, focusing on how the actual languages (e.g. Ukranian rather than lingua-franca Russian), or even the local varieties of the standard languages (e.g. Spanish and Russian) spoken by the caregivers in the Varese Province were specifically targeted, based on the statistical research carried out at the beginning. The Age.Vol.A. App shall be distributed free of charge to all involved social actors, and is hoped to represent a practical output of multi-disciplinary, applied research that is beneficial to society, albeit at a limited local level thus far, and that brings the academia closer to the needs and expectations of their territory-s population. Keywords: Northern Italy, elderly care, foreign caregivers, sociolinguistics, statistics, translation. References Brannigan Michael, Vicentini Alessandra, Grego Kim, Bacchini Simone C. (2020) (eds), Practical perspectives on older people, caregivers, families and organisations, Special issues, “Working with Older People”, 5(3), Emerald, London. Fondazione Cariplo (2021), https://www.fondazionecariplo.it/en/the-foundation/la-fondazione.html). Istat (2020), Rapporto annuale 2020. La situazione del Paese, https://www.istat.it/storage/rapporto-annuale/2020/Rapportoannuale2020.pdf. Russo Daniel, Grechi Daniele, Vicentini Alessandra, Grego Kim (2020), ‘Sociolinguistic and statistical methods to survey the communicative needs of home-assisted elderly, their families, and foreign caregivers in Northern Italy’, in Davis Boyd, Vicentini Alessandra, Grego Kim (2020) (eds), Seniors, foreign caregivers, families, institutions: Linguistic and multidisciplinary perspectives, Mimesis international, Milan/London. Vicentini Alessandra, Grego Kim (2019) (eds), Linguistic perspectives on ageing issues, ethics and ideology, “EXPRESSIO”, 3, Milan