Deaf Voice and the Invention of Community Interpreting

This article presents an analysis of group-level dynamics in the field of signed language interpretation. Groups are us/them categorizations involving insider/outsider identities and memberships. The diagnostic interpretation presented here comes from the situated perspective of a professional ASL/English interpreter, an outsider who entered the field by chance and has spent the last twenty years trying to discern why intercultural communication using simultaneous interpreting appears to be so rife with contention. Theoretically, this is a story of intercultural encounter and organizational development informed by anti-audist, anti-oralist and pro- Deafhood sensibilities. The goal of this article is to propose three, action learning “hypotheses” to be considered by interpreter educators as conceptual pillars for a comprehensive pedagogical framework that reinvigorates the original Deaf invention of community interpreting. “Although underexplored,” Stone (2009) demonstrates conclusively that “a translation norm exists within the Deaf community” (p. 172). The three hypotheses presented here seek to inspire collective reflection among stakeholders involved or concerned with simultaneous interpretation. Action learning describes one kind of relationship between an individual (e.g., a researcher, trainer, student, or participant/interlocutor) and knowledge. Action learning involves continuous, experiential cycles of investigation, comprehension, reevaluation, and new/revised comprehension among stakeholders (Kolb, 1984). In this case, several research methodologies have been merged, including participant-observation, critical discourse analysis, ethnographic action research, and some critical participatory action research. Patterns of discourse and social interaction that hold across multiple research sites have yielded the following tentative suggestions for growing the 1 Kent Published by Journal of Interpretation prominence of signed languages, Deaf peoples, and the intercultural communication practice of simultaneous interpretation. 1 The three hypotheses are presented separately as discrete proposals with specific supporting evidence; however, they are responsive to a composite cluster of inter-related phenomena. Untangling such interrelations is an interpretive task that goes beyond description— the logic used here involves distinguishing levels of social interaction and some of the discursive and cultural effects of language use. The two threads that tie these interdependent social phenomena together are time and ghostwriting (Adam, Carty, & Stone, 2011), especially as the Australian-Irish Deaf culture tradition of ghostwriting is invoked in the professional performances of American Deaf interpreters (Forestal, 2011) and elaborated upon as a Deaf translation norm by Deaf British translator/interpreters in broadcast television (Stone, 2009). The reemergence of Deaf interpreters has been described as “shifting positionality” (Cokely, 2005b, p. 3). This shift is from a position of dependence or oppression to one of empowerment and agency. Observable “resistance among hearing interpreters to chang[ing] how they [work]” (Forestal, 2011, p. 134) is, I argue, a “parallel process” (Alderfer & Smith, 1982) that mirrors the resistance of interlocutors (especially non-deaf interlocutors) to working with interpreters at all. The theoretical claim is that temporality is neglected in most reflection and research about simultaneous interpreting because it has been taken for granted that the speed of information transfer is a highly significant and non-negotiable measure of effective interpretation. For instance, four of the eleven (73%) sub-criteria that Lee recommended (2009) 1 Sites for action-learning research include workshops, invited presentations, and some of the author’s interpreting contexts for which participants (professional colleagues and/or interlocutors) completed written informed consent forms to authorize their participation in human subjects research. 2 Kent Published by Journal of Interpretation for measuring the quality of delivery involve time overtly: long pauses, hesitations, false starts and slow speech rate; and four more involve time implicitly: fillers, noise, excessive repairs or frequent self-corrections. These sub-criteria are aimed at “deviations” from 1) content accuracy, 2) quality of target language production, and 3) “delivery speed” (p. 175). Lee whittles all the various suggestions for assessment criteria in the academic literature down to these three because they are the only ones for which rating scales can be established for reference. Lee claims that the list of criteria may be exhaustive, but the practical use of so many criteria in test settings is a moot point” (p. 173). Arguments about the values and benefits of taking or using time to generate better interpretations and/or guarantee mutual understanding among interlocutors are precluded from scholarly reflection about the quality of communication during simultaneous interpretation because pace is so easy to measure and the values of speed are presumed. Some of the temporal effects of privileging the speed of delivery are made visible in tensions regarding the use of U.S. Certified Deaf Interpreters (CDIs) and British Deaf Translator/Interpreters (T/Is) whose contemporary professional performances revive deeply traditional Deaf community practices for mediating intercultural communication. “The cues, discourse flow, and turn taking would be based on signaling behaviors normally employed by Deaf persons” (Eldredge, as cited in Forestal, 2011, p. 116). In a similar vein, Adam et al. (2011) describe “ghostwriting” as language brokering, translation, and interpreting “that Deaf people have fulfilled as long as there have been signing Deaf communities” (p. 376)