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Spotted at Walgreens: American Exceptionalism
I saw this sign at my local Walgreen’s and I have to admit my first reaction was irritation.
Not because the company offers a menu of languages with which to interact with its customers. On the contrary, I think that’s probably smart business. Good for them.
No, it’s the words, “It’s your right.”
Is it? Is it really your “right” to come to a country and insist that your pharmacist speak Hmong? Or Russian or Persian or Armenian?
(I’m ignoring, for the moment, that the list of languages it’s “your right” to use when speaking to your pharmacist includes Arabic.)
I travel a lot. And I’ve been to some really way-out places. And as a result of my compulsion to eat everything in sight, I’ve also spent a fair amount of time gesturing and pointing and making humiliating charades in pharmacies worldwide. No one ever told me, anywhere, anyplace, anyhow, that it was “my right” to speak English to the pharmacist.
Published in General
Then maybe you should need to elaborate what you meant by “So maybe the “rights” language is just there for show.” To me that implied that you were asserting that the language in the boxes below negated the “rights” language that prompted Rob to create the OP.
OK, I’ll try to elaborate.
It’s funny that they didn’t put the language of “rights” in the only portion that the non-English speaker can read. The only people who know they have some imagined right to an interpreter are those who don’t need it. To me it smacks of typical government fail, but also signals that maybe deep down we know how silly our obsession with “rights” are and that it doesn’t translate to other cultures and is therefore nonsense. In the end we say it cause it sounds good, not because it has any meaning. Like those tasteless white puffy rice noodles used to garnish my pho, they are just there for show.
-E
This actually makes sense to do, which is why they probably don’t. It would make the most sense for the menu to be in English; the pharmacist makes the call and the customer points at the chart.
-E
There are a variety of prompt menu formats available. California’s law (you want part d) merely states that you have to be able to cater to customers without good English, with written policies showing how you do that. The individual company can decide on the details. For most, for the reasons you say, a telephone translation service will be most appropriate, such as this one.
Brilliant! you beat me to it.
As I read the law, the drugstore is required to serve a customer in any language in the world. A logistical impossibility. Also, I notice the service you linked to is “Pay as you go”, meaning the drug store has to pay for it. Yet another costly mandate by the government with negligible benefit.
Hmmm, let me guess, the owner of that telephonic translation service is a large political donor.
No Welsh? I decry this microaggression against the Welsh people. Stop oppressing me mate.
“E pluribus unum” becomes “E pluribus pluribus”
No, you only need to provide it “if interpretive services in such language are available”. Having a contract with RXTran, for instance, would be enough.
It’s not all that expensive, and the benefit is not negligible; my girlfriend’s father was a pharmacist in 2006, and they had this system then, before it was legally mandated, because it’s pretty important that people know what to do with their medicine, both from a life saving/ humanitarian perspective and a customer loyalty perspective.
I’m not saying the law should have passed but, like the vast bulk of laws, there are trade offs involved.
Pharmacy translators. Hmm …
Establishing shot of that Ethiopian neighborhood just south of CBS. Guy with a thick African accent walks into the pharmacy and tries to ask “have you got any Coca-Cola?”
Only the druggist hears “have you got anything for Ebola?”
Hilarity ensues. Or at least a scene like an old Firesign Theater routine.
So yeah, what with various assorted poxes and plagues zipping across borders and past airline screeners … I can live with pharmacy translators. In fact, keep an eye on your local one. When he packs up his family and heads out of town, there goes the canary in your coal mine.
The law is written very vaguely. The laws says on its face says that the Pharmacy shall “have procedures in place to help patients with limited or no English proficiency understand the information on the label…in the patient’s language.” It then goes on to say that “The pharmacy shall, at a minimum, provide interpretive services in the patient’s language, if interpretive services in such language are available, during all hours that pharmacy is open either in person or by use of a third-party interpretive service available by telephone…”
As I read that section, the operative requirement is the Pharmacy is required to serve everyone in their native language. The language you highlighted is under the “at a minimum” which does not imply sufficiency to comply with the law. Interpretive services are theoretically available for every language spoken by more than two people, so that is the law’s operative requirement; it is not constrained in any way by the languages available from third-party translation services.
If you perform the minimum under the law, you’re complying with the law. The system was already widespread in California, and I don’t believe the law resulted in big changes.