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Saturday, Jul 11, 2009
From the doctor's office to the courtroom, immigrants often rely on their bilingual children to interpret for them. Are these kids learning valuable life skills -- or shouldering too much family responsibility?
Aug 4, 2004 | Neisis Santiesteban studies every night, working toward her dream of becoming a real estate broker, answering sample test questions and absorbing the meanings of "amortization" and "actual authority" in the sparse dining area of her small West Palm Beach, Fla., apartment. But the 33-year-old Cuba native doesn't do it alone.
Santiesteban's two sons, 12-year-old Humberto and 11-year-old Orlando Gutierrez, help her by translating items in the test-preparation book from English to Spanish. They drill her with questions -- like "What is the right to rescission?" -- and if she doesn't know the answer or recognize a word, the boys look it up and break down the definition into digestible Spanish bites, often going over a term several times to perfect her pronunciation.
"They help me with the questions, but it's hard because they don't understand all the laws," Santiesteban, who moved to the United States eight years ago, said in Spanish. "We try to look them up, but sometimes I get stuck," says Humberto, a stocky seventh grader.
With 31 million foreign-born people living in the United States -- 11 percent of the population, according to the 2000 census -- Santiesteban's kids aren't the only ones acting as their parents' interpreters. The country's "limited English-proficient" population has ballooned from 6 percent in 1980 to 12 percent in 2000 -- meaning that around 25 million adults depend on their kids to help them understand everything from school permission slips, telemarketers' pitches and food labels to bills, job applications and doctors' prescriptions. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, there are more than 24,000 translators nationwide, but there still aren't enough to represent the more than 300 languages spoken in the United States. And many immigrants are uncomfortable with the idea of translators to begin with -- preferring to speak through their children rather than share intimate details of their lives with strangers. (Illegal immigrants tend to resist professional interpreters because they worry they might reveal information that would spur their deportation.)
"From the moment they land in the United States, many immigrant parents and children reverse roles," said Mojdeh Rohani, social services coordinator at the International Institute of Boston, a nonprofit agency that helps recent refugees and asylees adjust to life in the United States. "Children find out how to get the phone bill paid or help their parents take the bus. Lots of young children are helping their parents resolve housing and immigration-status issues."
Immigrants' kids say they would rather help their parents than see them use strangers to make themselves understood, but translating information that can affect the well-being of their families -- applications for food stamps, medical history forms -- can be a huge responsibility. Young interpreters can be privy to sensitive information -- the details of a parent's illness, for instance, or debt problems -- when accompanying their parents on trips to obtain social services or to deal with legal issues. Rohani said children of refugees or asylum seekers can learn particularly disturbing information -- including accounts of their parents' torture or rape -- in their role as go-betweens. "I've known many women who've had to share their experiences with their children because they have no choice," she says. "How do you tell your 11-year-old you've been raped? It's such a negative thing for a child to hear. But it happens a lot."
