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<h1 class="gmail-title" id="gmail-page-title">Lack of Language Access Is a Nationwide Crisis </h1> <div class="gmail-tabs"></div> <div class="gmail-region gmail-region-content">
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<span class="gmail-submitted-by">Posted Monday, February 19, 2018 - 1:30 pm</span><div class="gmail-field gmail-field-name-field-cat gmail-field-type-taxonomy-term-reference gmail-field-label-hidden"><div class="gmail-field-items"><div class="gmail-field-item even"><a href="https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/news-features">News & Features</a></div></div></div><div class="gmail-field gmail-field-name-field-author gmail-field-type-text gmail-field-label-hidden"><div class="gmail-field-items"><div class="gmail-field-item even">Angelo Franco</div></div></div><div class="gmail-field gmail-field-name-field-image gmail-field-type-image gmail-field-label-hidden"><div class="gmail-field-items"><div class="gmail-field-item even" rel="og:image rdfs:seeAlso"><img src="https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/field/image/1interpret.jpg?itok=nsrm5HR6" alt="" width="480" height="319"></div></div></div><div class="gmail-field gmail-field-name-body gmail-field-type-text-with-summary gmail-field-label-hidden"><div class="gmail-field-items"><div class="gmail-field-item even"><p> </p>
<p>In <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/25/nyregion/police-tackle-language-barrier-in-domestic-abuse-cases.html">August</a> 2012,
Arlet Macareno lay in a heap at the bottom of the stairs of her
apartment building in Staten Island. That is where her niece found her
and called 911. Arlet tried to tell the responding officers that her
husband had pushed her down, that she was in danger and she needed help.
“I need someone to translate,” Arlet said in her frantic, native
Spanish. The police decided to use her 22-year-old niece as an
unofficial interpreter, which resulted in Arlet being arrested and taken
to the precinct, bruised and barefoot. “Cállate la boca (shut your
mouth),” the officers responded in broken Spanish when she tried to
protest.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Arlet spent the night in jail and, desperate to return to her
7-year-old son, pleaded guilty to a charge of disorderly conduct. She
went home to her son and her abusive husband, whom the police had told
to go back to sleep the night before when they arrested Arlet.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>The NYPD is the <a href="https://www1.nyc.gov/site/nypd/about/about-nypd/about-nypd-landing.page">largest</a> police force in the nation with over 36,000 officers and 18,000 civilian employees. Among its ranks, some <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2014/02/19/us/new-york-domestic-killing-warnings/">19,000</a>
officers speak as many as 70 languages other than English. But in a
polyglot city like New York with a gargantuan population of 8.5 million
people, that may not be enough. <a href="https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/ochia/downloads/pdf/City%20Planning_OCHIA_Population_Trends_0614.pdf">According</a>
to the Census Bureau, there are as many as 1.8 million Limited English
Proficient (LEP) persons in New York City alone – that is almost 1 in
every 4 persons that can’t communicate in English proficiently (and more
than half the entire population speaks a language other than English at
home). In order to better serve this growing population, then-mayor
Michael Bloomberg <a href="http://www.nyc.gov/html/om/pdf/2008/pr282-08_eo_120.pdf">expanded </a>the city’s language access policy in 2008. By 2009, when the Language Access Plan was <a href="http://www.nyc.gov/html/nypd/downloads/pdf/public_information/lap_June_2012.pdf">published</a>
(since revised and updated), the city was, by law, requiring officers
who respond to a scene where interpretation services are needed to find
and provide them.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>It was only since June of 2012, just months before Arlet’s incident,
that New York City had implemented Language Line services, supplying
city officials and police officers with 24/7 access to telephonic
interpretation when responding to calls that require them.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>New York is not the only American city grappling with insufficient
access to language services and interpreters. It’s a nationwide crisis
that underscores an urgent need for more professional interpreters and
translators to assist the growing immigrant population that are limited
English proficient. In some California counties, the shortage of
qualified interpreters is so <a href="https://www.sfchronicle.com/health/article/Medical-interpreters-in-short-supply-as-health-6225291.php?t=184e8b303b7d4f3860&cmpid=email-premium#photo-7875050">severe</a> it may violate constitutional law.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>In Santa Clara County in the Bay Area, interpreters are concerned
that the lack of professional linguists is essentially creating a
two-tier justice system. LEP persons who do not have access to language
interpretation either keep getting their hearing delayed or cannot place
any official claims because there aren’t enough interpreters to help
them. California is one of the states that require interpreters to be
certified to interpret in court when assisting in official government
affairs, such as trials and hearings.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><img alt="" src="https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/sites/default/files/2interpret.jpg" style="height: 341px; width: 625px;"></p>
<p> </p>
<p>The California Federation of Interpreters says that Santa Clara
County needs at least seven certified interpreters working daily at the
county’s superior court. Most of the time, there are only five
interpreters darting from proffers to sentencing hearings attempting to
cover them all. Exhaustion prevents interpreters from effectively
translating for both parties, and rushing from courtroom to courtroom
causes delays which, in turn, cost the courts money and time. This lack
of language access is not only detrimental to law enforcement from a
victim’s point of view but from charged defendants as well, who can win
cases on appeal claiming they did not understand the case against them.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Meanwhile, even though federal and state laws mandate that all
patients who need a medical interpreter be provided with one, California
does not specifically spell out just how qualified a medical
interpreter needs to be. This specificity proves crucial when healthcare
providers are scurrying to supply patients with well-qualified
interpreters in order to comply with the law. The <a href="https://www.sfchronicle.com/health/article/Medical-interpreters-in-short-supply-as-health-6225291.php?t=184e8b303b7d4f3860&cmpid=email-premium#photo-7875050">issue</a>
of using non-certified interpreters becomes even more pronounced when
dealing with languages other than Spanish, the most widely spoken
language in California after English.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>There are approximately 8 million LEP people in the state of
California, according to the Census Bureau. Of these, more than half are
Spanish speakers which count with just under 600 certified medical
interpreters in the state – that’s about one interpreter for every 6,500
people. In contrast, there are nearly 300,000 Vietnamese speakers in
the Golden State. Qualified Vietnamese medical interpreters: nine. For
Tagalog speakers, the numbers are even more dismal; there is only one
certified medical interpreter for the whole LEP Filipino community,
which amounts to about 228,000. Because of this deficiency, healthcare
providers often resort to using uncertified interpreters to keep up with
the demand, which may result in mistranslations and misdiagnoses.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>In 2010, a <a href="http://www.pacificinterpreters.com/docs/resources/high-costs-of-language-barriers-in-malpractice_nhelp.pdf">report</a>
from UC Berkeley School of Public Health and National Health Law
Program examined 1,373 claims of malpractice in the state of California.
The study found that 35 of these cases, involving severe medical trauma
and death, were the direct result of poor medical interpreting. In one
case, a child who would later die from respiratory arrest provided her
own interpreting between the doctors and her parents. This problem was
more apparent with patients of Asian descent, as medical providers were
often unable to understand the need for the distinction between
Indo-Asian languages, such as Mandarin, Cantonese, and other Chinese
dialects, for example.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Also in 2010, the federal government <a href="http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-court-interpreter-20170905-story.html">began</a>
investigating the California court system after two Korean-speaking
women in Los Angeles alleged they were denied court interpreters. This,
as is the case with Santa Clara County, may have denied them their civil
rights, which prohibit discrimination based on national origin. As a
result, the state implemented its own language <a href="http://www.courts.ca.gov/documents/CLASP_report_060514.pdf">plan</a>—similar to New York City’s—in an attempt to provide interpreters to all non-English speakers who needed them in court affairs.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Legal aid lawyers <a href="http://documents.latimes.com/two-litigants-complained-l-courts-did-not-give-them-interpreters/">filed</a>
a complaint on behalf of the two Los Angeles women, one of whom was an
elderly sexual assault victim seeking a restraining order against her
abuser and the other was a single mother seeking child support. The Los
Angeles Superior Court denied them interpreters on the basis that the
court was not mandated to provide language interpretation for such cases
and, if they wished, the victims could provide their own interpreters
out of pocket or use a friend or a family member for this purpose. The
state of California had long provided interpreters for juvenile and
criminal cases, but only recently have the courts been mandated to
provide language solutions for civil cases as well. The Justice
Department and the Los Angeles County Superior Court reached an <a href="https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-and-los-angeles-county-superior-court-reach-agreement-ensure-access">agreement</a>
to provide accurate language assistance to all LEP persons as recently
as late 2016. Depending on the area, language needs vary; some require
common world languages such as a Farsi, Russian, American Sign, and
Arabic. But other areas demand rarer tongues, such as Malayalam, Hmong,
Mixteco, and even dialects of the Aleutian Islands. </p>
<p>
<img alt="" src="https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/sites/default/files/3interpret.jpg" style="height: 416px; width: 625px;"></p>
<p> </p>
<p>This expansion into offering less-common languages is not an isolated development. Just last summer, New York City began to <a href="https://medium.com/@NYCImmigrants/expanding-language-access-at-city-agencies-455f5d22d65b">require</a>
that all public agencies providing direct public and emergency services
translate all the documents they distribute into four additional
languages, bringing the total “most commonly used” languages in the city
to 10. The local government added Arabic, Urdu, French, and Polish to
the roster that had previously included—thanks to the 2008 language plan
mentioned above—Spanish, Chinese, Russian, Bengali, Haitian Creole, and
Korean. But implementation does not necessarily equate widespread
usage. Despite the training that government officials and police
officers must take on how and when to use these services available to
them, the language access plan remains underused, even when it involves
languages as common as Spanish.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>In May 2013, Deisy Garcia <a href="http://voiceless.nycitynewsservice.com/">filed</a>
a police report. An undocumented immigrant from Guatemala, Deisy wrote
on the report that she feared for hers and her two daughters’ lives
because her husband had threatened to kill her. The 21-year-old, who
didn’t speak English, wrote the report in Spanish. A few months later,
at the end of November, Deisy called 911 to report that her husband was
being violent and, once again, she filed a police report in Spanish.
Both police reports were not translated into English and so they were
never officially marked to be investigat<a name="_GoBack" id="gmail-_GoBack"></a>ed
or followed-up on. Less than two months later, Deisy’s husband was
caught in Texas trying to flee to Mexico after he stabbed and killed
Deisy and their two daughters. The children were 1 and 2 years old.
Following the incident, the police department sent out a staff memo
stating that all reports should be transcribed and translated to
guarantee that appropriate police services are provided.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>The U.S. Department of Justice concluded in a 2010 investigation into
the NYPD that the department was not fully in compliance with the Civil
Rights Act because of its poor track record providing language
solutions. Two years later, the Justice Department led a follow-up
investigation, <a href="https://ojp.gov/about/ocr/pdfs/NY-10-OCR-0015.pdf">determining</a>
in July of 2012 that the NYPD had taken significant steps to address
its language access issues and was now in substantial compliance with
civil right requirements. Three weeks later, Arlet’s husband would push
her down the stairs.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>Author Bio:</strong></p>
<p> </p>
<p><strong><em>Angelo Franco is</em> Highbrow Magazine’s <em>chief features writer.</em></strong></p></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div>
<br clear="all"><br>-- <br><div class="gmail_signature" data-smartmail="gmail_signature">=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+<br><br> Harold F. Schiffman<br><br>Professor Emeritus of <br> Dravidian Linguistics and Culture <br>Dept. of South Asia Studies <br>University of Pennsylvania<br>Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305<br><br>Phone: (215) 898-7475<br>Fax: (215) 573-2138 <br><br>Email: <a href="mailto:haroldfs@gmail.com" target="_blank">haroldfs@gmail.com</a><br><a href="http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/" target="_blank">http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/</a> <br><br>-------------------------------------------------</div>
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