This July, we celebrated 250 years since the Declaration of Independence was first read aloud on a Philadelphia street corner. What almost nobody mentions in the anniversary coverage: that crowd wasn’t listening in one language.
Who was present that day?
- German-speaking farmers
- French officers
- Dutch merchants
- People from dozens of Indigenous nations
All were already part of the fabric of this place.
250 years later, the US Congress still hasn’t picked an official language — not because we forgot to, but because for most of our history, we didn’t think we needed to. That’s not a footnote. I think it’s one of the most American facts about America.
How This Shapes My Work at a Multilingual Translation Service Company
My husband (and co-founder of the company) and I came to this work sideways. We’re both engineers by training — I’m Venezuelan, he’s Argentine — and we built our careers in IT in the States before we built this company. I took what I expected to be a short break from that career.
What I found instead was a need that never went away: every industry I’d touched ran into the same wall the moment something — a manual, a contract, a safety notice — had to cross a language line.
The break turned into a business. That is how our language translation company, JR Language Translation Services, was born.
Lessons from Our Own Home Turned Into Our Lives’ Mission
We also learned something in our own kitchen before we ever put it in a company mission statement: Venezuelan Spanish and Argentine Spanish share a backbone, but there are still meaningful differences.
He says “vos,” I say “tú.” Words that are perfectly ordinary in Caracas mean something else entirely in Buenos Aires. Two native Spanish speakers, married to each other, still occasionally “translating” for one another.
It’s a small, daily reminder that “we speak the same language” is rarely as simple as it sounds — and it’s part of why I don’t think of language access as an abstraction. I think of it as Tuesday.
The Nation’s Founders Didn’t Choose English. They Chose Not to Choose.
When the founding documents were drafted, English was the common tongue of convenience, not law. There was no requirement that it be anyone’s only language:
- German communities ran their own newspapers and schools well into the 20th century.
- Indigenous nations had languages that predated the republic by millennia.
- Immigrant communities built entire civic and commercial lives — churches, mutual aid societies, banks — in languages other than English, and the country absorbed it all without collapsing.
In 1923, the Supreme Court made this explicit in Meyer v. Nebraska, striking down a state law that banned foreign-language instruction and ruling that the right to learn and use another language falls under the liberties the Constitution protects. That case is 100 years old. It’s still the clearest judicial statement we have that multilingualism isn’t a threat to American identity — it’s a feature of it.
What “Making Room” for a Language Actually Means
Here’s the part I keep coming back to: when we talk about language access, we’re rarely just talking about grammar and vocabulary. We’re talking about whether someone gets to:
- Understand what their doctor is telling them before they sign a form
- Read an evacuation order before a storm arrives, not after
- Know what a ballot measure actually says before they vote on it
- Walk into a courtroom or a benefits office and be met as a full participant, not a guest
Roughly 68 million people in this country speak a language other than English at home. More than 27 million are considered limited English proficient. That’s not a niche population — it’s close to one in twelve Americans navigating hospitals, schools, and government offices in a language that isn’t fully theirs.
When Hurricane Ida hit New York in 2021, the storm killed 13 residents, many of them limited-English-proficient immigrants living in basement apartments who never received an emergency alert in a language they understood. That’s the sharpest version of the argument I can make: language access – in any community’s worst moments – is the difference between a warning that reaches someone and one that doesn’t.
Around the Nation: Where the Real Work Is Happening
Some of the most encouraging language access innovations I’ve seen aren’t coming from Washington at all — it’s coming from cities:
- New York City has built worker-owned language cooperatives to cover lower-density languages that big vendor contracts often miss
- Washington D.C. centralizes interpreter access for legal and victim services through nonprofit-run interpreter banks
- Houston has built multi-channel emergency alert systems that reach residents in the languages their neighborhoods actually speak
None of these is flashy. All of them are the difference between a policy that exists on paper and one that reaches an actual person at the moment they need it.
An Engineer’s Instinct in a Language Business
People sometimes ask why two engineers ended up running a language company. Honestly, I think the two disciplines have more in common than they look like from the outside. Engineering trains you to distrust anything that “mostly works”: a tolerance is a tolerance, a system either holds under load, or it doesn’t. That instinct turned out to matter more than I expected once machine translation and AI tools entered this industry.
The tools are genuinely useful now — faster, cheaper, often quite good on a first pass. But “quite good” isn’t the same as verified, and the gap between those two shows up exactly where it matters most:
- a mistranslated dosage
- a contract clause that shifts meaning by one word
- a safety instruction that reads differently in translation than in the original
That’s an engineering problem as much as a language one — you don’t ship on “probably fine,” you build in the checkpoint that catches the failure before it reaches someone who’s relying on it. That’s the mindset we brought with us, and it’s shaped how we think about pairing technology with human judgment rather than choosing one over the other.
JR Language: Proudly Celebrating the Multilingual Fabric of the United States
I don’t think the story of language in America is really a story about accommodation — treating other languages as something to be tolerated or permitted. I think it’s a story about capacity:
A country that is home to 800 immigrant languages and 150 Indigenous languages and still functions phenomenally well across all sectors is demonstrating an aspiration that most of the world often lacks the infrastructure to realize.
250 years in, it remains a sign that the “American dream” is getting stronger every day.
That’s the belief I’ve built a career – and a company – around.
Jacqueline Ruffolo is the Founder of JR Language Translation Services, a professional language solutions company serving 50 states and worldwide with 100+ language services.
