Translating malaria as sumaya: Justified convention or inappropriateness?

In exchanges between health professionals and consultants in the West African context, the word malaria is often replaced by its equivalent in the local dialect. In the Nouna health district of Burkina Faso the term malaria is regularly translated as sumaya. Acknowledging that there may be important epistemological differences between malaria, a term issued from the biomedical epistemology, and sumaya, which is borrowed from traditional medicine epistemology, the possible mismatches between these two terms have been assessed to anticipate problems that may result from their translation by different health stakeholders. By consulting various traditional healers and other members of the communities about the local meaning of the term sumaya, it has been possible to compare the conceptualisation of sumaya to the biomedical conceptualisation of malaria and assess the gap between them. An investigation based on a sample of 13 traditional healers and over 450 individuals from Nouna's health district was conducted to document the meaning of the term sumaya. This paper demonstrates that the generally accepted translation of the word malaria as sumaya is a mistake when one looks at the different systems of belief and representations given to each of these two terms.