US voter rights in translation
Semantic shifts in Spanish renderings of “felony”
Felons’ voting rights have featured prominently in debates over voter suppression in the
United States, particularly in Florida, where a 2018 state constitutional amendment reinstated voting rights to the
state’s 1.4 million former felons (
Robles 2018). Florida also has a high concentration of
Spanish-speaking voters with Limited English Proficiency (LEP), making Spanish-language voting information crucial. Inadequate translations
of voter information may misrepresent voter eligibility for LEP Spanish-speaking former felons in Florida. Using a parallel corpus, this
article’s central research question investigates how semantic shifts occur in Spanish translations of “felony” and “felon” in online voter
information for seven Florida counties. The results reveal a number of misrepresentative semantic shifts in both human- and
machine-translated Spanish voter information. Such shifts may impinge on individuals’ constitutional rights.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Related work
- 3.Methods
- 3.1Text selection
- 3.2Corpus compilation
- 3.3Corpus analysis
- 4.Legal comparative analysis of potential renderings
- 5.Results
- 5.1Semantic shifts by term and county
- 5.2Semantic shifts in human vs. machine translation
- 6.Discussion
- 7.Conclusion
- Notes
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References
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Legislation