First, I hope you all are doing well and finding plenty of opportunity to interpret.

Second, I want to share with you a book I recently read that is valuable in understanding hearing and deafness from a perspective different than the traditional interpreting perspective and completely valid.

I Can Hear You Whisper by Lydia Denworth is a mother’s journey in navigating the worlds surrounding deafness after her third son was born deaf.  Ms. Denworth’s day job is as a science writer and so she knows how to thoroughly research scientific aspects of a subject and presents them in a narrative easy for the public to understand.  What Ms. Denworth does in I Can Hear You Whisper  is almost magical.The book is a love story to her son, a prayer that he will have opportunities equal to his hearing older brothers, and a navigation through deafness historically, culturally and scientifically.  We, as interpreters, claim the moral high ground around deafness saying that we accept Deaf people as whole people while we assume audiologists, ENTs, and even hearing parents of Deaf don’t see our people as whole.  I urge you to keep an open mind while reading this book because you’ll see a mom who loves her son so completely that he becomes her life’s work for the better part of a decade.  You’ll see doctors impacted by hearing loss trying to do their best to bring communication back to people they love.  You’ll see the dynamics of Deaf culture through a different lens–the lens of a mother wondering if her son will abandon the family home for another culture and trying to decipher the new culture.

Ms. Denworth sits down with the inventors of Cochlear implants, neurologists who research hearing, staff and Gallaudet and RIT.  She talks about the Deaf woman she hired to teach her family sign language as well as how scary it was for her and her son when he lost what residual hearing he had.  Through it all, she imagines who her son will be as an adult.

Ms. Denworth also talks plainly about the very real way that having less access to sound negatively impacts a person’s life socially and educationally.  This is a very real impact that we, as interpreters like to brush over, but Ms. Denworth, as a mother, is extremely sensitive to.

If I were running an interpreter training program, I would have I Can Hear You Whisper as required reading.  Barring that, I’m simply recommending it to all of you.  If you read the book, please let me know what you think.

The post A Love Story for My Son, a review of I Can Hear You Whisper by Lydia Denworth appeared first on Signtalk Foundation.

As interpreters we play a large role in inclusion. We are often hired so one or two Deaf people can be included in a meeting or event. In a world with full access, rather than inclusion, everyone would sign, making interpreters unnecessary and making Deaf people full participants. While there are a few spaces where ASL is the dominate language and Deaf norms are upheld, this is unlikely to become the standard in American life any time soon. So, how can we help make the spaces we inhabit more egalitarian?

When I arrive at an assignment for the first time, I do not introduce myself as “John’s interpreter,” which bolsters the misconception that the interpreter is only present for the benefit of the Deaf person. I say, for example, “Hi, I’m Amy. I’m the class’s interpreter for the semester,” or “I’ll be the interpreter for your meeting.” I want to start our working relationship with a clear signal that everyone in the room is using my services.

This mindset extends to how we use CDIs. I don’t say, “The consumer needs a CDI.” This implies that the deficit resides in the Deaf consumer, who lacks some quality that does not allow him or her to use a hearing interpreter alone. Actually, the deficit lies in the hearing consumer who does not know sign language, and in me, who does not know the foreign sign that the consumer uses, or does not have the skills to communicate with a consumer with nonstandard language use.   Rather, I say that “the meeting requires a CDI,” or even that I lack the skills to communicate with this specific consumer and therefore require a CDI as a team to effectively facilitate communication.

Do these subtle changes in language make a difference? I can’t be sure. But as an interpreter who respects the power of language to communicate one’s beliefs and perspectives, I believe that words matter. By choosing words that do not contribute to the audist assumptions that spoken English is the natural language in any environment and only Deaf people need accommodations, I believe I’m chipping away at the assumptions too many of our hearing consumers make.

One challenge facing most every interpreter is negotiating turn-taking between signing and speaking participants in a meeting. Many hearing interpreters, myself included, privilege spoken comments over signed comments, forcing the Deaf participants to wait longer to get their points across. When a Deaf consumer begins signing at the same time that a hearing consumer begins to speak, do we interrupt the hearing person to prioritize the Deaf person’s right to contribute? While there are many factors to consider, including the formality of the meeting and the relative statuses of the participants, too often hearing interpreters relay hearing people’s comments first. This is the very nature of “inclusion”: Deaf people may participate, but never at the expense of any hearing person’s power.

To combat my habit of favoring what I hear over what I see, I make a special effort to begin speaking, in order to take the floor, as soon as a Deaf consumer begins signing. Depending on the dynamics of the situation, I may use a comment such as, “I want to jump in here to share my perspective on this…” or “Not to interrupt, but I did want a chance to say….” These introductory phrases can smooth over any overlap or competition for the right to speak. They also can fill the silence while you’re receiving the message and formulating an English interpretation before you begin voicing.

My perspective has shifted through the years. Instead of viewing my role as providing Deaf people with access to the hearing world, I now see how I can help transform the spaces where I work into level playing fields, where Deaf people may freely contribute to a project, influence their colleagues, or guide the conversation. Until every person learns to sign, we will be in the rooms where inclusion can, hopefully, transform into full participation.

The post Inclusion, with Conditions appeared first on Signtalk Foundation.

This story rubbed me the wrong way for a few reasons. The man has the right under the American with Disabilities Act to a paid note-taker of his choosing. He should not have had to be accompanied by his mother to attend classes and have access to note-taking. I can only imagine the impediments Marty faced to making friends or asking for dates while attending class with his mother. Was he less willing to participate in class, afraid of asking a simplistic question or giving a wrong response in front of his mother? Was she even a skilled note-taker, and was she willing to adapt her style to suit her son/consumer, or did she think she knew best?   None of these questions is answered, because not one of them was asked — or at least not reported on in the published story.How often are Deaf consumers ignored while hearing teachers, doctors or co-workers speak directly to the interpreter? Hearing people who have made no effort to get to know their Deaf colleagues or classmates are never shy to ask the interpreter how to say something in ASL, or inquire whether we have Deaf people in our families or how we got involved in the interpreting profession. Of course, I often defer to the Deaf consumer to answer questions about ASL and the Deaf community, but I have to wonder why do these people ask me in the first place, instead of the Deaf person whom they’ve known for months or years?

Chapman University took this focus on the service provider to an extreme by granting Marty’s mother an honorary degree for being her son’s note-taker. She did not pay tuition, nor did she take any tests or write any papers. She had not accomplished extraordinary achievement in the field of business, as most all honorary MBA degree recipients have. She was a service provider for a person who had the legal right to the service, and she worked for free, allowing the university to avoid the cost. For this, she was rewarded with a degree others work for years to earn.

Years ago, the Deaf actress Marlee Matlin appeared on The Tonight Show, and the host, I believe it was still Johnny Carson at the time, asked questions of Matlin’s interpreter, Jack Jason. This was long before I was an interpreter—I had only begun learning ASL—but I remember wondering why Carson was directing questions to the interpreter when Matlin was his guest. While it’s understandable that the language barrier can seem daunting to hearing people who don’t sign, interpreters are present to bridge the gap, not widen the chasm. Let’s not allow hearing people’s focus on us to be one more obstacle to Deaf people’s full participation in their gatherings, or in forming direct relationships with others.

Interpreters, note-takers and other service providers do important work. In the best-case scenario, they allow Deaf people and people with disabilities to better connect with their teachers, co-workers, health care providers. In the worst cases, they block those connections, stealing the attention and forming relationships of their own, rather than acting as a conduit for their consumers. In short, we can stand between our Deaf and hearing consumers so each must look around us to see the other, or we can stand behind our Deaf consumers as they face the wider world.

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