[cogman10]

What will you do if you are arrested by mistake?

Innocent people are arrested all the time. You can't just "obey all the laws" and assume you won't have a run in.

Without the legal protection to get a translator, you are assuming after being arrested you can simply call a translation service. Yet, you should know that most countries and most cops will take your cell phone.

It's a humanitarian principle that before being prosecuted you should at a minimum know why you are being prosecuted.

> I certainly don’t expect them to be provided freely.

I never said they had to (though I think they should). What's more important is that you have access to translation services.

[SoftTalker]

Generally if you are a tourist, on a tourist visa, doing touristy things in a place where lots of tourists go, there will be multilingual (probably at least English) support. If you're going deep off the beaten path into China or Mexico or Russia or some other part of the world where tourists are rare and the local language is all most people know, then you should be think about how you are going to function in both ordinary and exceptional circumstances, including "what if I get arrested?"

[cogman10]

I'm not talking about going off the beaten path. You can be arrested anywhere for any reason. Just being in a "touristy" location doesn't make you safe.

Even so, having translation support regardless of how far off the beaten path you are is something that should be consider a human right.

[ahmeneeroe-v2]

Sorry no, I do not consider it a human right.

You're also focusing on the low hanging fruit (a tourist getting falsely accused). What about voting materials or passport applications?

I do not expect other countries to make citizen-specific materials available to me in my language. I am also totally against making US-citizen-specific materials available in non-english language.

E.g. I do not want someone who doesn't speak English voting in local elections.

[cogman10]

> You're also focusing on the low hanging fruit

Right, because that's the strongest position for why we should have, at a minimum, translation services for someone facing imprisonment.

Why instead of addressing this case are you pivoting to an argument I did not and am not making? You are straw manning me.

> What about voting materials or passport applications?

Nice to have, not a need to have. With perhaps the exception accommodations made for someone that's blind. But that can literally just be a poll worker that helps someone fill out a ballot. No need to print out braille ballots.

[ahmeneeroe-v2]

I'm looking at another use-case further down the spectrum. I don't believe you're making an argument for/against those things. On the contrary, I am expanding the argument to what I believe is a more reasonable scenario to analyze this new fed gov policy.

Unfortunately our government does not engage in nuance well, so if I have to sacrifice translation services for criminal defendants in order to secure against ballots, passports, and other citizen-specific materials in foreign languages I am willing to make that tradeoff.

[cogman10]

> Unfortunately our government does not engage in nuance well

It certainly does and it's certainly not hard to put in exclusive language. There's no slippery slope here. A simple bill of "Anyone being prosecuted has the right to access translation services" would do (and we already have provisions like that in the criminal code). It can be amended right into our criminal justice legal code.

You are now creating a false dichotomy.