>> Should interpreters be provided for all LEPs at all times?  <<

LEPs?  I don't think you are referring to persons with Hanson's Disease, aka LEProsy.

Best regards,  4merCL

>>It is ridiculous to expect the courts to provide translation in obscure regional languages, just as it is ridiculous for arriving immigrants not to realize that English is the predominant language of the US and the one they will have to deal with if they want to realize their dreams.<<

The rub is that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 states requires the use of interpreters in the US, it is a right protected by law. Originally it was meant only to cover criminal matters but over the years different Courts have established that all procedures that involve a person with less than full command of the English language be provide with a competent interpreter, regardless of the obscuricity [is that a word??] of the language or dialect.

I wholly agree with you; If a person wants to emigrate to another country they should prepare themselves.

It's really nice that the US offers tax information in Spanish. And voting information in Chinese and Urdu and who knows what other languages.

Every time I receive multilingual voting information in foreign languages, I see red, especially as the translations and printing are at my expense. You aren't supposed to be allowed naturalization unless you have English proficiency, and you aren't allowed to vote if you're not a citizen.

If I emigrated to Germany or France, I certainly wouldn't expect them to allow me to become a citizen and vote if I hadn't learned their language.

This is not Canada or Switzerland. We are an English-speaking country. Private linguistic courtesies are fine, as are emergency/legal (criminal cases) interpreters; but taxpayer-funded interpretation for voting info, taxation, driver's license exams, or just about anything else has no place here.

_>>  and my ancestors hail from the Hexagon.   <<

the Hexagon ??

Best regards,  4merCL

Driving licenses, too - you're expected to get a local license if you reside in a country for more than a year or so. I did my driving exam in German in Germany, but paid extra to take the written exam in English, simply because the test in Germany actually tests your knowledge of driving regulations and I wanted to be sure of myself when reading "tricky" questions. (There are still a few terms they used in English on the exam that I've never heard used - and my UK friends agree they've never heard the terms used before, either.)

I am not enamored of the idea of driving at high speeds among others who can't even understand the road signs.

In New York, they don't have the sense (read "political guts") to make English an auto driving license requirement -- but for the sake of preventing at least some blood and gore, they do require it for driving a truck.

My children and grandchildren, who live part-time in Spain and have also lived in Germany, received no concession from the bureaucracy or the public schools for their native English -- nor did they expect that they would.

For that matter, we did perfectly well in America when hordes of immigrants arrived from Germany, Poland, China, Italy, etc. without a word of English. I see no reason at all to coddle others just because they showed up a generation or so after my grandparents. In the partiular case of Spanish, we are making it possible to be born, live, and die, without ever learning any other language -- a huge social mistake, imo, supported by many local Hispanic politicians who wish to keep their constituents linguistically bound to them.