Language in the News
ARE WE LOSING IT?
By José de la Isla
Hispanic Link News Service
HOUSTON — In 2006, the last best chance to pass a reasonable immigration reform bill failed in the Senate because of, frankly, mostly Republican opposition. It was a moderate proposal compared to the draconian Sensenbrenner bill passed in the House that year.
“The anti-immigration wedge issue,” wrote Frank Sharry of the immigration reform group America’s Voice “failed spectacularly” to materialize in 2006 with many militant proponents failing to win re-election. In 2008, America's Voice found, candidates who advocated comprehensive immigration reform again won over hardliners in 20 of 22 competitive congressional races.
The political battle was won, but not the legislative one. Reformers didn’t reform and the opposition Dracula didn’t stay dead. The U.S. Senate’s 60-percent bill-passing hurdle, fueling hysteria and discontent, is as much a cause of the problem as are the undocumented.
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Add a Second Language (and Value) to Your Website
By Sandra McNally
To some businesses, it is an emerging trend, to others a commercial necessity – whatever “language” you attach to it, the growing market for Spanish-speaking websites cannot be denied.
Statistics show an estimated 10 million U.S. Hispanics are online, a number that is expected to grow by double digits annually for the next several years. Eye-opening data indeed, but those figures should come as no surprise since according to the US Census Bureau an estimated 40 million native Spanish speaking individuals currently live in this country, a figure that is expected to increase to 50 million by the year 2010.
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More Than Just Spanish Speakers: Language Report Details the Many Faces of Immigration
MONTEREY, Calif., June 29 /PRNewswire/ -- The debate over Arizona's new immigration law, SB 1070, continues to boil and create worry for Spanish-speaking residents who have been the focus of the bill. At the same time, a new report from Language Line Services revealing a surge in demand for interpretation for the more than 170 different languages currently spoken in the United States gives insight into the difficulty of relying on "reasonable suspicion" to question and detain possible undocumented immigrants.
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California Mandates Mortgage Document Translations
Beginning January 1, non-English speakers in California will have their consumer rights protected by a new state statute. The law stipulates that if a loan or extension of credit secured by real property is negotiated in Spanish, Chinese, Tagalog, Vietnamese, or Korean, the borrower must be given a translation of the key terms in the contract.
