Last week we saw a video in class that discussed literacy and the difficulties that people encountered due to limited English skills, literacy, complexity of the language to name a few.
I can really relate to the health literacy video. In my previous job, I did home visits to interview teens that were interested in having a mentor. Many of the teens I visited were Hispanic and their parents at times had very limited English. As I got to know these families and they began asking me for help to translate paperwork, bills, filling out housing applications, school forms that although were in spanish, were too complicated and hard to digest.
A lot of the time, I was not sure what some of the forms were asking for, the language was complicated and the terminology was not explained clearly. I know its important to cover all your basis when it comes to liability issues,getting consent forms, signing waivers, but at what cost? who is it really for? should there be the complicated paperwork and then the cliff note version attached for the reader?
I think we need to be creative on how we present information and keep reminding ourselves that we have an obligation to inform the public and make sure our message is not only thorough, but clearly understood.
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1 comment:
As a government worker, I currently work with disability claims, reviewing medical records and forms filled out by those claiming they are disabled. Although sometimes Spanish language interpreters are provided, this is not always the case. For instance, some claims are decided on how a person goes about her daily activities: does this person lack the motivation to do anything but sleep, can they not concentrate, on and on. In this particular example, these forms are not offered in Spanish, not to mention other, less frequently spoken languages like Farsi or Russian or even Senegalese. Speakers of these languages are at a disadvantage because they cannot elaborate as much as English speakers, and sometimes they might not even know what a question is asking. There is a flip side to this in that sometimes it is an advantage to not speak English because we determine that these people are less able to find work because and thus disabled. Some of my co-workers resent this. Yet what I find that the system in its entirety is not "fair"; it's just that non-English speakers are an easy target for this resentment. I have tried to tell one friend this, that the system is not "fair," and in reality the non-English speaker is indeed less capable of finding work. So bottomline: Although these people are disadvantaged, they are still resented. I think this is just because they are more visible.
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