Translating the English-Only Bill

First of all, this is what would not change: the names Los Angeles, El Monte, La Puente or La Verne; Italian opera lyrics performed at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion; the E pluribus unum stamped onto the spare change collected along skid row.

Last week’s vote by the House of Representatives to declare English the official language of the United States was predominantly a symbolic act--its effects largely uncertain even to those who translate legislation. Even if the Senate decides to affirm English in the months ahead, it seems that life in Los Angeles would most likely continue on multilingually.

Immigrant children in Los Angeles public schools would still go home to hear their parents speak Amharic, Marshallese, Urdu, Sinhalese, Ibo, Gujarati, Assyrian, Afrikaans, Khmu and 70-plus other languages.

Sidewalk chatter would continue unabated in Ukrainian and Cambodian, Arabic and Spanish, Armenian and Tagalog. Signs along Wilshire Boulevard would continue to advertise in Korean. The city telephone book would still be full of people with last names such as Sanchez, Sarfatti, Hirai and Desormeauxom, some of whom might not speak a word of America’s new official tongue.

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The federal government’s use of foreign languages would change, however, and immigrant rights activists say the impacts would range from the trivial to the profound.

A small percentage of government documents are published in languages other than English. The law would scrap most of them.

That means no more “Los Aventuras de Carmelo,” a Spanish language comic book prepared by the Selective Service System to inform Latino teenagers that they must register for the draft. No more U.S. Postal Service brochures aimed at helping the English-deficient buy stamps. No more tax forms in Spanish.

Actually, the Internal Revenue Service has already discontinued its bilingual forms. Back in 1994, the IRS sent out half a million Spanish forms in Southern California and Florida but received back fewer than 1,000. The low return rate resulted in costs exceeding $150 per form, prompting officials to stick to English.

At the Social Security Administration, dozens of forms do go out in languages other than English. The California office publishes a fact sheet on the Supplemental Security Income program in Armenian, Cambodian, Chinese, Persian, Hmong, Japanese, Korean, Lao, Russian, Tagalog and Vietnamese. The agency says the forms are a quick way of explaining the intricacies of government programs to non-English speakers.

“It’s hard to explain how our government works,” said Mariann Gitomer, a bilingual staffer in the Social Security Administration’s Los Angeles office. “People are sometimes confused even if you give them explanations in their own language. Can you imagine explaining government benefits to someone in a language they don’t understand?”

Local congressional offices might also have to alter the way they do business. Rep. Xavier Becerra (D-Los Angeles) might have to stop notifying constituents at the bottom of his newsletter that the information is available in Spanish: “Si desea esta informacion en espanol, por favor llame al (213) 550-8962.”

Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles), who sends out entire newsletters in Spanish, said she will continue to mail them to Latinos in her district no matter what the law says.

Most alarming to critics is a provision that would repeal the federal requirement for bilingual ballots in areas with significant immigrant populations.

Los Angeles County could choose to voluntarily continue publishing supplementary election materials in foreign languages--which 27,304 voters requested in the last election. But if officials opted not to do so, those long-winded ballot propositions that are difficult for many English speakers to understand would no longer be translated into Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese or Tagalog.

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Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham (R-San Diego), the sponsor of the bill, is not alarmed by any of this. Every time the federal government publishes a document in a foreign language, he says, it is merely discouraging more immigrants from learning English.

“I look across this nation and there are 320 languages . . . and 1,000 dialects,” he said. “I want them to speak those languages at home. This bill does not prohibit that. What the bill does--it says that the official language of the government, of the federal government, shall be English.”

Cunningham agreed to numerous exemptions to the bill so it would not get in the way of essential government functions. Foreign embassies could continue their work unaffected by the English-as-the-official-language declaration. The bill only applies to written, not oral, communication. And the bill explicitly allows occasional foreign words or phrases such as quid pro quo or fait accompli, which government bureaucrats seem to thrive on.

Becerra, who vehemently opposes the legislation, acknowledges that declaring English the official language is primarily a symbolic act and will probably not wreak havoc on the lives of too many Angelenos. But every once in a while, he said, it might cause an English-deficient person to be pushed aside by his or her government.

“In any language,” he said, “that’s wrong.”