Since we got back from our trip, I’ve noticed a bunch of red and white signs labeling various items around Charleston in both English and Spanish. I mentioned that I was a bit confused about what they were and that it bothered me^[a].

This morning, I got an e-mail with the subject line “Here’s your sign”, which linked to a Charleston Daily Mail article that explained everything:

City artists Amy Williams and Chris Dutch hung up the signs, which translate the names of Charleston landmarks and common street scenes into Spanish, as a special exhibit for FestivALL.

The city’s fourth annual arts and culture festival starts next week, but the “Press 2 for Spanish” installation was unveiled last week as a prelude to the 10-day event.

My curiosity appeased, I was content, until I got to the end of the article. It seems that some of the signs were removed by city maintenance, because workers didn’t know the signs were officially authorized.

What does that tell you? It tells me that the bureaucracy in city government isn’t particularly efficient at letting its employees have information that they need. The artists had a somewhat… different… take.

The artists are working on getting them put back up, but the mishaps sort of prove the point Williams and Dutch were trying to make.

“There’s a whole world out there, and in it, people speak all kinds of languages,” the artists’ statement says. “Yet many Americans only know English.”

That might make some sense if the signs said on them (in Spanish only), “These signs were officially approved by the City of Charleston^[b],” but they say nothing of the sort. Instead, they say things like, “La Farola / Street Light”, which gives no indication whatsoever to maintenance workers in the city that they should leave the signs alone.

The workers in this case were not motivated by the fact that they didn’t know a language other than English, nor were they acting out of some hostility toward another culture. They were, as far as they knew, doing their jobs by removing signs that they thought were not officially permitted to be placed on city property.

I’m not arguing that the artists’ point is invalid. Many Americans do only known English, and while I don’t think we should be required to know more languages, a better understanding of other cultures and languages is not a bad goal. I just don’t think that the removal of some signs by maintenance workers has anything to do with their point at all.

1. The signs themselves didn’t bother me, just that I didn’t understand why they’d suddenly showed up, nor why the items they labelled seemed to be random — traffic signals, fountains, ice cream shops… [↩]
2. Though, even then, it wouldn’t really mean much — the workers would have no way of knowing that the statement was true, even if they could read it [↩]