Over the past year, a quarter of a million Guatemalan migrants have been apprehended at the U.S.-Mexico border, at least half of whom speak Mayan languages that are not being accommodated at detention centers. In a recent article for The New Yorker titled “A Translation Crisis at the Border,” historian Rachel Nolan found that many Mayan-language speakers were often only “given access to Mayan-language translation at their final court date, if at all,” she says. Indigenous migrants are then forced to sign documents and complete interviews in Spanish, a language that many have limited understanding of, resulting in a number of deportations and family separations. Nolan’s article focuses on the grassroot efforts that are “often their only hope for receiving asylum.” We spoke with Nolan, a historian of modern Latin America, as well as Odilia Romero, a trilingual interpreter who recently began developing a training program for Indigenous-language interpreters in multiple U.S. cities. “We had to develop our own curricula. We had to develop our own glossary. We had to develop everything for ourselves as indigenous people,” said Romero. “But I think it’s so important that we’re trained, because the life of a person depends on us as the interpreters.”
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Democracy Now | Radio Free (2020-01-18T21:38:33+00:00) Mayan-speaking migrants at U.S. border face deportations, separations due to lack of interpreters. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2020/01/18/mayan-speaking-migrants-at-u-s-border-face-deportations-separations-due-to-lack-of-interpreters/
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