In US K-12 education, the Spanish language is subject to practices and policies that limit its expression, especially among racialized Latinx students. However, higher education claims to view Spanish as a positive form of diversity. We therefore examine college admissions essays to analyze how students strategically deploy Spanish in light of these contradictions. We use two years of undergraduate application essays (n = 276,768) and metadata submitted to the University of California by every self-identified Latinx applicant and a racially representative random sample of non-Latinx applicants. To identify Spanish language usage in the text, we develop a computational mixed methods approach by combining machine translation and human reading. Spanish was used by 33% of Latinx and 15% of non-Latinx students with stylistic variation by class and ethnicity. We also find that lower income Mexican and Central American applicants were the most likely to use substantive forms of Spanish in their admissions essays as well as provide translations into English. We posit that this self-translation is an example of students identifying cultural mismatch between themselves and university admissions offices. This linguistic strategy, which we call strategic Spanish, sheds light on how language, culture, and ethnicity intersect in high-stakes evaluation and also helps surface the potential for machine translation as a method for social scientific inquiry.

中文翻译：

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多语言和不匹配：大学招生论文中西班牙语的使用


在美国 K-12 教育中，西班牙语受到限制其表达的实践和政策的影响，尤其是在拉丁裔学生中。然而，高等教育声称将西班牙语视为多元化的积极形式。因此，我们检查大学招生论文，分析学生如何根据这些矛盾战略性地运用西班牙语。我们使用了每位自我认定的拉丁裔申请人和具有种族代表性的非拉丁裔申请人的随机样本向加州大学提交的两年本科申请论文（n = 276,768）和元数据。为了识别文本中的西班牙语用法，我们通过结合机器翻译和人类阅读开发了一种计算混合方法。 33% 的拉丁裔学生和 15% 的非拉丁裔学生使用西班牙语，不同阶层和种族的语言风格有所不同。我们还发现，收入较低的墨西哥和中美洲申请人最有可能在其招生论文中使用西班牙语的实质性形式，并提供英语翻译。我们认为这种自译是学生发现自己与大学招生办公室之间文化不匹配的一个例子。这种语言策略，我们称之为战略西班牙语，揭示了语言、文化和种族在高风险评估中如何交叉，也有助于揭示机器翻译作为社会科学探究方法的潜力。