30 Sep The Language Access for All Act: From Proposition to Practice
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The Language Access for All Act of 2026 was officially introduced to the House of Representatives in January and to the Senate in July. This bill seeks to improve access to federal services for individuals with limited English proficiency (LEP).
What Limited English Proficiency (LEP) means
According to the bill: An individual for whom English is not a primary language and who has a limited ability to read, speak, write, or understand the English language (including an individual who is able to speak or understand the English language but has a limited ability to read or write the English language).
The key points of the bill:
- Bilingual/multilingual staff: having officers who speak more than one language and can provide information to interested individuals more quickly, more effectively, and more cost-efficiently.
- Emergency support accessibility: in disasters, public health crises, and other urgent circumstances, specify how multilingual communications will be meaningfully provided to such populations during such situations.
- AI and automated language assistance services: may not fully replace any qualified language assistance services of the agency with artificial intelligence or machine translation services. Will require a qualified human translator or interpreter to verify any use of such service or machine translation by the agency.
What will this mean for people who do not speak English? Will this help communication with their doctors or lawyers? Will they better understand emergency signs? These concerns also resonate in the minds of second-generation Americans, who must help their parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles navigate a system that can leave them isolated.
This is an opportunity to provide meaningful language access and bring people closer to their benefits and civil rights protections. The fact that this issue is in the hands of the legislators who shape the future of the nation is excellent news.
No time to wait
Now that the proposal is before both chambers, legislators must study the bill’s viability, call on experts, make revisions, and a long list of steps that could delay the implementation (sometimes eternally). However, Mendoza has been taking action for over 30 years.
Our Language Services team translates into more than 85 languages. Spanish is our main language, but we work with experts qualified to translate Latin and non-Latin languages, right-to-left text, Cyrillic, logograms, abugidas, and more. We even receive surprising requests like translating from English into Malayalam, a language from southwestern India. In short, if a client requests a language, we will do everything within our reach to provide a reliable, high-quality translation.
We have bilingual and multilingual staff in every department who help our clients wherever they have a complex project or a timely consultation. We have seen situations where clients need to publish urgent information on their websites and come to us for help adapting the message into other languages as quickly as possible.
Intercultural communication is a part of who we are. Its ideas are woven into the fabric of our daily lives—from our Language Services team clarifying messages for multilingual communities to easygoing weekend conversations with our loved ones.
We know that language access is essential to supporting people with LEP to successfully receive health coverage, medication, or urgent care. Language is essential to helping people, especially when integrating into a new country, a new home. But it is not an automatic process. Learning a language is tough—it requires time, focus, commitment, and money. Factors that many people cannot afford.
As for AI, well, that is still a developing chapter. But our processes remain manual. Our work is performed by human translators. Reviews are done by human reviewers. Projects are delivered by human project coordinators. If a message was created with empathy and precision, it is human. Our achievements are human. And if there is an error, well, it is a human who corrects it.
Legislation is a marathon of a process. We hope the Language Access for All Act is signed into law, but until then we’ll keep doing what we’ve always done.