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June 08, 2003 at 08:00 PM
What Insurance Companies Can Do To Improve Spanish Translations
By Jaime R. Carlo-Casellas
The rapidly growing and evolving Hispanic population in the United States–with an annual spending power that currently exceeds $540 billion–represents one of the most alluring markets in the country.
Recognizing this, progressive insurance companies are focusing on developing the infrastructure necessary to capture this market.
The deployment of this infrastructure is a multifaceted, evolutionary process, which often begins with the dissemination of materials in Spanish.
Unfortunately, the development of effective Spanish-language materials is hampered by the fact that insurance companies are still struggling to improve contract comprehensibility in English.
Although some companies claim that the readability of insurance policies has reached an irreducible level, review authorities are convinced that much needs to and can be done to increase consumer understanding. Until then, the inability to decipher ambiguous contracts will continue to plague the consumer.
This is true not only for those Hispanic consumers with limited knowledge of English but also for consumers with sophisticated English language skills.
In their attempts to control readability, most states require insurance companies to issue readable and understandable policies. To comply with these requirements, companies aim to reach people with a 10th grade reading level or lower. However, despite state requirements, some companies continue to issue contracts with passages that are so ambiguous that their meaning baffles even highly educated English readers. To cite an example:
