The Interpreter, directed by Sydney Pollack, will be filmed on location at the United Nations (article from NYTimes posted in the extended entry). Might be a fine opportunity for some media analysis of representations of interpreters. Useful for training purposes, I bet.
And I never watched the West Wing, but James and Vangie recently started plowing through all the episodes, and have been amused by the interpreter’s antics conveying romantic exchanges between Marlee Matlin‘s character and a non-deaf co-worker who wants to be beau. (If I understood James’ summary of the situation correctly.)
by Steph • August 3rd, 2004
by Steph • July 28th, 2004
some people really are earning some income from blogs! I doubt I’ve got quite the public persona – too dry and “objective” 🙂 – to make the cut, but what I have been trying to do is provide access to live events (like the mentoring project). This is a key variation on what most bloggers do, as described by Jennifer 8. Lee in the NY Times:
“The question facing many of the bloggers, who do most of their work without venturing from their desks, is how exactly they will cover a live convention. Most built their followings by ferreting out interesting but obscure information or by providing commentary on events and on news coverage of those events.
“What we don’t usually do is talk to primary sources,” said Tom Burka, a lawyer in New York City, who maintains a satirical blog at TomBurka.com. “We’ve never been put in this position as bloggers to have this kind of access.”
I’ve been playing with this in terms of interpreter education and research as well.
by Steph • July 25th, 2004
Came across a beauty of a clip getting ready for the next round of research! Improves my mood considerably on that front, especially since the most recent person to contact me about a possible presentation vanished from cyberspace. 🙁 I suck at this online negotiation thing. I think I’m “worth” a certain (considerable) amount because a) no one else is doing this topic and b) I use video from real situations which means hours upon hours of prep work. BUT, I need to start from a different stance, somehow. The strategy I used for Alaska was effective, but I can’t rely on a cookie-cutter approach. I need to ask more questions first….seems to me that my contact in Alaska and I spent more time on the content/delivery before we got to talking about money….and I need to have a better sense of the context of the requesting party and their resources.
🙁 hate to lose the opportunity to take the next step.
by Steph • July 15th, 2004
What a blast! I was the solo interpreter at a mixed (deaf/hearing) community event and spent most of the time with three ASL-users and one non-signing deaf person, simultaneously encouraging and interpreting their interaction. It’d get tricky when I had to also interpret for hearing people – going back and forth among spoken English, ASL, and mouthed English for lipreading. One can’t work in any kind of formal interpreter role in this setting – lots of facilitating and group management. I probably wouldn’t be so bold in a setting where I didn’t know the people so well, but these are people who LOOK at each other practically every day and never get to converse. So the social scene allowed for connections that never become possible any other way. So I deliberately interpreted all those comments directed at me and got them talking with each other. When I noticed one or another of them watching hearing people, I’d pop over to the hearies and ask if they minded, then I’d interpret and get the hearies and deafies talking with each other. I have to say there was a fair amount of actual interaction!
Read Moreby Steph • July 14th, 2004
I articulated something today that has been on my mind a lot but I hadn’t quite put into words. I’ve been doing this thing where, while I’m interpreting, I mirror the instructor’s movement in the class – sit when she sits, stand when she stands – and I think it is actually helping the flow of the interaction.
Here’s my idea. When we (interpreters) sit down and establish a position, we become an anchor for the talk. Whatever people are saying – in all its flexibility and inherent movement – is “rigiditized” (yes, I just invented this term!) because it has to come to the interpreter in order to go through us. In other words, our stationary position actually impedes the flow instead of facilitating it. Our training (to be unobtrusive) is counterproductive in this way, because in our effort not to be “too present” we establish a physical presence that requires the communication flow to accommodate to us.
What’s been happening as I move with the instructor now, is that the students are hardly aware of me and yet I’m So there! But they’ve adjusted to my physical movement as part-and-parcel of the communicative movement
by Steph • July 14th, 2004
“[Informant] Thomas Speigal[‘s] warning about judging the past from the perspective of the present, about the simultaneous solidification of boundaries and blurring of distinctions between victims and perpetrators” (p. 217).
This quote continues her analysis of the commemoration parade, in a chapter she calls “Dis-membered Border”. This seems (to me, smile) to parallel my relational struggle – we are contesting who was/is “victim” and who was/is “perpetrator.” I see the ways in which both of us did both, AND my “20/20 hindsight” perceives the discursive evidence (what was said and what was not said) in much sharper relief than I heard at the time. I need to learn to hear/interpret differently (or at least with other possibilities in mind) and I think this is the crux of acting into a new discursive future when one recognizes a PM.
Berdahl’s work doesn’t ground the discursive “collision” in any specific microsocial instant of real interaction – she juxtaposes what people said in one context with what they say in another context. This is what I hope to do with the critical discourse analysis paper that I intend to write analysing the key new finding (a discovery!) from the workshop in
by Steph • July 1st, 2004
Well, I arrived for the second day of a class, having missed the introductory stuff of the first day because I’d already booked another job when this one came around. Didn’t take but 5 minutes for me to stir things up. It’s a small class, five students, the instructor, two interpreters, and I realized I ought to know people’s names – so I asked right then and there. I also used the same “interruption” to remind the instructor to look at the deaf student (not the interpreter) when addressing him. There was some tension, yes….but everyone now looks at the deaf student when speaking to him, so my action seemed to set a certain normative behavior into motion.
There’s a definite mood of ignoring the interpreters (or at least attempting to do so), but so far clarifications have gone fine and we’ve been free to move around and situate ourselves for the best possible visual angles, so that part is working well. There’s a definite disparity in communication – the hearing students are more participatory, but it might be personality and amount of background in the subject matter moreso than exclusionary communication practices (at least at
by Steph • June 16th, 2004
Doing all these graduations (that most Deaf folk are only marginally interested in) inspired one of my teammates to share this new model of interpreting with me:
Make Stuff Up.
🙂
Of course we joke about it with hearing people who compliment us (and have no idea whether we really did “do a good job” or not), and Deaf folk complain about it (aka “fill-in-the-blank interpreting”), and occasionally there is no doubt it really happens….I’d suggest it is a very compelling site for the study of dynamics and discourses about these dynamics. Why do we “make stuff up” instead of asking for clarification? Could be to save face. Could be to avoid Deaf criticism. Could be an appropriate decision about some other communicative issue taking precedence over what was ‘missed’ and filled in for the sake of continuity. Hmmmmm. !
by Steph • June 15th, 2004
Graduations are the fingerspelling curse of the world (unless one is into the Rochester Method).
Since the lone deaf audience member that my team and I were there for was only interested in his friend’s actual reception of her diploma, we spent the time talking about cultural differences, whiteness, and science fiction. 🙂 He recommended Wilbur Smith; I recommended Octavia Butler, particularly the Xenogenesis series. He recommended George R.R. Martin; I recommended Alastair Reynolds.
by Steph • June 5th, 2004
I attended the first official meeting of the World Symposium of the Deaf before DeafWay II in DC…two years ago? Hannah and her Oma came for a couple of days too and had a grand time. The three of us had a fun day at the Zoo, too. Anyway, there was a second meeting at the World Congress for the Deaf in Montreal last summer, which I missed. The next event is in South Africa. I’m considering…!
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