The White House Sued Over Lack of Sign Language Interpreters at Press Briefings

NPR (5/29/25) By Kristin Wright

The National Association of the Deaf (NAD) has filed a federal lawsuit against the White House over a lack of American Sign Language (ASL) interpreters at media briefings.

The NAD stated the White House abruptly stopped providing ASL interpreters during press briefings and other public events when President Trump returned to office for a second term.

The lawsuit requests that the presence of ASL interpreters be required at these events and that video of them be available for viewers.

The NAD stated that “at least several hundred thousand” people in the U.S. communicate mainly in ASL, and many who are deaf or hard of hearing know little English. That’s why English closed captioning of briefings is not sufficient.

The suit alleges the White House is violating Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, which is a cornerstone of federal disability rights law, as well as the First Amendment and Fifth Amendment.

“Deaf and hard of hearing Americans have the right to the same access to White House information as everyone else,” said Bobbie Beth Scoggins, interim chief executive officer of the NAD. “Such information must be provided not only through captioning but also in American Sign Language.”

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Immigrant Women Call for Better Interpreter Access During Births in Quebec City Hospitals

CBC (5/14/25) By Marika Wheeler

The Service de référence en périnatalité pour les femmes immigrantes de Québec (SRPFIQ), an organization that supports pregnant immigrant women in Quebec City, Canada, stated that patients do not have adequate access to interpreters during births in hospitals.

“Understanding what is happening during a birth is the base,” said SRPFIQ director, Marielle M’Bangha, adding that she is concerned that women are receiving care without giving full consent. M’Bangha wants to see staff at Quebec City’s University Hospital Center (CHU) de Québec-Université Laval, offer interpreting services “systematically” and provide translated versions of consent forms and other documents to patients.

“It’s absolutely crucial that consent to care is given. If it’s unclear what we are signing or why, there’s a problem when it comes to making a free and informed choice,” M’Bangha said.

According to the Act Respecting Health Services and Social Services in Quebec, English speakers have the right to receive services in English. Social and healthcare services networks can use a different language when delivering services, but access is conditional on the health institution’s available staff, funding, and organizational resources.

M’Bangha filed a complaint with CHU last year following the experience of an unaccompanied English-speaking mother who did not have access to a hospital-provided interpreter when she underwent an emergency caesarian and a subsequent week-long hospital stay.

Brigitte Wellens, president of the regional access committee to health and social services for English speakers in the Quebec City area, said there is still a lot of work to do. Wellens said staff are not well informed about the rights of English speakers and that users don’t insist on being provided with interpreters.

According to Wellens, the 36 requests for an English interpreter made in 2024-25 is a testament to the difficulties in accessing care for English speakers, especially given that 17,000 people in the Quebec City region identified themselves as having learned English as a first language in the last Canadian census.

“It tells me people are not completely aware of their rights, it tells me the establishment, clearly, doesn’t always make the request for an interpreter when it’s in English,” Wellness said. She believes government directives on when to provide services in English cause confusion among staff, and some of them opt not to offer it because they don’t understand users’ rights or fear getting in trouble.

According to Wellens, very few documents, including consent forms or pre- and post-procedure instructions, are translated. She believes poor access to care in languages other than French is a public health concern as “patients will inevitably require more care if they misunderstand a diagnosis or how to care for themselves at home.”

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Heart Lamp Wins International Booker Prize, with Stories of India’s Muslim Women and Girls

NPR (5/20/25) By Andrew Limbong

The writer and advocate Banu Mushtaq and translator Deepa Bhasthi have won this year’s International Booker Prize for their book Heart Lamp. The book is the first short story collection to win the prize, which awards the best fiction translated into English.

“Heart Lamp is something genuinely new for English readers,” wrote Max Porter, chair of the judges, in a statement announcing the win. “It speaks of women’s lives, reproductive rights, faith, caste, power, and oppression.”

The book collects 12 short stories written by Mushtaq between 1990 and 2023. They tell the stories of girls and women in Muslim communities in southern India navigating caste and class.

Mushtaq, a lawyer and advocate for women’s rights, wrote in a statement that the stories were inspired by daily incidents that happened to women all around her. “I witness this day to day, in my daily life, because so many women come to me. They have brought all the problems with them. They seek relief. But some of the women, they don’t know why they are suffering.”

Heart Lamp is the first prize winner to be translated from Kannada, a language spoken mostly in southern India. Translator Deepa Bhasthi explained that her approach to translation isn’t to turn the language into “proper” English. Instead, “the aim is to introduce the reader to new words (in this case, Kannada) or to new thoughts that come loaded with the hum of another language. I call it translating with an accent,” Bhasthi said. “So, the English in Heart Lamp is an English with a very deliberate Kannada hum to it.”

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Trump Envoy Relied on Kremlin Interpreter in Meetings with Putin to End War in Ukraine

NBC News (5/10/25) By Keir Simmons, Carol E. Lee, Dan De Luce, and Courtney Kube

Steve Witkoff, President Trump’s special envoy tasked with negotiating an end to the war in Ukraine, broke with long-standing protocol by not employing his own interpreter during three high-level meetings with Russian President Vladimir Putin, opting instead to rely on interpreters from the Kremlin, a U.S. official and two Western officials with knowledge of the talks said.

Steve Witkoff, who does not speak Russian, met with Putin in Moscow for several hours on February 11, March 13, and April 11. “By using Kremlin interpreters, Witkoff ran the risk that some of the nuance in Putin’s messages would be missed, and he would not have been able to independently verify what was being said to him,” two former American ambassadors said. “If Putin and the interpreters speak to each other in Russian, Witkoff doesn’t know what they are saying,” one official added.

Anna Kelly, a White House deputy press secretary, said in a statement that Witkoff “abides by all security protocols in coordination with the State Department.”

Michael McFaul, a former U.S. ambassador to Russia, said using the Kremlin’s interpreter was “a very bad idea” that put Witkoff at a disadvantage. “I speak Russian and have listened to Kremlin interpreters and U.S. interpreters at the same meeting, and the language is never the same,” he said.

McFaul, now a professor of political science at Stanford University, added that having a U.S. interpreter present also ensures a more accurate written account of the meeting for the rest of the government, known as a memorandum of conversation, or memcon. “At the end of every meeting that I attended, I debriefed the interpreter to make sure we heard everything correctly, to get the ‘memcom’ exactly right. You can’t do that using a Russian official.”

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Ohio Supreme Court Weighs Proposed Changes to Interpreter Services – Could Allow AI

WOSU (5/15/25) By Renee Fox

As part of an effort to increase the availability of language services in Ohio courtrooms, the Ohio Supreme Court has proposed rules on how courts could use generative artificial intelligence (AI) for interpreting.

The new rule, proposed by the court’s Commission on the Rules of Superintendence and the Advisory Committee on Language Services, would only allow AI to assist with basic interpreting in the courts, but AI would be banned from being used to interpret proceedings and court functions where a person’s rights are at stake.

If approved, AI could also be used to translate general information, as long as it’s disclosed, but not legal forms or substantive legal writing. “Non-substantive, non-legal writings include materials relating to general court information such as websites, webpages, chatbots, court signage, court hours, department or office locations, and other writings that are not legal in nature and do not implicate a litigant’s constitutional or civil rights,” the proposal states.

Commentary within the proposed rule change states that the use of AI could harm people who need language services. “The use of artificial intelligence oral interpreting is subject to error, misrepresentation, breach of privacy, and may cause harm to the individual who receives the information in the foreign language,” the commentary states. “By using artificial intelligence oral interpreting, the output may jeopardize the litigant’s constitutional or civil rights.”

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Demand for French Programs Surges Among Newcomers to Canada

CBC News (Canada) (5/5/25) By Pratyush Dayal

Obtaining permanent residence status in Canada has become a challenge for many newcomers. Now, more are opting for a route to help their chances: learning French.

The process for permanent residence is competitive. As of January, Canada is estimated to have 3.02 million temporary residents, but there are only 395,000 permanent residence spots available this year.

Lou Janssen Dangzalan, a Toronto-based immigration lawyer, said he has been advising his clients for the past two years to learn French as one of their backup plans to improve their Comprehensive Ranking System (CRS) scores. CRS is a ranking system used by Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) for immigrants applying for permanent residency, using factors such as age, level of education, English proficiency, and work experience. Every two weeks, IRCC draws a CRS rank, and applicants with that score or higher are invited to submit documents to receive a permanent residency card.

“If you pursue French as a second language, essentially you stand to increase your CRS points, and that increases your chances to get drawn,” Dangzalan said. “The other thing is that you receive the possibility of being classified as a Francophone under Express Entry, and that means you could benefit from Francophone category-based selection, which has a lower cutoff score.” Dangzalan said many international students holding postgraduate work permits, which have a limited validity maximum of three years, are opting for this route.

Simon Goulet, campus director at Windsor – Collège Boréal, said their seven campuses across the province have been feeling the increasing demand for French programs for newcomers. Goulet said many newcomers are realizing that being fluent in French is an advantage in Canada. “We are seeing an increase right now in international students registering for our French as second language program,” he said.

Province-wide, Goulet said there is a “222% increase” in registrations of international students in the program. “That’s good news. There’s a lot of interest in learning French for many reasons. Immigration is one, but also there’s a curiosity for official languages as well and a desire to partake in that.”

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