2/02/01 3:00 p.m.
Highway to Havoc
DOT demands multilingual road signs and driver’s tests.

By Jim Boulet Jr., executive director, English First

hose little adventures which enliven your morning commute, like a near-miss at an intersection, may become far more common thanks to yet another of Bill Clinton's midnight regulations.

It is now the official policy of the U.S. government that requiring any prospective driver to understand English is discrimination, thanks to an astounding document entitled "DOT Guidance to Recipients on Special Language Services to Limited English Proficient (LEP) Beneficiaries."

This document declares that "transportation is considered an essential service to participation in modern society." For this reason, the U.S. Department of Transportation has declared that all persons who speak little or no English must "have a meaningful opportunity to participate in and access programs, services and benefits to the same extent as fully English proficient persons." This includes driver's licenses as well as anything which affects public transportation including buses, subway systems and trains.

The DOT document, which has the impact of an official regulation, explicitly states that the agency "will not specify numerical or percentage thresholds for LEP populations that need to be served." In fact, "[p]rograms and activities that affect a few or even one LEP person are subject" to this rule.

Not even one actual human being is required to trigger this new mandate: "Note that the population includes those who may potentially be served by the recipient [of federal transportation funds], rather than just those who are presently being served " (emphasis added). This population includes those unable to read in any language and those whose tongue has no written form whatsoever.

What will this new policy mean in practice? The DOT points with pride to New Jersey's policy of giving driver's license tests in over 14 languages including French, Greek, Korean, Portuguese, and Turkish. Wisconsin's "Knowledge and Highway Sign Tests" in 13 languages besides English earns praise as well.

Consider the computerized signs seen on many city highways, which are intended to provide brief messages as cars and trucks speed by on crowded roads. The DOT Guidance document actually suggests that such signs may discriminate against those who cannot read English and encourages changes:

Signage along highways presents a very difficult LEP topic, due to the large number of signs, the cost of changing them, and limitations on space on the sign. …DOT recommends…the possibility of either using pictorial or symbol messages or translating messages into frequently encountered languages on variable message signs that report dangerous driving conditions.

This is actually being attempted in Great Britain and the results are not encouraging. The Guardian reported on December 5th that the proposed English/Welsh Variable Message Signs might actually cause additional carnage:

Tests at Leeds with a tachistoscope — an instrument for measuring how much the eye can absorb in very small units of time — suggest drivers could delay potentially fatally while distinguishing between the two [languages].

Since over 300 languages are spoken within America's borders, the potential for fatal accidents would be far greater.

A government mandate so manifestly inane begs the question: who benefits? Not the immigrants, who certainly do not welcome more dangerous roads, but those who claim to represent those immigrants.

Consider the DOT's definition of "comprehensive outreach" which includes the "[u]se of ethnic media, such as radio, television, newspapers, magazines and websites." Such government-mandated ads are a cash cow for any self-appointed organization that can Xerox a four-page newsletter.

Those who claim to represent the interests of non-English-speakers may also benefit from "an established, formal linkage between a minority community-based organization and a transportation provider or infrastructure entity…which specifies in detail the roles and resources that each entity will bring to the project."

This radical document makes one sensible point: the translations it requires may be neither readable nor accurate:

DOT's National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has found that direct translation of safety pamphlets and brochures… into a non-English language often results in an inferior or inappropriate product due to the many dialects and linguistic styles of foreign languages.

The government suggests "involving the target community in review of the final brochure or product [to] eliminate inappropriate word choice." It turns out the potential for inadvertent hilarity is greater than they think. The opinion of the federal judge who ruled against Alabama's policy of English-only driver's tests provoked some giggles in Puerto Rico, according to an e-mail I received:

A quick read of the original NR article (" Judicial Activism on Trial") caught my eye at the point where the Alabama judge tries to explain the differences between pito and bocina. Interestingly, pito (whistle) in some places in Latin America is also jargon for the male anatomy.

In light of translation issues of this sort, feminists could wind up suing the Department of Transportation for promoting a hostile working environment at your local DMV.