US voter rights in translation: Semantic shifts in Spanish renderings of “felony”

Felons’ voting rights have featured prominently in debates over voter suppression in the United States, particularly in Florida, where a 2018 state constitutional amendment reinstated voting rights to the state’s 1.4 million former felons (Robles 2018). Florida also has a high concentration of Spanish-speaking voters with Limited English Proficiency (LEP), making Spanish-language voting information crucial. Inadequate translations of voter information may misrepresent voter eligibility for LEP Spanish-speaking former felons in Florida. Using a parallel corpus, this article’s central research question investigates how semantic shifts occur in Spanish translations of “felony” and “felon” in online voter information for seven Florida counties. The results reveal a number of misrepresentative semantic shifts in both human- and machine-translated Spanish voter information. Such shifts may impinge on individuals’ constitutional rights.