Make driver’s test understandable to more people

A driver’s license is a crucial document that many people must secure before seeking employment, paying for rent and essentials and generally becoming full-fledged members of society. It’s unfortunate that Hawaii, supposedly famous for its melting-pot image, has recently raised this hurdle higher for many people that it otherwise welcomes.

The state has in recent years balked at providing any support for languages other than English in administering its driver’s licensing test, a fact that last week prompted action from a group promoting greater language access to government services. Led by advocates for the Micronesian and Filipino communities, representatives had presented a petition seeking translations of the license test into Chuukese, Marshallese and Ilokano.

As it happens, the shortcomings of Hawaii’s services to non-English speakers is worse than many people have imagined, said Kim Harman, policy director for Faith Action for Community Equity.

The nonprofit organization and representatives of the various language groups have been leading the charge and last week met with Caroline Sluyter, spokeswoman for the state Department of Transportation.

Harman said that between 2001 and 2010, the test had been offered in English, Tagalog, Japanese, Mandarin, Korean, Vietnamese, Samoan and Tongan.

More recently, Sluyter said, legislation mandated the addition of new questions to the test, in all its available languages. There were no funds set aside to do the translations, she added, so the DOT complied with the new requirements by presenting the exam only in English.

Of course, it’s prudent to promote fluency and literacy in English for anyone hoping to live here. But that process takes time and meanwhile people ought to have the capacity to earn a living. While Oahu is endowed with a good bus system providing public transportation, schedules don’t always mesh with bus timetables. The situation is worse on the other islands.

Curtailing practical employment options is not a smart way to approach a population group that Hawaii wants to become better acclimated. The Chuukese and Marshallese groups, part of the Micronesian wave of recent decades, are relatively new arrivals, whose open-ended migration is enabled through the federal Compact of Free Association.

It’s startling that no language accommodations had ever been made for those Filipinos who speak Ilokano — in Hawaii, a relatively well-established group — and now all non-English speakers have been stumbling through on a test they don’t understand. Advocates have surveyed even the more fluent English speakers in these groups and found that they couldn’t grasp some vocabulary and idiomatic expressions on the test — "sound your horn" and "fail-safe latch" are just two examples.

Setting aside the barrier this erects against so many people, the lack of comprehension about road safety rules and the expectations of fellow drivers on highways create a public safety problem, besides.

Sluyter said DOT is finding funds to re-establish the old tests and add the new languages, including a previous request, Spanish. Ideally, the translations should cover study materials instead of only the tests.

But that’s at least a start, propelling Hawaii government in the right direction, toward serving the population that actually lives and works here.