Maybe because some American citizens were raised with Spanish as a first language, o un solo idioma. Tú quieres a hacer deficíle por a ellos conducen.*
*or a sole language. You want to make it harder for those folks to drive?
Also all errors with Spanish serve to reinforce my point.
Fuck me running I mean they would be.
The translations are already done, and I’m assuning the driver’s test is some kind of multiple-choice dealie with an answer key blind to language, so how would cutting this save money?
Yes, my dad was one such. But he believed that it was the correct thing to do to require citizens to learn English, and he did not favor things like driving tests in Spanish.
And I agree.
I’d be fine with simply saying we’re not going to spend any more money on the idea on providing multi-lingual tests. If it doesn’t cost anything to continue using what’s already been created, that’s fine.
Because the ability to speak English (beyond, maybe, “Stop” and “Yield”) is totally unrelated to the ability to drive. Although requiring residents to learn English may be a laudable goal - I generally side with the left on immigration issues, but I’m all for the protection of English as the de facto official national (and/or state) language - restricting their rights based on their failure to do so is not.
I agree that licensing exams may be printed solely in English to the extent that traffic control devices are - that is, licensees should be able to read “Stop”, “Road Work Ahead”, “Yield to Pedestrians”, and so on - but no more than that. After all, the 14.5% of Alabamans who lack basic literacy skills in any language don’t seem to be legislated against.
“Tu quieres hacer conducir dificil para ellos” 
Is there a ballpark figure on how much that is?
And “Left Lane Exit Only,” and “Delays Continue to Exit 60,” and so on. I don’t think it’s trivial.
And where do we draw the line, then? Spanish tests, Vietnamese tests… Tamazight tests? Hozo tests? There are about 3,000 Hozo speakers in the world, but their claim is identical to the Spanish speaker: you don’t need to know anything beyond basic road sign-English to drive, so why should I have to take a test in English?
What criteria would you use to determine who gets native-language tests created at government expense, and who has to wing it?
That’s a really good question, and I don’t have any idea. I know what my wife makes as a translator, though – she does English-to-Spanish translation every month for a national magazine’s Spanish-language edition – and it’s not peanuts.
But I don’t know what the dollar figure is here.
Oh, eta: we can also add in Mrs. Bricker as a native Spanish speaker opposed to Spanish language driving tests in this country.
Its pretty hard to live and work in some many parts of this country without a drivers license. While I certainly agree that non-English speakers should be encouraged and given assistance to learn English, they’re not going to learn it right away, and many of them can’t afford to not work for the amount of time it takes to learn a new tongue.
My gf’s mother is a Vietnamese immigrant living in FL (which is a particularly crummy place to live without a car due to poor mass transit, lots of sprawl and the temperature makes it difficult to walk/bike during much of the year) and was raising two kids with no spouse and no english language skills when she first got here. She and her brothers managed to get a used car they could share to go to work every morning. Had they not been able to get licensed, I suspect the end result would’ve been either there driving illegally without a license or her having to stay on public assistance, neither of which seems particularly preferable to simply providing language assistance at the DMV.
I don’t think there’s anything unreasonable about limiting the languages offered based on demand. Let’s say that any language spoken as a first language by more than 0.5% of the state’s population should get its own licensing test. It’s not as though the state hasn’t already dealt with that issue - it currently offers licensing exams in 11 languages, although its official language has been English since 2001.
Truly minor languages like Hozo are not relevant; no Hozo speaker could reasonably expect to arrive in Alabama and be able to read documents written in his primary language.
Very valid point.
See, this framing of the issue really irritates me.
I agree with the point raised by your first paragraph, and with the point offered by Simplicio above. And it may be that your phrasing wasn’t intended to carry this connotation: no Hozo speaker could reasonably expect to arrive in Alabama and be able to read documents written in his primary language. Of course not – and neither could a Spanish or Vietnamese speaker. If we provide tests in other languages, we do so as a courtesy, not as an obligation to meet a reasonable expectation.
It’s a tiny point, perhaps, but I think it shifts the discussion in the correct way: it makes sense for the officially English-speaking state to offer tests on other languages for the benefits the state will derive, NOT because it’s a duty owed to the non-English speakers wishing to be licensed.
Its not a duty, its a courtesy, a gesture to the common humanity. If translating a driver’s test into Basque required sending a squadron of Marines on a dangerous mission, I wouldn’t be for it. But if its only a matter of asking someone fluent in both languages to translate the test, then its such a trivial matter that to refuse would be churlish and insulting.
The drivel about the expense of such translations is just that, drivel. Prejudice and discrimination have become socially unacceptable, so now bigotry must dress itself up in better clothes, now he must pretend to be fiscally responsible, hoping to lull our better instincts with horseshit while simultaneously appealing to the worst of us. And a man who appeals to the worst in us is not worthy to lead a Boy Scout troop, much less an American state.
How many immigrants really fail to obtain at least a basic functionality in English within a small number of years, anyway? Maybe the ones smuggled in to work 24/7 in sweatshops, who never get exposed, but they’re not out driving anyway.
There’s no need for a legal requirement to learn English, ISTM. It happens anyway. Total immersion is the most effective way to learn any language, I understand.
I’m really glad to hear this. It’s about time we got the religious people to fight with each other. Let them argue about faith vs deeds, the correct numbering of the 10 Commandments, what day is the sabbath, what meat is OK to eat, where The Garden of Eden was, and what to wear on your head.
Illegals take all kinds of jobs. Up north you see a lot of what may be illegals on construction crews. The contractors say they have to do it to make money due to the competitive bidding process.
If picking crops paid a living wage, Americans would be lined up for those jobs. The fact is they can get away with paying extremely low wages by using illegals. There is no job that an American would not do if it paid well enough.
While you may look at a translator’s fee and consider it a considerable amount of money, you have to look at it from the government’s standpoint.
First, a driver’s test isn’t War and Peace. We’re not looking at paying someone for very many words.
Second, how often does it need to be done? Not very - things like driver’s tests tend to remain the same from year to year.
So, a very small job, eleven (or however many) translators, probably done back in 1970 or something…
Chump change.
I work for a transportation authority. Anything under $100K isn’t even worth board approval. Anything under $25K (and this is where translation services fall - transportation authorities use these quite a bit) isn’t even worth a formal procurement. Get a few quotes, hire someone.
If someone is running for governor, they need to pinpoint something that uses a lot more money than translation services for me to notice. Like, say, transportation issues, maybe? I live in Texas. The Texas DoT mislaid $2 BILLION a few years ago. That’s much more likely to get my attention than how much we paid to have a document translated years ago.
For what it’s worth, I believe in gradual assimilation. That, for example, we don’t care if the custom in Bumfukistan was for the fathers of the couple to arrange marriages and give or withhold consent to them so long as they live with the force of law, that’s not how we do it. Included in that is that the lingua franca of America is American English, and you should learn it.
But by the same token, we don’t withhold rights and privileges based on how well they’ve assimilated. The 70-year-old mother of (half of) an immigrant couple, not very fluent in English and here only a month, who was witness to a crime, does not get assaulted by prosecutor and defense lawyer and expected to understand and answer them in her halting English; she gets a translator provided by the court. The team of green-card workers who prefer to speak Spanish among themselves and English only to the boss and the client’s people, don’t (or shouldn’t) get condemned for that. I was reading a story about a family of fairly well-to-do Mexican horse ranchers (bred, trained, and sold them) who sold off their holdings and immigrated to start up the same sort of business in America, where it would support them) – the parents were aghast that their daughter, invited to a beach party by nice kids, wanted a bikini, which to them was tantamount to dressing her in a red leather microskirt and a blouse with her normal charges printed on it.
The kids will assimilate. The young and middle aged adults will assimilate a bit more slowly. The old will retain a lot of their ‘homeland’ customs, which the younger people will keep as ‘heritage’, and eventually die off.
You don’t demand that every immigrant family immediately adopt NASCAR and pig pickin’, rodeo and hunting, playing golf and watching the Super Bowl, and in general become clones of every other American. That’s not what we’re made up of, it’s not a part of our national heritage.
And to demand it is a lot of chutzpah, of gettin’ a mite above yourself, of thinkin’
that someone died and left you boss – all of whch are, you’ll note, good old Americanisms we adopted from the melting pot.