Pub. 4 2015-2016 Issue 1

24 San Diego Dealer notice must be provided in English and that foreign language. A creditor who fails to provide this notification may not sue or enforce any security interest against the co-signer. While one can argue that this requirement is not triggered with standard co-buyer situations (since co-buyers do receive the benefits of the contract), the risk of unenforceability against a co-buyer or co-lessee for failure to provide the notice is too great for dealers not to provide the notice. In any event, finance companies often require a signed copy of this notice as a condition of buying the underlying contract. [Reference: Civil Code §§ 1799.91; 1799.95] What Else is Coming? Given the political sensitivity towards negotiated transactions with foreign-language speakers and policymaker fears of potential industry abuses, there’s always a risk of legislation adding more languages to the current list of five, or other technical changes that may require a change in your business operations. Just last year, a Senate Bill (SB 245, Correa, D—Santa Ana) mademinor changes to the statistical findings in the foreign language translation statute. The changes, which didn’t have any real effect on the law, updated the data on California foreign language speakers based upon the last American Community Survey as part of the Census Bureau's population estimate. All the same, this shows that the legislature remains vigilant in this area. For data geeks like us at AAS, here’s the latest data on California’s population by language spoken at home (excluding“other” categories and languages with a population of less than 100,000 speakers): [Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2009-2013 5-Year American Community Survey] As readers can clearly see, there remains a significant gap between the fifth-most-spoken foreign language (Korean), and the next language on the list (Armenian). Does this mean that we’re safe from additional translation mandates being added in the coming years? In California, we wouldn’t bet on it—particularly given the recent changed interpretation of the law from the Court of Appeal earlier this year. Language Spoken at Home Estimated Population English Only 19,782,598 Spanish 10,105,424 Chinese 1,058,231 Tagalog 764,743 Vietnamese 521,534 Korean 372,742 Armenian 191,928 Persian 191,138 Arabic 153,635 Russian 151,685 Hindi 149,301 Japanese 140,575 French 126,083 German 110,575 Total 35,131,429 Continued from page 23