- Twice the printing cost.
- If you have lived here long enough to be interested in (and eligible for) voting, you've lived here long enough to learn basic English and buy a dictionary.
- Voting citizens around here who don't speak English generally don't speak Spanish either. They speak Russian, mostly, as well as Arabic, Farsi, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Hmong, and a blizzard of Hindi dialects.
Sunday, November 05, 2006
I Want a freakin' Monolingual Ballot
I'm steeling myself to dive in and read the material and make my election decisions when the most annoying thing hits me: My sample ballot is hard to read and twice as big as it needs to be because half of it is in Spanish. I open the book and the first thing I see is Balota de Muestra followed by mounds of text my eye can't settle on because it's not in English. Sure, there's English in there too, but it's a freakin' pain and that's the least of what's wrong with it:
8 comments:
...Is this somehow less "racist" than providing the information in English only?
Amen.
But there's no reason why native speakers of Spanish should be singled out for this unnecessary and special treatment, to the exclusion of immigrants from India or the Ukraine or Southeast Asia. Is this somehow less "racist" than providing the information in English only?
Amen again.
I can understand the thinking behind translating the ballot pamphlet.
(oy! the cost of translation! oy! the expense of printing those translations!)
We need translations. We need simplifications, to be honest. My word, have you looked at the ballot questions and their explanations? You need far more than a basic understanding of English and a dictionary to understand what's going on.
Still, the Spanish (and only Spanish) translation nod to our more-comfortable-with-Spanish-than-English voters is a bit much. I can't even begin to guess how many "spoken at home" languages exist within a mile or two of here.
And the cost of producing that dual language pamphlet for everyone whether they need help with Spanish or don't and need help with Hmong or Tagalog? Gack.
Seems to me my absentee ballot came with a [check here] if you want an absentee ballot in a different language. Surely the Registrar's database could be tweaked to track voter requests for voter pamphlets in a given language. It already tracks my request to always get an absentee ballot.
Speaking of which, my absentee ballot was so frickin' thick it was unbelievable. Five (or was it six?) PAGES of ballot.
San Francisco is cool enough to pay for the return postage for absentee ballots instead of, like other counties, having to plead with the USPO not to return absentee ballots to voters who accidentally mailed their ballots in with insufficient postage.
All right, but I was in the drugstore today and saw a product for my labios. WHAT? Oh, right. It means lips in Spanish. Lipsticks and stuff. I'm still laffing.
track voter requests for voter pamphlets in a given language
I should think that misunderstanding a bad Vietnamese translation would be a worse problem than misunderstanding the original English.
Can we have bilabio ballots? Gets my vote!
There are a *ton* more Hispanophones than Vietnamesophones. Don't be a prick. Z.
Statewide, yes. But not around here. Most of the non-Anglophone kids in my wife's school speak Russian. How do their parents vote? Spanish as THE second language is a holdover from a former day.
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