According to a recent online article, thousands of Arabic-speaking Californian voters will need their ballots translated before they are able to cast a truly informed vote.
The article blames the lack of Arabic translation on Trump’s government, who it claims has failed to provide foreign-language speaking voters with the language services they need in order to understand for whom and what they are voting.
US government officials use population data, collected in the form of a census, to dictate which limited English-language proficient communities may require additional language services for voting such as, translation services or translated ballots.
However, it is claimed that much of the census data is flawed as it does not sufficiently capture immigrant populations and erases historically marginalised communities such as, people of colour.
In Fresno County, California, there is an Arabic-speaking community (led by an advocacy coalition) who have bought the ballot translation issue to the attention of Secretary of State Alex Padilla. It is his office which holds authority under state law to provide language services for foreign-speaking people from the Middle East and Africa.
Unfortunately, Padilla failed to help with the requested translations for foreign-language voters, meaning the Arabic-speaking community have once again been marginalized.
The Fresno County coalition group conducted their own survey regarding the language requirements of their community and found some startling results:
• The Arabic-speaking population in Fresno County is thought to be 6000 – 10000 people
• At least half of these are believed to have limited English-speaking proficiency
• The federal government data suggests that fewer than 1500 Arabic-speakers have limited English-language proficiency
It is believed that one of the reasons for the dispute regarding the numbers of Arabic-speakers is due to the fact that the government census counts the Middle Eastern population as ‘white’ and survey respondents must list Arabic as their first language in order for it to be recognized in the data.
There are numerous Arabic-speaking communities throughout the US with many of them descended from migrants that arrived as early as the 1940s and 1950s from Yemeni. More recently, Arabic-speaking people have arrived from Iraq, Egypt, Palestine, Jordan and Syria.
Unfortunately, there are many issues that affect Arabic-speaking communities within the US.
For example, language difficulties and inadequate translations from English to Arabic can affect students at school, rural community groups due to a lack of comprehension regarding environmental issues, and immigration policies resulting in the Muslim ban and family separations at border control.
A multilingual ballot, which offers language translations for minority groups should be the norm in today’s diverse, highly-technological world and would empower people to have their say regarding those that govern them.
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