The Consumer Federation of America joined numerous civil rights and consumer advocacy groups in a letter to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), applauding the years-long effort that the CFPB has undertaken to expand language accessibility in our consumer financial markets and its to mandate that servicers provide language assistance to borrowers seeking loss mitigation assistance.

The letter supports the CFPB’s proposal to require servicers to provide specified written communications in both English and Spanish to all borrowers, along with its proposal to require servicers to provide specified written communications in five servicer-selected languages upon borrower request and its proposal to require that servicers provide language assistance for specified oral communications.

The letter recommends several modifications to the proposed rule, including expanding the mandate for oral interpretation to cover more than five languages, requiring that the five servicer-selected languages for written translations be based on a regular assessment of the language needs of the servicer’s borrower population, and removing the provisions that requires servicers to provide translated written materials when the borrower received marketing in that language.