Reply #93: Absolutely, yes!! [View All]

[Rabrrrrrr]

But only in the sense to say that, in America, the only really truly binding legal documents are in English, and all government work will be done in English (Senate, Supreme Court, White House, road signage, department of agriculture, public schools, IRS, FBI, etc.).

And by binding legal documents, I mean that, as the IRS now translates IRS forms into Spanish, Cantonese, Mandarin, Korean, and a whole host of other languages (which is good, and I support that), no translation is ever perfect and ALWAYS will get some kind of error creeping into it. So, in that sense, we need to say that only the English version is truly official, so that people can't take a non-English translation of a law done in English, which translation might have an error, and say "but the law in Spanish says..." or "but the law in esperanto says..." or "but the law in Cantonese says...".

I think we need to translate, and be as helpful as possible, but at some point, now that we ARE translating legal documents, I think we're going to get royally burned by someone bringing in a translated document and suing, and probably ending up with a judge, a lawyer, and a jury who don't speak the translated language at all trying to decide what the law says in, say, Tagalog.

Should English be so official that people are not allowed to speak anything else? Obviously not. We should do everything we can to start teaching foreign languages intelligently (that is, in elementary school instead junior high) and teach as many of them as possible. And I'm glad that so many immigrants now are not leaving their old language behind, as was the popular method in the 1800s and early 1900s (when my great grandparents came over, and made sure that their children learned English and didn't learn German at all, sadly).

But I do think we're gonna see a time, soon, when we will have to decide to have one official language for legal work, or end up in a slurry of potentially awful legal battles and chaos.