Peter Jackson faced this dilemma with The Lord of the Rings, but managed to make his vision of middle-earth open to both the casual viewer and the Elvish-as-a-second-language citizen alike.
China has always had censorship, he said, and there's a language among citizens that acknowledges it; many call the government the Ministry of Truth.
Without Section 5's preclearance requirement, Congress found, "racial and language minority citizens will be deprived of the opportunity to exercise their right to vote, or will have their votes diluted, undermining the significant gains made by minorities in the last 40 years".
Congress concluded that, unless the law was reauthorized, "racial and language minority citizens will be deprived of the opportunity to exercise their right to vote, or will have their votes diluted, undermining the significant gains made by minorities in the last 40 years".
He tracks down exiled families of the disappeared and shows the reality of life on the streets of Minsk, the Belarussian capital, where old women are dragged off the streets by military police for speaking their own language and citizens are bundled into cars by the security service in broad daylight.
Under the Nordic Language Convention, citizens of the Nordic countries speaking Swedish have the opportunity to use their native language when interacting with official bodies in other Nordic countries without being liable to any interpretation or translation costs.
Without the VRA's protections, Congress wrote, the evidence is clear that "racial and language minority citizens will be deprived of the opportunity to exercise their right to vote, or will have their votes diluted".
"According to the Language Act, common citizens should be entitled to communicate with Swedish authorities in Swedish," she said in a telephone interview from Stockholm last week.
The widespread assumption is that few Americans speak more than one language, compared with citizens of other nations — and that we have little interest in learning to speak another.
She has, he writes, "an ability to puncture her colleagues' bloodless abstractions and tendentious arguments, and to explain the constitutional stakes in plain language that all citizens can understand".
