Deaf Eyes on Interpreting

Thomas K. Holcomb, David H. Smith, Thomas K. Holcomb, David H. Smith

• Publisher: Gallaudet University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781944838287
• Topic: Langues et linguistique
• Subtopic: Linguistique

As the ASL-English interpreting field has become professionalized, there is a growing disconnect between interpreters and the Deaf consumers they serve. Whereas interpreting used to be a community-based practice, the field is growing into a research-based profession that begins in a classroom rather than in the Deaf community. Despite the many gains being made in the interpreting services profession, with an emphasis on the accuracy of the interpreted work, the perspectives of Deaf individuals are rarely documented in the literature. Opportunities for enhanced participation and full inclusion need to be considered in order for Deaf people to best represent themselves to the hearing, nonsigning public as competent and intelligent individuals. Deaf Eyes on Interpreting brings Deaf people to the forefront of the discussions about what constitutes quality interpreting services. The contributors are all Deaf professionals who use interpreters on a regular basis, and their insights and recommendations are based on research as well as on personal experiences. These multiple perspectives reveal strategies to maximize access to interpreted work and hearing environments and to facilitate trust and understanding between interpreters and Deaf consumers. Interpreter educators, interpreting students, professional interpreters, and Deaf individuals will all benefit from the approaches offered in this collection.

1

Seeing the Issues through Deaf Eyes

1

The Importance of Storytelling to Address Deaf Disempowerment

Trudy Suggs

For the ASL summary of this chapter, go to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_taTQu2OqY

When my two-year-old son broke his leg, I took him along with my one-year-old to the orthopedic doctor for a follow-up. At the time, I lived in a small town that had a deaf school. What that meant was there were hundreds of Deaf residents and practically everyone in town knew how to sign or at least how to work with interpreters.

After an unusually extended wait time, I had the certified and certainly very qualified interpreter, who I had worked with in the past, accompany me to ask the receptionist about the delay. The receptionist, typing on her computer, said that the doctor’s schedule was backed up. I asked if we could see the doctor sooner rather than later since my children were restless and hungry. On top of that, my son, in a body cast from chest to toe, needed his medicine at home. She refused, so I asked to speak with the doctor or nurse. She again refused.

Throughout this entire interaction, she never once looked at me. Frustrated, I said, “Could you please look at me?” She turned her head and looked at the interpreter, who quickly pointed at me. I then asked, “Could you please offer a resolution? We’ve been here an hour.” At that very moment, my youngest began crying. The receptionist, sighing, called a nurse, who was far more courteous and apologetic. I asked to file a complaint about the receptionist’s behavior, and the nurse nodded, saying she’d get back to me. The interpreter and I returned to our seats.

A few minutes later, the receptionist called the interpreter over for a phone call. The interpreter answered the phone, beckoned me over, and said it was the office manager. She interpreted as the office manager began asking questions. All the while, the receptionist was looking at me with dagger eyes. I asked the office manager if I could email her, since the receptionist was listening in. The office manager agreed, and we hung up. Walking to my seat, I looked back and saw the interpreter casually cover her mouth as she whispered to the receptionist. Once the interpreter returned to her seat directly across from me, I asked what she had said to the receptionist.

“Nothing, why?” the interpreter said.

“I saw you whisper to her. What did you say?” I asked.

She again said, “Nothing.”

I was puzzled. “No, I saw you whisper. What was it about?”

She relented. “Uh, she began apologizing to me for her behavior and said she didn’t mean to talk to you like that. I told her it was okay.”

I was surprised. “But it isn’t okay how she treated me. Why didn’t you tell her to apologize directly to me?”

As realization of what she had done dawned over her face, we were called into the examination room and the appointment was over fairly quickly.

Such a simple act of trying to mediate a situation—when the interpreter really didn’t have the right to—became a disempowering experience for me. Had the interpreter been in my shoes, would she have told the receptionist this delay and behavior was okay? I don’t know, but this was the start of my extensive work on understanding disempowerment and how we have become complacent with its role in our lives. And there’s been one crucial thread throughout the hundreds of stories shared with me about disempowerment: the importance of storytelling, or autoethnography.

AUTOETHNOGRAPHY AND THE IMPORTANCE OF STORYTELLING

Rachel Freed said, “We tell our stories to transform ourselves; to learn about our history and tell our experiences to transcend them; to use our stories to make a difference in our world; to broaden our perspective to see further than normal; to act beyond a story that may have imprisoned or enslaved us; to live more of our spiritual and earthly potential.”¹

This is exactly why it’s so important for Deaf people to share stories with each other and with others such as interpreters: to learn about the never-ending history of oppression, audism, and disempowerment. Yet, interpreter education often consists of academic, on-the-job, and formal, research-based learning about Deaf culture, linguistic aspects of American Sign Language (ASL), ethics, test preparation, and Deaf history—but very rarely does it involve Deaf people telling stories about life on a day-to-day basis. The few stories that are shared often come in the form of mass-produced videos, well-orchestrated interviews, and/or discussion panels focused on generic “What is it like to be Deaf?” discussions, each broad enough to cover the entire community but not quite capture the intricate experience of being Deaf. In “Being Scheherazade: The Importance of Storytelling in Academic Writing,” authors Pollock and Bono stated, “One impediment to effective storytelling is the lack of a human face—actors acting and the human imbuing all of our experiences. All too often, academic writers remove the human elements from their storytelling in an effort to sound ‘scholarly.’ They engage in arid, context-free theorizing, of interest only to the most ardent specialists in their domains.”²

As Pollock and Bono pointed out, it is the day-to-day stories that are so crucial to understanding the challenges that Deaf people face, particularly with interpreters—that is, the stories they share in the privacy of their homes and through vlogs. Deaf people’s frustrations are often discarded by hearing people who say, “My gosh, I’d never do that, how horrible!” and then perform the very same disempowering behavior minutes later.

Many interpreter education courses and workshops pertain to stereotypes or “what if” situations, but very few actually focus on the countless examples of disempowerment, and the consequences, simply because the disempowerment is so deeply embedded into their mindset of “it’s just how things are”—much like the example shared at the start of this chapter. Another factor is that many programs emphasize the positive aspects of the field rather than the nitty-gritty of what Deaf people experience at the hands of interpreters. On top of that is the severe lack of data, resources, and education available for Deaf people. Most of the money for training and data goes to hearing-led interpreting projects, programs, and studies geared toward hearing interpreters. Even if such projects, programs, and studies involve Deaf people at lower levels, they are still hearing-led and therefore hearing-influenced at the final decision-making level.

Therefore, this anecdotal discussion and the subsequent chapters center on personal narratives rather than statistics or research-driven evidence. “One of the main advantages of personal narratives is that they give us access into learners’ private worlds and provide rich data.”³ The autoethnographic approach in this book, with each author contributing a personal experience, is “a useful qualitative research method used to analyse people’s lives, a tool that Ellis and Bochner define as ‘… an autobiographical genre of writing that displays multiple layers of consciousness, connecting the personal to the cultural.’ There are different uses of the term and it varies according to the relations between the researcher’s personal experience and the phenomenon under investigation. Autoethnography can range from research about personal experiences of a research process to parallel exploration of the researcher’s and the participants’ experiences and about the experience of the researcher while conducting a specific piece of research.”⁴

Researcher and popular speaker Brene Brown said, “Vulnerability is about sharing our feelings and experiences with people who have earned the right to hear them. Being vulnerable and open is mutual and an integral part of the trust-building process.”⁵ Since I first spoke on disempowerment some years ago, hundreds of stories about disempowerment have been shared with me to the point where I have felt overwhelmed, even drained, by the gravity of their experiences. So many Deaf people have told me of their discomfort in sharing their experiences with hearing people, preferring Deaf people like me who have been in the trenches of disempowerment. By sharing my vulnerability through my stories, both in my presentations and on my blog, Deaf people and quite a few hearing interpreters have hopefully come to trust that I understand and validate what they share.

It is my hope that by having Deaf people share their disempowerment stories through various channels such as this book, articles and blogs, workshops, social media, and in autoethnographic research, we can all recognize that sharing stories does not always imply anger, bitterness, or vengeance. Rather, it is a profound way to share experiences that are rarely told because of fear of so many things: denial, judgment, and worst of all, dismissal of their experiences. Deaf people also often hesitate to share such stories with outsiders for fear of being called militant, bothersome, complainers, or any other number of labels. Let us not forget that many have grown up being indoctrinated with feedback that they’re expecting too much when they ask for equal treatment, that it’s not important to know what was just spoken, or that they’re not as valued as others. Talking about real-life instances of disempowerment, ordinary or extraordinary, can help challenge the status quo and create greater opportunities for increased societal equity among Deaf people.

DISEMPOWERMENT AND HEARING PRIVILEGE

The word disempowerment has quite a simple definition for such a powerful concept: to take away power. Disempowerment takes place on a daily basis for most deaf people and runs the gamut of seemingly meaningless incidents to life-changing situations. When we think of disempowerment among Deaf people, we usually think of things like being denied interpreters, watching films or TV shows that aren’t captioned, being told not to sign, or seeing hearing actors in roles portraying Deaf people. Yet there are smaller, everyday acts (microaggressions, if you will) that hold just as much capacity, if not more, to disempower Deaf people. And these everyday acts are often performed by perhaps some of the most powerful allies of the Deaf community: interpreters.

A crucial element to understand before delving into disempowerment is hearing privilege. Much like “white privilege,” hearing privilege is an emerging topic. Tiffany Tuccoli, in her master’s thesis, described it as “… advantages or entitlements that are enjoyed by people who can hear which are denied to those who are Deaf. These advantages give hearing people power and authority to decide how society should be designed”⁶ (emphasis added).

This power and authority of designing society is what is often taken away from Deaf people as we go about our daily lives. Worse yet, we often are not sure if it’s because we’re Deaf or not. This is often found among other minorities as well:

To use a non-interpreting example, Oprah Winfrey was denied access to a store in Paris. She felt that she had been discriminated against because she was black. The store claimed that they were setting up for a private party and couldn’t let her in. Tim Wise suggests that the reason doesn’t matter. What is more significant is that “Oprah Winfrey, with all her money, all her power, and all her influence, still had to wonder, even if only for a moment, whether her race had trumped all that in the eyes of another person” (Wise, 2008, p. 72). Deaf people frequently have similar thoughts and experiences when encountering systems and institutions that favor the ability to hear, or hearing privilege. No matter how competent or powerful those individuals are, the risk of encountering doubt and insecurity is simply a part of living in a hearing-dominated society.⁷

Another example of hearing privilege is illustrated in a video by Roger Claussen,⁸ who led a National Association of the Deaf committee disseminating a survey about open-captioned films. In his ten-minute video, Claussen shared a humorous, yet realistic, narrative about the annoying factors hearing people never have to deal with or even think about. He talks about how, with rearview captioning, Deaf people are required to leave their driver’s licenses if they want to use the captioning equipment, struggle with holding refreshments because the device installs in the refreshment...