Katie Becker
Panel: Inclusive Responses to Language Violence
Katie Becker will present findings from her research about speakers of Indigenous languages in the U.S. immigration system and her work with non-dominant language speakers in the U.S. legal system. In these contexts, the median person seeking interpreting and translating assistance is often assumed to be a Spanish speaker, highly literate, and able to use a computer with ease.
But this is not the case. Many people speak other languages than Spanish–including Indigenous languages and other languages of limited diffusion. One in five American adults is “functionally illiterate.” The digital divide in the United States hits non-English speakers especially hard: only 12% of foreign-born people demonstrate a high level of proficiency with computers and digital tools, and many households simply do not have access to the internet. Each of these factors overlap to create barriers that seem insurmountable.
In this presentation, Katie will explore how these barriers overlap to prevent the most vulnerable from accessing justice in the civil and immigration contexts. Katie will consider how much of the U.S. language-access infrastructure is focused on meeting the needs of Spanish speakers–an important effort, but one that neglects people occupying positions of even more extreme linguistic vulnerability. And many of the proposed access-to-justice solutions like technologized court forms, apps, and machine translation simply will not work for people who cannot read them, who lack access to computers, or who are uncomfortable using technology. She will consider how translators, interpreters, and multilingual navigators can help bridge these language, literacy, and digital-literacy gaps to help people access justice.