Friday, August 02, 2002
Vietnamese Ballots: Translation Errors Abound
The Houston Chronicle reported that ballots in Houston, TX must now include Vietnamese. Three California counties -- Los Angeles, Orange and Santa Clara -- must do likewise.
Will this help people? Opponents of official English believe so: "Information pamphlets written in Vietnamese save time and confusion. It seems logical. It seems necessary to our greater sense of community and national identity."
Yet there have been published reports of erroneous Vietnamese translations in California during the 2002 March primary election:
The job title for the district attorney became “hamlet prosecutor,” and the county clerk-recorder was described as “office secretary” in the information mailed to 25,000 voters by the county registrar. “They translated some things very, very wrong,” Chuyen Van Nguyen, of the Vietnamese American Voters Coalition of Orange County, told the Associated Press. “These kind of sloppy translations have happened in prior years, too.”
Those of us who don’t speak Vietnamese will have to take his word for it. And that is precisely the problem. . . .
When the ballot and other election materials are translated into foreign languages, the integrity is compromised. Some languages, including Vietnamese, do not have exact equivalents of English words, so a precise translation is impossible. Thus, after a judge determines exactly how a candidate must be described or how a proposition must be worded in English, translators with no accountability to the public can change the descriptions on the foreign-language versions.
In addition, the Vietnamese sample ballot was allegedly unreadable: "sample ballots contained information about casting absentee votes that was virtually impossible to read, because it was filled with vowels and accent marks that don't exist in Vietnamese."
There is even a study of the perils of Vietnamese/English translation on the Internet which suggests these translation problems are unavoidable.
|posted by Jim on 6:48 PM|
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