Category Archives: Derechos lingüísticos

by monzo

From Principles to Practice: Language Rights of Deaf Professionals

Wyatte C. Hall, Bill Millios, Kelby Brick

The past 50 years has seen American Sign Language (ASL) interpreting in the United States shift from community-based development (Deaf clubs, churches, and family members) to formal education, training, and professional standards. As this professionalization progressed, the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act was an inflection point that created legal requirements for interpreters in a wide variety of everyday settings. This enabled more access to advanced education and professional opportunities for Deaf people. Organic growth and demand has led to over 140 interpreter education programs in the United States. The rapid increase of Deaf professionals in advanced fields, however, outpaces development and typical ASL interpreter qualifications. As institutions experience an influx of Deaf professionals in various academic, corporate, and clinical roles, they are often left without guidelines and practices tailored to Deaf professional work that will enable quality access in these high-stakes environments. One such institution with a large concentration of Deaf professionals is the University of Rochester Medical Center. In response to this, an effort to restructure Deaf professional interpreting services under its Office of Equity & Inclusion with a centralized budget for institution-wide access needs was undertaken. This restructuring included surveys, interviews, and focus groups with a wide variety of individuals that use, provide, and oversee interpreting services. A list of 10 foundational principles to provide high-quality access within a Deaf-centered language equity framework emerged from this stakeholder-driven process. Through these Principles, adverse and affirming practices were identified and some historically-viewed “best practices” were discovered to have adverse effects. Instead of practice driving principles, principles must drive practice. This work demonstrates that a committed institution can uplift marginalized language minority communities as fully-included members of diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. We will share the principles, and discuss their application in various professional environments with Deaf people around the world.

by monzo

Are language rights a component of a fair trial under French criminal procedure?

Agata de Laforcade

Academic Director, Department of Law, Languages and Intercultural Challenges at ISIT

After the transposition of Directive 2010/64/EU on the right to interpretation and translation in criminal proceedings, the preliminary article of the French Code of Criminal Procedure containing the most important principles in this area provides that if the suspect or accused does not understand the French language, he or she is entitled to be assisted by an interpreter during any questioning, hearing or interviews forming part of the proceedings, as well as during interviews with his or her lawyer. He or she is also entitled to receive a translation of the documents essential for exercising his or her defense and for guaranteeing a fair trial. Legal enshrinement of language rights during criminal proceedings in the preliminary article was an important step and highly symbolic, but does it mean that language rights are considered today as a real component of the right to a fair trial? The answer to this question is not obvious. This presentation will set out the arguments in favor of considering language rights as a component of a fair trial, and well as some arguments that cast doubt upon the fundamental value of language rights in French criminal proceedings.

Keywords: fair trail, language rights, criminal proceedings

by monzo

S1.1 La traducción y la interpretación en el reconocimiento del derecho a la lengua de signos española: revisión de políticas lingüísticas

María Luz Esteban Saiz, Saúl Villameriel García, Eva Aroca Fernández, Mónica Rodríguez Varela

En las últimas décadas se está dando una progresiva normalización sociolingüística de la lengua de signos española (LSE) que se extiende también al ámbito de la traducción e interpretación. No obstante, las relaciones entre lenguas y culturas respecto a los procesos de traducción e interpretación de la LSE, en cuanto que lengua minoritaria y minorizada, siguen siendo asimétricas. Así, aunque la capacitación y la acreditación de traductores e intérpretes de LSE han ido evolucionando hasta llegar a la universidad, esta formación resulta insuficiente para cubrir la creciente demanda de profesionales competentes en proporción a las exigencias actuales tanto de la comunidad lingüística signante como de la población en general. 

Esta realidad da lugar a una situación especialmente vulnerable para las personas sordas y sordociegas signantes que, como minoría lingüística y cultural, no ven atendidas sus necesidades de traducción e interpretación de la LSE. Esta comunicación pretende, por tanto, ofrecer una panorámica general sobre la formación de las y los profesionales de traducción e interpretación de la LSE que, por un lado, llame la atención sobre la carencia de planes de estudios al respecto y, por otro, apunte a la necesidad de promover políticas lingüísticas encaminadas al incremento de programas de formación de traductores e intérpretes de LSE. Todo ello con el fin de garantizar el derecho de las personas sordas y sordociegas a usar la LSE en cualquier dominio público o privado.

Palabras clave: derechos lingüísticos, políticas lingüísticas, traducción e interpretación, lengua de signos española, ideologías lingüísticas

by monzo

A Right to Language in Education and the Challenges of Distance Education

Adrien Habermacher

Professor of Law

Panel: Linguistic equality and justice in the face federal diversity: A Canadian perspective

Chair: Karine McLaren

The Canadian constitutional framework entrenches the right of official language minorities to receive school instruction in their own language. This specific right often lays at the core of language minorities’ legal battles against governments, for instance in relation to the level of funding provided by government for such services, the quality of the programs and the facilities, as well as the extent to which the official language community is able to manage and control such services. Moreover, it has long been recognized that a mere translation of the curriculum offered in another language in the majority’s education system may not be adequate as the instruction provided must reflect the values and culture of the language community in question.
Against this backdrop, we have recently witnessed the generalization of distance learning at all education level during the COVID-19 pandemic. While recourse to such methods was temporary, it inevitably leads to questions regarding the possibility that government may try to fulfil their legal requirements to provide educational services to official language minorities by way of distance education programs. This may come across as a tempting alternative to allocating significant financial resources to operating dedicated facilities, especially for governments less favorable to language minorities and in regions where the numbers of right-holders are low.
This paper explores the pitfalls and benefits of this option from the point of view of language (in)justice beyond the specifically Canadian legal framework. It questions the importance of environments, physical or virtual, in the implementation of language rights to education. Building on insights from the fields of socio-linguistic, education, and law, it also considers the intersection of socio-economic and language minority status.

by monzo

The concept of linguistic equality in Canadian constitutional law: cutting the Gordian knot between Quebec’s Bill 101 and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms

Érik Labelle Eastaugh

Panel: Linguistic equality and justice in the face federal diversity: A Canadian perspective

Chair: Karine McLaren

Since 1969, Canada has adopted an array of legal measures aiming to address various inequalities between Anglophones and Francophones.  These measures have been adopted by a range of actors in a variety of different contexts, giving rise to apparent inconsistencies or conflicts between them.  The most widely remarked-upon of these apparent conflicts have been those between Quebec’s Charter of the French Language (Bill 101), a law whose purpose is to protect the right to use French in a variety of public and private settings, and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, a constitutional bill of rights which contains standard civil and political rights as well as several sui generis language rights based on a principle of equality between English and French.  These two instruments are often described as being ‘fundamentally’ incompatible, on the grounds that they instantiate radically different principles of language policy and linguistic justice.  This supposed incompatibility is usually framed in binary terms, with proponents claiming that Bill 101 protects ‘collective’ rights, while the Charter protects only ‘individual’ rights, that Bill 101 adopts a ‘territorial’ approach, while the Charter rests on a ‘personal’ one, and/or that Bill 101 represents an exercise in self-determination by the Québécois, while the Charter is a centralizing force that deprives them of their autonomy. However, this paper will argue that the degree of conflict between the two measures is in fact substantially overstated as it rests on a series of false dichotomies, and that both the Charter and Bill 101 can be seen as pursuing a common goal of ‘advance[ing] the equality of status or use of English and French’ as set out in s. 16(3) of the Charter.  In doing so, the paper will offer a critical examination of the use (and misuse) of certain key concepts in the debates over linguistic justice, such as collective rights and territoriality.