We twittered about Recording Voices: Stories of Asian Pacific American in New York, you can see the report here.

Here’s a community briefing to release the Coalition for Asian American Children and Families’ (CAACF) latest report on the impacts of language brokering on families and to discuss the implications on policy and practice. Language brokering is not merely the ability to speak two languages. Language brokering means that bilingual youth are translating and interpreting in daily situations without any special training and are bridging between the home culture and American culture. The role of youth in connecting their limited English proficient parents to the outside world extends beyond communicating the information verbatim. Youth often influence the content and messages presented. Parents rely on this information to make family decisions or assign the decision-making responsibility on the youth themselves.

New York City’s Asian Pacific American community has doubled every decade for the last 30 years, becoming the most rapidly expanding group of the city and accounting for 11 percent of the city’s population. Of the approximately 873,000 Asian Pacific Americans in New York City, 78% are foreign-born, 28% speak little or no English, and 53% are born into poverty.

BTW – There’s been a lot of good research coming out of New York including Asian Americans in Poverty.

Recording Voices: Stories of Asian Pacific American (Presentation starts at the 7 minute mark)

KEY FINDINGS: Recording Voices found that Asian Pacific American families often rely on children and youth to be translators and interpreters when accessing public services. While other research shows that there are positive impacts of being a language broker, youth identified negative impacts including the 1) increased burden when providing language assistance; 2) heightened anxiety, stress, and fear of miscommunication; 3) conflict with the family unit; and 4) role-reversal between parents and youth. Youth who were surveyed for the policy brief indicated that:

• 49% of youth translate for their parents “always/a lot.”
• 61% of foreign-born youth translate “always/a lot”, compared to 43% of native-born youth.
• 83% of youth translate notes and letters from school.
• 49% of youth translate forms from the doctor’s office.