Obamacare’s Spanish Language Website Is Full of Garbled Translations

Like much of the rollout of Obamacare’s federal
exchange system, the launch of the Spanish-language version of the
site hasn’t gone so well.

It was delayed on multiple occasions, and eventually went live
in “soft-launch” mode two months after the originally scheduled
October start-up date.

It’s still not ready for prime time. We’re now the middle of
January, and apparently the site is still full of garbled
translations and bad information,
according to the Associated Press:

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.

In other words, work on the Spanish-language site, as on the
rest of it, was late and remains sloppy. And that’s despite the
fact that Spanish-speakers,
many of whom are young, healthy, and uninsured, are one of the
administration’s target demographics for health insurance sign-ups
under the law.