Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] When a Right Exists Only on Paper By Carol Velandia In June of this year, a business school student messaged me on LinkedIn. She'd come across my advocacy on language access rights and wanted to know how to fight for her mother, a Farsi speaker managing a chronic condition. For years she had interpreted for her mother's diagnoses, medications, and follow up care.
[00:00:23] She grew increasingly frustrated because she couldn't always be there to interpret, to advocate, to sit beside her mother during an appointment or a follow up call. She even built an app to address the problem despite having no prior experience in software development.
[00:00:37] When I told this individual her mother has a right to professional interpretation, she told me something troubling. Yes, many times the hospital provides interpreters for my mom, but they are not good. They don't know about my mom's condition and the vocabulary of the specific encounters. Ask the moment that sits with me not when a right is denied outright, but when it's technically honored and still fails. And that failure has three separate causes. Which is exactly why it's so easy to miss. Most people with limited English proficiency don't know the right exists. The providers and administrators responsible for it don't always enforce it, and the language industry itself hasn't invested enough in training interpreters for anything beyond Spanish and a handful of major languages.
[00:01:21] A right can survive all three failures perfectly intact on paper and still be worth nothing to the person who needs it. The right Stated plainly, Executive Order 14224 designated English the official language of the United States. In March 2025, it also revoked EO13166, which directs federal agencies to improve language access.
[00:01:47] An EO cannot repeal Title VI, a statute Congress passed, and it cannot amend Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act. EO14224 goes a step further and tells agencies they are not required to change their existing services or the language in which they provide them. Permission to keep going, not a promise that anything will. The statutes are safe. The regulations and guidance that make them operational are not.
[00:02:14] So yes, the mother in my story still has a legal right to a qualified interpreter. Our rights are not under threat or repealed by this EO. The right is still there. However, in July 2025, the US Department of Justice issued guidance directing agencies to minimize non essential multilingual services.
[00:02:35] That's a quiet redirection of what gets investigated, funded, and risked as and enforcement, not statutory language, is usually what decides whether a right reaches the person who needs it. We've been here before to understand how a right can survive on paper and still fail in practice. Look back to 2020, when Section 1557 regulations were revised to strip the specific definitions of qualified bilingual multilingual staff, an individual with limited English proficiency conspicuously absent the specificity that told a hospital administrator what compliance actually meant. Research published this year in the Journal of General Internal Medicine shows what that thinness looks like in the medical record.
[00:03:19] Reviewing 23,245 inpatient notes from 2019 through 2023 at One Academic Medical center, the authors found untrained ad hoc interpreters, usually family members, documented in 14.9% of admissions overall and in 29.7% of admissions involving speakers of less common languages. Nearly three quarters of those notes gave no reason at all. The definitions were reinstated in 2024, but for nearly four years the right was formally intact and functionally thinner. EO14224 and the 2025 DOJ guidance aren't identical to 2020, but they rhyme, and that earlier episode is worth watching closely now. A right doesn't have to be repealed to stop functioning. It just has to stop being enforced consistently. Farsi is not Spanish.
[00:04:11] Even a fully enforced right doesn't reach every language equally, which is the third piece of the gap I opened with and the one that lands squarely on our own industry. A Minnesota study of 2,489 publicly insured NRELies, all covered by the same laws, found that Hmong and Somali respondents reported greater need for interpreters and more communication problems than Latino respondents. Somali enrollese also reported lower availability and Hmong enrollees lower access to professional interpreters. The structure of credentialing tells the same story. When Indiana created its second interpreter tier in 2015, full certification was available in only 21 languages, funneling everything else into a lesser tier that skips the oral exam. And even trained interpreters in lesser spoken languages struggle to find enough work to sustain a career. The pipeline problem isn't just training capacity. It's whether we've built a career path for these languages at all. Farsi is spoken by tens of millions of people worldwide. It is still in the American interpreter marketplace, a language of lesser diffusion.
[00:05:18] That structural gap predates EO14224 and will outlast it. No EO, favorable or hostile, was ever going to close it. Only we, the language services providers, can. The app she built because no one else would.
[00:05:34] I want to be careful how I describe what this young woman has done because child forced into an adult role isn't quite right, and neither is letting her off the hook is simply helping her mom.
[00:05:46] Research on child language brokering increasingly frames it as a family care practice rather than pure harm, noting that brokers frustration is usually directed at the system, not the parent. A companion study set in a doctor's office found them shielding the adults they interpreted for delaying softening, editing while carrying the weight of decisions that were never theirs to make. I don't condemn the children who do this or the parents who need them to.
[00:06:11] The blame lies with the professionals and institutions who let it keep happening because it's free. A December 2025 case report citing estimates that 75 to 90% of immigrant and refugee children broker language for their families and that 18 to 20% experience clinically significant distress in the role documents a 9 year old Syrian refugee girl who developed anxiety, somatic symptoms and academic decline after brokering her mother's medical visas, including gynecological and mental health appointments. Reframing that as care is irresponsible and doesn't make the diagnosis easier for a child to carry. My correspondence app is the clearer answer to what the research is actually pointing at. The central problem is that the system handed her a language task when what she had to offer was a caring one. Build the tool. Set the reminder. Take notes on her mother's care.
[00:07:03] Advocate for the interpreter you're legally owed.
[00:07:06] That's what family care can look like when we stop asking children to be the interpreter too. What we owe this fight A right can be fully intact on the books and still fail a family. That's why enforcing it is up to us. Tell your clients and communities plainly that this right exists and what it covers. Don't assume they already know. Push the institutions you serve to enforce it consistently, not just when someone complains and invest specifically in languages of lesser diffusion. Sponsor a Farsi, Hmong or Somali speaker through interpreter training and push for the same rigor for a language spoken by a few thousand local families that you'd apply to Spanish. None of this requires Congress. It requires us, the people whose profession exists to make understanding possible, to close a gap that statutory language was never going to close on its own. This article was written by Carol Valandia, a nationally recognized advocate for language access in the United States.
[00:08:03] She is founder and CEO of Equal Access Language Services, and she developed the award winning program Effective Inclusion through Language Access to enhance language service delivery across various sectors. Originally published by Multilingual Magazine, Issue 255 September 2026.
