Deaf History ≠ Interpreter History: A Preamble

     Signing Deaf people throughout history have always drawn upon a range of strategies when communicating with hearing people who use only spoken language. Sometimes these approaches are co-created through intermediaries. Versions of interpreters have perhaps always figured in Deaf lives, and by definition, at least one Deaf person is in every interpreter’s life. Our respective paths have run a parallel course, with intersections, merges, and medians to hop—but though maintaining sightlines, they are not strictly in the same lane. They cannot be.

The constellations of interests, risks, and rewards are never identical. At times, the interpreter must call to reroute the Hearing person a few paces. At others, the imbalance is reversed, and the Deaf person runs ahead, then doubles back to signal the interpreter along.

As interpreters’ utility and virtue rests in not inserting ourselves into Deaf-led discourses, we have been careful to integrate but not colonize Deaf spaces with our own narratives. Without question, interpreters must learn to pivot toward Deaf people in our own research and practice—and back. To conflate the two perspectives, or relegate the study of one group as subpart to the other is an oversimplified and unrealistic solution. This is the underlying research assumption of this project: Deaf History does not equal Interpreter History.

In more recent centuries, the two camps have converged in a symbiosis,  and the expectation of the interpreter’s identity as part of an attached squadron to the Deaf-world has become inextricably fixed. After pre-Deaf culture protocols for hearing interpreters began to resemble contemporary practice, Deaf interpreters emerged as a direct outgrowth from 19th-century Deaf communities. Their role-space reinforces our allegiances and grafts interpreter and Deaf histories more closely together.

Relaxing the focus away from Deaf communities, and the toward the pedigree of hearing signed language interpreters will deepen and nourish our own roots. Ideally, this may heal growing pains through a more nuanced understanding of our position, and more practically, it could feed new analyses back into primary Deaf narratives. This is the underlying aim of this project: to disentangle Interpreter History from Deaf History, so each can be examined individually.

 

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