Sunday, January 12, 2014

Spanglish

My Spanish is good enough for Taxi cabs and some of our locals. I picked it up from my Puerto Rican friends decades ago, one fellow was a lifeguard with us and he was in Med School at the time. Thus it may not be the greatest accent. It is like my Russian learned from Jimmy Bula, a Ukrainian, who taught me as we sat on the lifeguard stand in New York. Now my French is not bad but I would never try it in Paris, and I once tried to write a Term Sheet and was laughed out of the room.

Thus when I needed Czech, Thai, Korean, I found someone who was fluent.

Now it comes to the ACA web site in Spanish. Modern Health Care states:

The site, CuidadoDeSalud.gov, launched more than two months late.  A Web page with Spanish instructions linked users to an English form. And the translations were so clunky and full of grammatical mistakes that critics say they must have been computer-generated — the name of the site itself can literally be read "for the caution of health." "When you get into the details of the plans, it's not all written in Spanish. It's written in Spanglish, so we end up having to translate it for them," said xxxx, a healthcare navigator who helps with enrollment in Miami.

Now why they did not get someone fluent in Spanish I do not know, but it is the Government.