Race- Privilege, Relations, Racism, etc.

We don't have the money and training to accommodate everyone. We just don't.

We can say how nice it would be for everyone if a school catered to that minority, but god help that kid should they move or grow up and want to leave their inclusive bubble.

I'm saying this as someone who is completely illiterate in their native language because my parents dropped everything to teach me English as both a spoken and written language.

I have no problem with reasonable accommodations. I don't expect Little Italy to suddenly start adding Greek to their signs but I do expect emergency services to try and identify someone's language. I don't expect a town without a certain demography to all of a sudden demand the teaching of an extinct language like Pazeh or Livonian.

Bounds of reasons. If you seriously refuse to learn the dominate language of your area, then you better hope that you always stay with someone who does or you never leave your little enclave.

That's fair, but the debate at the moment is about (I think) mandatory language instruction.

And good luck enforcing it.

Unless you want to start pissing off a lot of countries by mass visa rejections, deportations, and an insane amount of force we again can't afford.

Nevermind the effect on the economy, civilian marriages and family, private business, and community morale.

I have a better idea, let's just work on improving the English classes and other classes we already have, then we can work on adding more options and accommodations.

That policy I can endorse.

I agree. That's why I don't advocate argument practices which "dismiss" problems or concerns. For example, "Yes, I agree that [X Problem] is terrible, but there's nothing we can do. [Y Complainer] just has to deal with it."

To simplify the question - what is the language that laws are written in; and, as people are after all obliged to know and understand these laws as written, shouldn't they have to know and understand that language? Conversely, in cases of judicial or professional malpractice due to linguistic misunderstanding, especially in cases where both parties speak otherwise foreign languages, who should be held accountable?

edited 6th Feb '14 11:38:45 AM by indiana404

I don't get why people think that having official language means all other languages are suddenly banned.

Then again, in Finland, there has been discussion of dropping mandatory Swedish out, because people feel that current "Mother language, mandatory second and practically mandatory English" are taking away from other languages and considering how small part of the populace speaks of Swedish (5%)...

So idea is to drop mandatory Swedish and thus free one more language for students to learn, like Russia or German.

Not to sound like a broken record, but this is another is/ought problem. Yes, it is practical to learn a country's language to know its laws, but that still doesn't adequately explain why services don't exist to accomodate people of that langauge.

Whoever performed the malpractice, I would assume.

I wasnt aware that the US translates its laws as a matter of routine practice.

It does not, and no judge is going to accept "Well I was looking at translated laws" as an excuse. De Facto we have a english as an offical language that Indiana and I are proposing. However, De Jure we do not.

If I'm not mistaken, though, aren't law-enforcement agents required to provide legal counsel to you in the case of criminal accusation? Are they also required to find counsel that can communicate with you?

'Cause it don't, which is exactly my point. It's one thing to have multilingual options for your driver's licence exam, but once you get it, you should still be able to read what's written on the licence itself.

The question is simple - who bears the burden of communication? Which language takes precedence if neither is official?

Basically, instead of people being obliged to learn one language, particularly one which already is used by most of the population and for all laws and regulations in the state, you're pretty much forcing them, under penalty of judicial retribution, to learn a whole bunch of languages for each and every person they might have to deal with, because you think that's how it ought to be.

edited 6th Feb '14 12:20:57 PM by indiana404

They are and they do comply. Though most people who need special communication needs are normally not in local jurisdictions. ICE, FBI, State Department, and the consulate send out translators all the time to help in stuff like that.

edited 6th Feb '14 12:18:23 PM by Gabrael

Gabrael:

Them's fightin' words!

Joking aside, this entire debate reminds me of my first day of class in sociolinguistics. To play devil's advocate to a minor extent, bear in mind that the United States is not only very ethnically diverse but also just geographically large in general. We're substantially larger in terms of land mass than most other nations, and it's not unheard of for people - even in the 21st century - to spend their entire lives in one town. Each state is basically it's own miniaturized country and all of the socio-political baggage that entails.

While I would prefer that less "enlightened" individuals stop shouting that everyone should speak English, it's at least marginally realistic to expect many Americans to be monolingual throughout their entire lives. Contrast this with the landlocked nations of Europe or Africa, where you can expect to pass by a stranger who knows at least two languages.

Of course, this entire debate about that Coke commercial (which I admittedly haven't even seen) is predicated by an undercurrent of resurgent xenophobia and racism being blanketed by platitudes about the difficulty of learning other languages such as Spanish and Chinese. And I'm going to back up what Zeal said. Mandarin Chinese takes up a huge chunk of my time, but it isn't half the headache that English is. And without dick waving too much, I'm saying this as someone who has a formal and fairly extensive understanding of its mechanics and history.

What concerns me is not so much the relative difficulty of English' mechanics, but rather the political and social motivations in insisting that English be the status quo of communication in the US. As a mercantile language, English has both a great deal of social currency that native English-speaking Americans often underestimate.

There's a lot of nationalism tied into being an American who speaks English as a native, and that nationalism can and often does turn vicious when social progressives point out the excessive insularity that comes with speaking said language. This is actually fairly common in world languages, in which the political and cultural ideologies are intertwined with the people who speak those languages. Two infamous examples I can think of are Hindi and Urdu as well as Arabic and Hebrew (languages that have been artificially divided for political and racial reasons rather than grammatical or lexical functions endemic to the languages). The Japanese' view of Korean speakers comes to mind as well.

Heck, I prefer that more people here speak English, but the motivations for that argument, while sometimes based on good intentions, are sometimes based on thinly veiled racism. It's the same problem with this hoopla over voter ID laws. It sounds like and honest, noble and efficient idea at first, but look carefully at some of the politicians who want this legislation passed, and listen carefully to the rhetoric and ideological premises they are using to argue their case.

edited 6th Feb '14 12:31:16 PM by Aprilla

Are you talking about malpractice or a communication barrier? Because I'm confused.

Nooooo, no one's "forcing" any person to do anything. We're talking about services being available for people who speak a foreign language. Because otherwise, you have services which are NOT available to those persons at all.

You Keep Using That Word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

Because, once again, either people are going to have services or they aren't.

You never answered my question before; do we withhold, say, emergency medical care to anyone who can't speak English? How about legal counsel? What exactly do you want here?

EDIT: Also, "being made available" does not mean "force the service provider to do everything themselves". It means any number of systemic changes, at a variety of levels, that would make things easier, more practical, and more capable for the parties involved to facilitate the need.

edited 6th Feb '14 1:05:53 PM by KingZeal

Here's an example of language barrier induced malpractice: a doctor resuscitates a DNR-signed patient. The DNR statement is written in Swedish, which nobody in the hospital knows, nor has time to call a translator for. The patient sues for malpractice. Is the claim valid?

Like I said, while on-call translations can be a useful band-aid in most situations, when it comes to legal documents regarding essential services, it is the person's own responsibility to read and understand them. Basically, a doctor is required to provide medical aid, but if it comes with any waiver or otherwise legal bind, there's no requirement for it to be prepared in the patient's own language. The same goes for any other social service that includes a signature - and as long as the documents that signature is placed on are written in one language, then might as well declare it official, and expect and provide for aspiring citizens and students to learn it.

edited 6th Feb '14 1:15:38 PM by indiana404

Not withholding, but how well can an ER nurse who only speaks English provide care to someone who only speaks Swahili? Any mistake or lack of care because of the communication barrier will be placed squarely on the nurse. If that patient should die because they can't tell the doctors non-obvious symptoms (like pain level, vision, dizziness, etc) then the doctors will be investigated and possibly fired.

As for "it won't fall completely on the provider," no, I'm pretty sure that it will. If there's a requirement for medical, law enforcement, or business to provide services in multiple languages, then it's the responsibility of that group to hire people capable of understanding and translating when neccessary. Compliance will probably end up being enforced by levying large fines, like the government does to businesses that don't meet requirements for people with disabilities.

edited 6th Feb '14 1:16:50 PM by BlueNinja0

Well, as a direct result of not having an official language in this country, the nurse is required to have a translation service that they can call any time of day or night in order to translate for that patient. It's not someone in house, but phones and the internet are awesome things.

The idea that that is a "direct result of not having an official language" is rather erroneous. Making a language official leads the way for procedures to be outlined when somebody cannot communicate effectively in that language. Do you really think anyone is suggesting just leaving people out in the cold?

Germany, for instance, has large populations of Turkish speakers, and there are several boroughs of Berlin where the majority of the population are Turkish immigrants or recent descendants of Turkish immigrants. Turkish interpreters are thus a dime a dozen, and local government offices generally have people able to conduct business in Turkish.

Nevertheless, Germany's official language is German, and Turkish immigrants and Turkish Germans are heavily encouraged to take German classes so they can communicate effectively in the common language of the society. Because if you want to plant your roots in a society, that's what you should do. It makes things a hell of a lot easier for everyone involved, including you.

But like I said above, Germany recognizes its large population of non-German speakers and takes steps to accommodate them. Nobody just throws Turks to the wolves.

edited 6th Feb '14 1:34:21 PM by somerandomdude

Personally, I think the hospital should be held liable for translating the DNR, provided they had a reasonable amount of time to do so, regardless of whether there is an "official" language in place or not. The cost would be a drop in the bucket for a hospital, which is used to providing services that cost millions of dollars.

Again, You Keep Using That Word. That's not malpractice, but you keep trying to fit a square word into a round hole.

And here's a perfect example of why you can't use "the way it is" to define "the way it ought to be".

In American law, every citizen is assumed to understand every law on the books, from the federal, state, municipal, county, and local levels. However, this is functionally impossible. The entire reason the Fifth Amendment of our Constitution exists is because it's functionally impossible, and thus the state has to provide legal counsel for everyone in order to interpret and argue on their behalf.

If we simply stopped with "the way it is", then every single citizen would be on their own when it came to figuring out the hundreds of thousands of statues that make up US Law (as well as how those laws interact with international laws). But, we don't...precisely BECAUSE the need for basic rights takes priority over "the way it is".

I'm currently looking it up to see if non-English speakers are culpable if they sign a contract in a language they don't understand that wasn't sufficiently explained.

This happens all the time in emergency care. Especially when you have patients who are delirious or are unable to effectively communicate for any number of reasons. Hell, they wouldn't even be able to do their job effectively if it was a necessity that a patient be clearly understood before being worked on. Again, though, as I'm unfamiliar with actual practice, I'll need to look up what the actual procedure and legal precedent is.

Yes, but the government still provides the means for businesses to meet this standards. If I'm not mistaken, the Small Business Association, in particular, has a number of loans and grants that it provides to businesses that do so.

edited 6th Feb '14 1:41:38 PM by KingZeal

This provides an interesting counterargument, then: [1]

ignorance is no excuse

edited 6th Feb '14 2:07:50 PM by indiana404