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Spanish is by a wide margin the most common source language in the metro, concentrated on the south side around the Capitol Hill district and spreading well beyond it. Most of the records are Mexican, with Central American documents alongside them. A Mexican birth certificate is a printed registry form rather than a letter: it has fixed fields, a registry entry with a book and page reference, and on recent copies a personal identifier printed as a long alphanumeric string. Those coded fields are what a school registrar or a court clerk actually reads, so a translation that turns the form into flowing prose is less useful than one that keeps the boxes. Both family names belong on the English version too, since Spanish-speaking countries give a child the paternal surname followed by the maternal one and American forms have room for only one.

Vietnamese is the second, and it comes from a community that has been here since the resettlement that followed 1975, centred on the Asian District along North Classen Boulevard. Vietnamese is written in Latin letters, which misleads people into thinking it is easy to process. It is arguably the least forgiving Latin orthography there is. A single vowel can carry two marks at once: one that changes the vowel itself, as in ă, â, ê, ô, ơ and ư, and a second that marks one of the tones. Stack them and you get letters like ệ and ự. Photocopy that page, fax it, or scan it at low resolution, and the smaller mark disappears. The word that remains is still a valid Vietnamese word, just a different one, which is exactly the failure that is hard to catch by eye.

Vietnamese names compound the problem. The family name comes first, the given name last, which is the reverse of the American convention and guarantees that somebody somewhere will file the person under the wrong field. A small number of family names cover a very large share of the population, so the name alone does not identify anybody: the full string, diacritics included, is the identifying information. When an English version strips the marks for the sake of a database, it has thrown away most of what made the name specific.

There is a third layer worth naming even though it is not usually what arrives in an upload. This state is the seat of dozens of tribal nations, among them the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Muscogee and Seminole, and Cherokee is written in a syllabary rather than an alphabet, the one Sequoyah devised in the 1820s, where each of its characters stands for a whole syllable instead of a single sound. It is a reminder that a writing system is not a detail of presentation. Getting a script wrong does not produce clumsy text; it produces text that cannot be read at all.