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Article published In:
Translation Spaces
Vol. 11:2 (2022) ► pp.303–328

US voter rights in translation

Semantic shifts in Spanish renderings of “felony”

ORCID logo | Dublin City University
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.
Keywords: voter rights, US elections, corpus-based translation studies, semantic shifts, felon disenfranchisement, legal translation
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
  • References
  • Legislation
Published online: 10 October 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ts.22004.rie
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