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Speaking of things I am working on other than my PhD, this. Thanks for asking! The role and responsibilities of the Deaf Interpreter (DI) are constantly under review. Many have claimed that the most common task is not even “interpreting” in the strictest sense. One interpreter educator and deaf native signer argued: “They do not translate from a language into another except for the rare situations where they translate from printed English into ASL or from one sign language to another sign language.”1 Fair enough. The DI job varies widely, and includes mirroring, sight translation, all of the tactile and close-vision tasks, among many other things. Maybe we have been miscategorizing some of the intra- / interlingual and intercultural transfer, and bulldozing it all into a big “interpreting” pile. Rather than contrive a special case to go “beyond the CPC if necessary” to fulfill some “higher level of ethics,”2 maybe some things can be discussed in terms of other existing functions. This might resolve the “DIs are different! It’s not just interpreting!” and “DIs are the same as any interpreter! Stop saying we’re Deaf!” paradox. In order to not explode both words in the title of “Deaf Interpreter,” I offer these unfinished thoughts on Localis/zation & Adaptation
Localis/zation takes language from one place, and moves it to a more appropriate place for the users. You can insert whatever DEAF-space or Deaf-World metaphor, or Eyeth parable you like here.
For example, one interpreter renders into unadorned English, and the localis/zation specialist converts it into a regional dialect — or an HI feeds a DI working on a platform. I think it is a matter of specificity. Depending on the nature of the interaction and the primary participants, an interpreter might be expected to get people to the right
continent time zone country village, or an exact chair.
Adaptation is about how the interpreted event functions as a whole. What is this language supposed to do, and what is the best format to accomplish that? Transforming a text into a movie or play is an apt metaphor for what all signed language interpreters do. For our purposes, the HI might sketch out the plot, for the DI to animate in Technicolor onstage. Or the reverse: an HI delivers the unabridged version, and the DI distills the salient points to a minor.
If there is still “no standard definition of Deaf interpreting,”3 I think discussing HI–DI teams in these terms could diffuse some of the rhetoric. Whether DIs apply objective judgment or subjective intuition to drop a character or add one, omit or invent dialogue, or turn a salteña into a pasty, I’m guessing Danish gravediggers would be equally satisfied with either.
More on this later, and much more much later!

1. Johnston, E. (2005). Guest editorial. CIT News, 25(2).
2. The National Consortium of Interpreter Education Centers Deaf Interpreter Work Team. (2009). Analysis of deaf interpreter focus group discussions conducted April–July 2007.
3. National Consortium of Interpreter Education Centers Deaf Interpreter Work Team. (2009). Findings of deaf interpreter educator focus groups conducted December 2007.

I know we’ve only just met, but I’ve been at this interpreter history game for over ten years now. In fact, it began February 13th, 2008. It was not a Friday, but it might as well have been. That day, I made a stack of copies for a project I worked very hard on, but was only allowed to share a small portion of it.

I still have the folder.        

Since then, I’ve spent thousands of hours, and the equivalent of two years’ earnings on tuition, research travel, equipment, copies, postage, you name it. I did a master’s in Communication, and now 2/3 of a Translation Studies doctorate—the first such scholarship showing how interpreting emerged in the UK and US, before BSL, ASL or Deaf communities came about.

Here’s evidence of how this accelerates the breakdown of collagen in the face, and pigmentation in the hair: 

2008   vs.   2018

Okay, you cannot see it clearly in the pictures, but things have taken a turn. No matter! The kind of “work” I need to get done may be as expensive, but much more gratifying. After 30 years of not speaking my own words, or using my own voice, it is deeply cathartic to tell our story.

The traditional gift for a 10-year anniversary is aluminum, so here is one of the first figures cast in that metal. It is the god Anteros, born for a playmate to his more famous older brother. He is the god of requited or returned love, which is fitting for a labor like this one, where nothing is lost.

My road to academia has been fraught with traffic delays almost as severe as Piccadilly Circus, where that Anteros statue has balanced for over 100 years. It seems that I have been waiting at least that long. So I got myself an anniversary gift.

Throughout this research, my favorite discovery is a brief reference in a 17th-century Canon law treatise on marriage. I first presented about it five years ago this week, first wrote about it in 2015, and have mentioned it at every available opportunity since. Before his death in 1624, Henry Swinburne declared that if one or both marriage candidates gesture their vows of consent silently, and

“neither of the parties express any words at all, but some third person recite the words…the Contract is of like Efficacy, as if they themselves had mutually expressed the words before recited by that third person” 

Wait, what? A deaf person doesn’t necessarily have to speak the vows, but if the priest prefers to hear the liturgy recited, a third party can read the frozen text while the deaf party gestures, nods, and otherwise indicates willing participation. And it counts as though they had said those exact words themselves. That was almost 400 years ago. 

So I found a deal on an original (1686—it was published posthumously) copy of A treatise of spousals, or matrimonial contracts: Wherein all the questions relating to that subject are ingeniously debated and resolved. I give you, my friends, the unboxing of the first interpreting “textbook” in history:

Leahy, A. (24 Aug 2013). In search of Interpreter 0: Tracing Anglo–American sign langauge interpreting since 1198 A.D. Presented at the Utah Registry of Interpreters for the Deaf, Taylorsville, UT.
Leahy, A. M. (2015). Interpreted communication with deaf parties under Anglo–American common law to 1880 (Master’s thesis). Southern Utah University, Cedar City, UT.
Swinburne, H. (1686). A treatise of spousals, or matrimonial contracts: Wherein all the questions relating to that subject are ingeniously debated and resolved. London: S. Roycroft for R. Clavell.

This post was approved by Johnny Dollar.  

A quick post in response to a request…

In British Deaf history, the figure of the missioner is a complicated one, and will not be examined here. Except to say that in training hearing people to sign and ultimately interpret, these historical pastoral–social service workers deserve credit for recognizing linguistic principles of British Sign Language. Eventually, I will focus more on their theories, methods, and attitudes about L2 instruction in academic writing. For now, here are some fun things!

Rev. Thomas Henry Sutcliffe (1907-1996) lost his hearing and learned BSL as an adult. He afterward published and worked vigorously for the recognition of the community, and the language. In his 1954 booklet Conversation with the Deaf, he enumerates various features of what he called “gestures,” or signs and classifiers. See how he observed indexing, non-manual markers, depictions, instrumental classifiers, synecdoche references, etc. And this is only a fraction of his insights!

In his memoirs, the Rev. Percy Corfmat (1914-1990) revealed he was chosen as the first full-time RADD interpreter in 1938. He grew up signing, but in this 1961 letter to William Stokoe, he confessed some ambivalence about the legitimacy of his parents’ language “gestures and signs”.  In other writing, Corfmat describes signs in usage among various categories of Deaf people, and strategies for effective interpreting along the continuum with English. His request below confirms that missioners were seeking academic sources to inform their work, and wanted to apply linguistic principles to what would eventually be known as BSL (Brennan, 1975).

But Brennan (1975) was not the first to name the manual communication used in various dialects throughout the UK. The Rev. Alan G. K. F. Mackenzie (1911-1997) was the son of a Deaf missioner. In 1966, he reviewed a copy of Stokoe, Casterline and Croneberg’s A Dictionary of American Sign Language on Linguistic Principles which had been published the previous year. Again, he did so in order to share the new findings with his colleagues, and improve their understanding and practices of working among Deaf people. Mackenzie never proselyted “E.S.L.—English Sign Language” like Fant, another Deaf preacher’s son, later would with “Ameslan”. Suffice it to say that neither stuck (notwithstanding any differences with fingerspelling and signing in Scotland and Wales), but update your research, folks! Rev. Mackenzie made one of the first known published attempts at labeling BSL. 

Brennan, M. (1975). Can deaf children acquire language? An evaluation of linguistic principles in deaf education. American Annals of the Deaf, 120(5). 
Corfmat, P. (1990). Please sign here: Insights into the world of the deaf. Worthing: Churchman.
Fant, Jr., L. J. (1972). Ameslan. Silver Spring, MD: National Association of the Deaf.
Mackenzie, A. F. (1966). Dictionary of American Sign Language on Linguistic Principles. Deaf Welfare, 4(6).
Stokoe, W. C., Casterline, D. S., & Croneberg, C. G. (1965). A dictionary of American Sign Language on linguistic principles. Silver Spring, MD: Linstok Press.
Sutcliffe, T. H. (1954). NID Booklet number 491: Conversation with the deaf. London: National Institute for the Deaf.

You may already be familiar with the legendary Alan B. Crammatte (1911-1996) from his work as a teacher, author, and leader in the American Deaf community, who called him “ABC.” 

 

He was both interviewer and subject in several archival films which Gallaudet has digitized and made available on the Web.

 

 

The purpose of this post not his illustrious career, but an enterprising project of the young Crammatte, just before he graduated from Gallaudet in 1932:

During his last semester, Crammatte was either enrolled or serving as a teaching assistant in Irving S. Fusfield‘s English class. This beloved hearing professor seemed to understand the importance of sign language, and his lecture notes included the statement:

“Speech work [is] acquired at the expense of other content subjects.” 

In 1937, Dr. Fusfield also served on a committee for the Conference of Executives of American Schools for the Deaf to abolish the terms “deaf-mute, deaf and dumb, semi-mute, semi-deaf, and mute,” in favor of “Deaf” or “Hard of Hearing”. Significant to interpreters, the 1970 (no. 1) issue of VIEWS reported that he had recently become a member of RID. His name sign looks like FINLAND, presumably for the dimple on his chin:

In 1932, Dr. Fusfield’s class participated in a two-part study which would have supported his ongoing research to understand how Deaf people think. Working backwards, Part 2 gave a brief sentence in English, and recorded how different students rendered it into signs. Here is the sentence in Fusfield’s handwriting:

Here’s the transcription: 

Exercise

How the deaf mind works in ideation.

The sentence: “The cook’s dress is beginning to show signs of age.” Recorded by the observer as different individuals sign it.

The same file also includes a bundle of paper slips that recorded each student’s response. The experiment had two prompts: the one above was probably for the second one that elicited signed renditions. In Part 1, the experimenter gave a signed prompt (which unfortunately was not recorded or no longer exists), and requested an English translation. These data cards were labeled as belonging to Crammatte, and the Gallaudet Archivist confirmed they are indeed in his handwriting.

Here are two examples of student translations. This one from student Achille Buzzelli offered two different responses for the Signs-to-English prompt:

“A window of the farmhouse needs cleaning”

(or)

“The windows of the farmhouse must be cleaned”

For the English-to-Signs exercise, Buzzelli signed

HER COOK DRESS START SHOW SIGNS OLD

Another student, David A. Davidowitz, gave two options for each response. Crammatte’s field notes include a transcription key that words in (parenthesis) had been fingerspelled. The image below indicates the researcher coded the second response as “conversational” signs, or what we would understand as having more ASL features:

Signs to English:

“The old country or farm house’s windows need cleaning ^ or must be cleaned”

English to Signs:

(First attempt) THE COOK DRESS (IS) SHOW SIGNS (OF) OLD

COOK DRESS APPARENTLY OLD (conversational)

 

All of these responses were copied onto a master data sheet, again in Crammatte’s handwriting. Here is an example of the signed data:

O’Brian – HER COOK ER DRESS START SHOW OLD.

Davis – DRESS HER COOK ER START SHOW ^ SIGNS YEARS.

Gamblin – COOK HER DRESS START SHOW OLD WORN-OUT.

And here is an excerpt from the English translations:

Like Stokoe would observe 30 years later, the study revealed that there were different varieties of signing, and part of that continuum was very different from English. I am not sure what Crammatte’s role in this experiment was, but it is clear that Dr. Fusfield kept all of his original data for decades.

More details may be waiting to be discovered, but at this writing we can be confident that these materials represent the earliest known systematic analysis of English–Sign translation by a Deaf researcher. Thank you, Alan Benn Crammatte for leaving a record of thorough and careful work, and most of all for being our A-B-C at the beginning of a rich linguistic and entrepreneurial legacy.

Oh, and Happy 106th Birthday from your many grateful heirs.

Yesterday, our friend, sister, and colleague Ellen O’Hara died in a traffic accident near Salt Lake City, Utah. She was an extremely accomplished woman, and touched many lives. Let’s celebrate her!

I first met Ellen when she was no more than three years old. My Deaf Culture class at Brigham Young University had to learn a nursery rhyme or children’s story in ASL, and perform it for local Deaf kids. The large O’Hara family was mix of Deaf, hearing, and hard-of-hearing people, and welcomed us into their home.

We were terrible! The kids gave us blank stares, but were very patient. Luckily, none of them whom I’ve now known for years as adults remember much about that day.

Ellen was well-known and had always been a savvy consumer of interpreters. Because Ellen had exceptional presence, she was a go-to Deaf interpreter I wanted for both paid and pro-bono assignments which required a fearless performer. The last time we worked together, she had just been awarded the Certified Deaf Interpreter credential. She possessed the rare balance of enthusiasm to both teach and learn from hearing interpreters, in equal measure. It was exciting to come full circle with Ellen — at our first meeting, I was about to become an interpreter; at our most recent, she was a newly-minted CDI! It was an honor to witness her success.

Indulge me in one quick memory. Remember the Wells Fargo Video about the adoption of a Deaf girl? To launch the promotion, the company wanted ASL translations of short phrases on the website masthead. Ellen was chosen as the sign model, and I was onsite as interpreter/lady-in-waiting. Here she is being fussed over during a camera check while quickly snarfing some food.

For a brief period, Ellen’s hands were featured in the campaign. I’ll always remember our (long!) day, and the many other times we enjoyed working together. I watched her sign those marketing phrases dozens of times, but the one I can remember most clearly is the lesson for all Deaf–Hearing teams, and indeed everyone:

Thanks, Ellen! Looking forward to retracing our full circle with you again someday!