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The Spanish language Obamacare website is unreadable to Spanish speakers.

Incompetence beyond belief: The Spanish language Obamacare website is unreadable to Spanish speakers.

The site, CuidadoDeSalud.gov, launched more than two months late. A Web page with Spanish instructions linked users to an English form. And the translations were so clunky and full of grammatical mistakes that critics say they must have been computer-generated — the name of the site itself can literally be read “for the caution of health.”

“When you get into the details of the plans, it’s not all written in Spanish. It’s written in Spanglish, so we end up having to translate it for them,” said Adrian Madriz, a health care navigator who helps with enrollment in Miami. [emphasis mine]

I normal expect the government to do a poor job in most things, but this level of idiocy astonishes even me. For example,

As for the language, Plaza, the New Mexico professor, said a recent examination by her research students concluded that the translations were done “by a computer-generated process” and came across as awkward.

“There are problems with the verbs and word order that make sentences hard to understand,” said Plaza, who helped develop an audio version to help residents in New Mexico sign up. “Sometimes,” she added, “it’s just the terms they use.”

The website translates “premium” into “prima,” but that Spanish word is more commonly used to mean a female cousin, Plaza said. A more accurate translation, she said, would be “cuotas,” ”couta mensual” or “costo annual.”

It is a good thing the Democrats have demanded Obamacare go into effect right away, as they are also the ones in charge of implementing it.

Genesis cover

On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.

 
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.


The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
 

"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News

5 comments

  • Cotour

    It gets more stupider and stupider. So stupid in fact that you really have to stand back in aw at the magnitude, arrogance and flat out disregard for the people who actually pay for the whole thing who this is supposed to bennift. Is it by design or is it just as a consequence of government being in something that it has no business being in? Does it really matter?

    I can’t even imagine if this was a private company how much sooner loses would have been cut and this would have been flushed. As long as there is a law passed called “Obamacare” this kind of bad behavior and way of conducting business will be allowed to continue. That law, this president and this Senate is much stronger than logic.

  • wodun

    This should be a major story because it emphasizes what Democrats really think about Latinos.

  • Edward

    Isn’t the Obama team supposed to be the Web savvy group? They sure do suck at Information Technology. And knowledge of what the American public, doctors, insurers, medical device manufacturers and pharmaceuticals want and need. We want and need a medical system that works (like what we had before), not whatever it is that we have now.

    This is what we get when we let government run things. We are getting exactly what we always get when we let government run things: whatever government wants, not what *we* want. It is a loss of our freedom to do as *we* please, not what the government pleases.

  • Cotour

    And you point out exactly the consequences of losing elections and the inability to have a reasonable Constitutionally based agenda and the ability and the people to properly communicate it. We have to correct for swings of power cycles from left to right, but what we have been left with, both the agenda and the people have been totally unacceptable. America has failed itself. What are we going to do about it? I think it depends on how badly the individuals in both party’s are personally hurt.

  • Pzatchok

    They couldn’t find ONE Spanish speaker in the whole staff of ALL of Washington?

    Don’t they at least have one Spanish speaking politician? Even the Republicans have a few of those.

    This shows a HUGE lack of simple respect for the Latino voters.

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