Spanish Teachers as Impromptu Translators and Liaisons in New Latino Communities.

Abstract: Recent shifts in immigrant settlement patterns are bringing new Latino communities to areas of the Midwest and Southeast that are unaccustomed to educating multilingual students. Schools in these areas often lack resources for communicating with students and their families. In this article we document how Spanish teachers in new Latino communities are being asked to serve as unofficial translators and interpreters in many contexts. We further show that teachers are being asked to take demanding roles as surrogate counselors, administrators, and teachers in other subject areas. We consider teachers' varying attitudes and responses to these new demands and discuss the implications for the field of world language education in terms of professional education and policy. Key words: advocacy, interpreting, Latinas/os, teacher education, teacher workload Language: Spanish Several regions of the United States have traditionally served as gateways for new immigrant settlement, including California, Florida, New York, New Jersey, Illinois, and Texas (Alba & Nee, 2005). In recent years, however, settlement patterns have shifted markedly and new immigrant communities are springing up in rural areas of the Midwest and Southeast (Massey, 2008). Approximately three quarters of new immigrants in the southeastern United States are Spanish speakers (U.S. Census Bureau, 2003, p. 2). The Latino population in Georgia, for example, grew 302.7% between 1990 and 2000 (Guzman, 2001, p. 4), and Georgia had the third fastest growth of Latinos1 (60.1%) in the nation between 2000 and 2006 (Pew Hispanic Center, 2008, Table 13). This demographic phenomenon, sometimes termed the "new Latino diaspora" (Hamann & Harklau, 2010; Hamann, Wortham, & Murillo, 2002), has brought about salient and relatively sudden changes to the demographics of public schools in affected areas. Schools that are unaccustomed to educating new Spanish-speaking immigrant students often lack resources for communicating with them and their families and improvise with whatever resources are on hand. In this article, we document how Spanish teachers, as some of the few Spanish- speaking educators in new immigrant communities, are bearing an especially heavy burden as impromptu, unofficial translators and school representatives. Taking the experience of north Georgia educators as an example, we document a wide range of duties assigned to and assumed by foreign language educators working in schools hosting new immigrant student populations. We show how these duties include not only translation and interpretation, but also much more demanding roles as surrogate counselors, administrators, and teachers of English and other content areas. We explore the hidden extra workload that this work imposes on Spanish educators. Finally, we consider teachers' varying attitudes and responses to these new demands. We conclude by considering the implications for the field in terms of professional education and policy. Background There has been little recognition thus far in the literature of the roles that world language educators play as unofficial translators, interpreters, and liaisons for immigrant communities. However, existing work provides instructive insights on two related issues. First, scholarship on the training and qualifications of professional translators and interpreters offers a useful comparison to the typical training of foreign language educators. Second, recent research on the experiences of other impromptu interpreters and school liaisons with immigrant families such as language minority children and parent liaisons identifies potentially relevant issues. Professional Translating and Interpreting Although both translators and interpreters deal with language conversion, "the act of writing or speech in one language and converting it to another effectively and accurately" (Hallam, 2008, p. 34), scholars distinguish between the two because they demand somewhat different skills. …