Does anyone in Boston know how to translate “Ask not what your country can do for you” into the original Mandarin Chinese?

Candidates lost in Chinese translation


Guo Yan Mai, 71, waves to passersby in Boston as he holds up a sign expressing his support for fully bilingual election ballots during a demonstration in front of the Statehouse.

'08 RACE FOR PRESIDENT

USA TODAY ON POLITICS: Boston's 2008 presidential primary ballot could read like a bad Chinese menu.

There might be "Sticky Rice" in column A, "Virtue Soup" in column B and, in column C, "Upset Stomach."

Those could be choices facing some voters if the names of Mitt Romney, Fred Thompson and Hillary Rodham Clinton were converted into Chinese characters, according to Massachusetts' top election official. And that gives Secretary of State William Galvin heartburn.

On Tuesday, Galvin filed a challenge in federal court to a Justice Department agreement requiring that ballots be fully translated to protect the rights of Chinese-speaking voters.

Galvin says Chinese — which uses characters, not letters; has sounds with several meanings; and is spoken in several dialects — will create ballot chaos.

"Elections have to be precise," says Galvin, who wants ballot instructions in Chinese but candidate names in English. He says transliteration — using characters whose sounds approximate the way the names are spoken — can have "unintended negative inferences."

The federal government and some Asian-American activists disagree. Transliterating candidate names "is an effective way to allow voters to vote independently," unaccompanied by someone to translate, says Justice Department spokeswoman Cynthia Magnuson.

Ann Har-Yee Wong of Boston's Elections Advisory Committee says asking Chinese-speaking voters to read a candidate's name in English is "akin to a Boston cabdriver navigating the streets in Beijing while trying to read street signs only in Chinese characters."

Margaret Fung of the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund says: "If you take seriously that voters be able to exercise their vote and cast an informed ballot, then the election officials should" transliterate names.

The controversy stems from a lawsuit filed by the Justice Department that accused Boston poll workers of mismarking the ballots of Asian voters who didn't speak English. A 2005 settlement requires the city to translate instructions, office titles and candidate names on ballots in precincts with large numbers of Chinese speakers.

Fung says Asian-Americans are eligible under the federal Voting Rights Act to receive help at polling places in 16 jurisdictions in seven states with large numbers of non-English-speaking voters. Among those, seven counties in California and New York transliterate candidates' names on ballots.

[link to www.usatoday.com]

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Does anyone in Boston know how to translate “Ask not what your country can do for you” into the original Mandarin Chinese?

I ask this question as a simple-minded American and Bay Stater who remembers the days when American liberals stood by John F. Kennedy and pledged to “pay any price, bear any burden and meet any hardship to assure the survival and the success of liberty.” A generation later, the American left’s motto could be “No Burden, No Hardship, No Democracy? No Problem!”

This new spirit of “convenience democracy” was on display at the State House yesterday when the so-called “Chinese Progressive Association” demanded that ballots for American elections in an American city (Boston) be printed entirely in the language of American democracy - Cantonese. Under orders from the U.S. Department of Justice, Boston now prints ballots in Cantonese and Mandarin Chinese, as well as Spanish, Portuguese, Vietnamese, Creole and (coming soon, no doubt), Gaelic, Vulcan and that South African click-click language from “The Gods Must Be Crazy.” However, while the text of the ballots is in Chinese, the actual names of the candidates - Bush in ’88 or Clinton in ’92 or Bush in 2000 or Clinton in 2008 - still appear in English. This isn’t good enough, liberals complain. It’s asking too much of local voters to read any part of a ballot in English.

Which means that the unbearable burden of citizenship for Americans of Chinese descent is to be able to look at the names “Patrick” and “Healy” and tell which candidate is Irish. OK, that’s a bad example.

Seriously, if a mastery of English is a requirement for citizenship - and it is - then how is reading a ballot in English a burden at all? And do we really want the next Leader of the Free World being picked by people who can’t tell “Barack Obama” from “Ron Paul?” Phonetically or politically? And what would JFK say to those who claim that the unbearable burden of citizenship is citizenship itself?

Last Edited by theDtrain on 01/21/2012 12:40 PM