Interpreting: January 2007 Archives

As always with the start of the semester, there are myriad new interpreting jobs, new groups, new group dynamics. I remain of the opinion that one strategy for creating the possibility of bilingual/bicultural interaction is to be more overt and open about issues and challenges we face - as interpreters - trying to maintain open flows of communication between two languages and across two different modes of perception (auditory and visual).

A common problem in groups that are mostly non-deaf (thus, communicating with spoken English) is creating "space" for the deaf person's vision-based interjections. While it is politically-correct for interpreters to talk of "process time" (while our brain is absorbing meaning, unpacking its linguistic wrapper, and rewrapping it in a new wrapper), the felt experience of people in the group is that of a delay, of waiting, of a lag between modes. To what extent can interpreters mediate this dimension of time, and to what extent can - should? - we encourage the group to figure out how to do inclusion considering the unalterable fact that these modes will sometimes come into conflict?

The most common way this "problem" shows up is when non-deaf people are talking and turn-taking at their usual pace, with anticipation of when someone's turn will end and someone else can begin - often leading to overlaps and/or simultaneous utterances from two or more speakers who negotiate (through volume, persistence, surrender) who will continue to speak and who will wait. When a deaf person wants to get in on the action, their signed comments often intersects with someone's speech - the deaf person has SEEN a pause in the interpretation indicating a turn-exchange and jumps in. If the interpreter voices naturally for the deaf person - asserting their right to participate in an unmonitored, spontaneous conversation - it could be taken as the deaf person (or the interpreter!) being rude, impolite, or inconsiderate.

I admit to being frustrated numerous times in my "early" career (!) with non-deaf people who simply would not make room for deaf people to participate. It isn't that I would LOOK for opportunities to break into voicing, but I thought of the act of "interrupting" a non-deaf speaker less as an interruption of an individual's talk and more as an intervention into an oppressive group dynamic. Ok, ok, I've gotten easier over the years and no longer consider these situations the best mode for cross-cultural instruction. But I do wonder, where is the line between the time and turn-taking boundary that we can manage to maintain as smooth a flow of communication as possible, and the responsibility of all the participants in a communication situation to make sure everyone can contribute?

Case-in-point: a deaf student asks (in sign) a question of a teacher. The interpreter voices it (in speech), interrupting the teacher's response to another student's question. The teacher responds to the deaf student's question.

De-brief: something about the interaction felt bad/wrong/off to the team interpreter, the interruption was too harsh or otherwise not positively representative of the deaf student.

Question: Do we interpreters solve this on our own?

Result: In this instance, the interpreters approached the teacher, who encouraged the interruptions because that is the style of all the students in the class. The teacher took the responsiblity to decide when to ask for a more formal turn-taking system (such as raising hands), and when to let the give-and-take continue.

Outcome? More questions. :-) Is this a concession to "the hearing way" of talking in overlaps, or is it an act of inclusion? As inclusion, the deaf student's voice is embraced as importantly as any other's - meaning the interpreters should be less concerned with finding "the right moment" and more concerned with getting the deaf voice "out there."

What do you think? :-)

I've had a few interesting gigs lately. Each job was for a large "small group" - 20 or more persons but with the expectation of interaction, not just one person giving a presentation. One group had a minority of Deaf persons (roughly 20%) and the other group had equal numbers of Deaf and non-deaf participants. Both groups were composed almost entirely of people who knew sign language - even the non-deaf participants (varying degrees of fluency).

There were two noticeable differences between the two groups. In the former, with the minority of Deaf persons, the dominant language was ASL: interpreters were hired to provide access for the very few non-ASL users - essentially a "one-way" communicative arrangement. In the second group, which was half-and-half, interpreters were needed to provide communicative access both ways - from the visual/gestural to the auditory/spoken and from the spoken/auditory to the gestural/visual.

Several dynamics "flowed" from these distinct demographic and linguistic configurations. Maintaining a steady flow of communication back-and-forth "across" the language difference - the auditory and visual channels - was most challenging in the evenly divided group, however with strong facilitation a surprising amount of equity was established. The ironic part, from my vantage point, is that this group included non-deaf people with little knowledge or personal experience with the Deaf community and/or interpreted situations. "Typical" meetings like this, when non-deaf persons call upon the Deaf community to share information, do not often evolve into such lengthy and detailed discussion.

I say that the success of the half-Deaf/half-non-deaf group is ironic because it included non-deaf members with little to no prior experience. The irony is in contrast with the other group, where almost everyone signed and the participants are all familiar with interpreted situations. This is the second noticeable difference between the two groups. In the uneven group - uneven demographically by Deaf and non-deaf status and also uneven linguistically in that ASL was the dominant language and voicing into English was an event that occurred "on the side" (so to speak) - was the extent to which this experienced group failed to take into account the access needs of the persons requiring interpretation.

I've been observing this dynamic for some time, now. This group is not unique, rather, they are typical of groups who have functioned with interpreters for many years. Somehow, the (old) messages of interpreters to "ignore me", "do your own thing," "don't change anything, we'll take care of it" (and messages to this effect) have become ingrained in practice such that the habit of NOT "paying attention to the interpreter" is so deep as to be outside of awareness.

I've been playing with how to rephrase that kind of advice for non-deaf folks using interpreters for the first time (not to mention trying to find ways to talk about this with members of the Deaf community)....the thing is, it isn't that we interpreters need people to pay attention to us-in-ourselves. What we need people to pay attention to is if the communication is working, by which I mean (and possibly others would disagree): Are relationships being built across the language/culture difference?

I finally registered for Critical Link V, did I already say I get a whole half hour to present on the question of whether or not interpreters are Guardians of Social Justice? The Program looks amazing.

The main task of the presentation will be to summarize a critical discourse analysis of interviews with spoken language interpreters at the European Parliament.

According to Diane M. Hoffman (working for the American Institutes for Research, Iranians conceive of an "inner self" and an "outer self" which "does not presuppose any necessary conformity between inside and outside; the two can, and in fact often do, coexist in mutually contradictory fashion, without leading to what many Westerners might experience as an uncomfortable dissonance" (1989, p. 36, Ethos).

The article, "Self and Culture Revisited: Culture Acquisition among Iranians in the United States," piqued my imagination regarding the "culture acquisition" of delegates, staff, and interpreters at the European Parliament (EP). Hoffman describes "a dual learning process, involving, on the one hand, knowledge acquisition - a learning about culture - and, on the other, a 'deeper' sort of learning that involves the internalization of another cultural set of values and meanings. This second form of learning involves the inner self and affects the individual's sense of cultural being; it is identity-impacting" (38-39).

As I’m going about formulating a frame for my dissertation research, it becomes clearer that it matters where I draw the line between what will be “in” the project and what must remain “outside” of it. I always knew this, but the difference now, perhaps, is a better sense (?) of what is do-able, particularly in terms of promising an outcome. I don’t mean predicting a particular or specific result, because I do not know, now, the answers to my research problem. I do mean guaranteeing with some assurance that the problem is significant and the results of rigorous examination will be worthwhile and beneficial to the narrow field of language and interpretation studies as well as to (I hope) a broader social science. But I cannot say how the leap from the subfield of interpretation to larger fields will occur. Probably there are several possibilities. I don’t want to foreclose some by too close an interest in others. I cannot see any of them; I only intuit that the connections will become evident.

That penultimate goal must wait. I have been learning a different kind of trust the past few years and I must continue to exercise it. My mind is quick on a few things (sometimes too much so), medium with most, and just plain slow with others. Within my consciousness, a vague sense of understanding floats around definitive knowledge for a long time before it suddenly congeals into sharp coherency. Formulating the kernel of research into the institutionalization of interpretation and language processes has been like this: I've written nearly a dozen papers seeking clarity, all of them “promising” but insufficient. Then, last week, while taking notes of a lecture by my (!) cultural codes instructor, a foundational structure leapt into view. I apprehended what my intuition has been telling me lo-these-past three years.

My interest in epistemology (how we come to know what we know), cognition (more precisely, neuroscience), and perception (haphazardly categorized as “phenomenology”) suggests to me that understanding the productive effects of discourses might influence particular, relational communication choices. I’m going to have to wean myself away from the popular science literature elucidating what specializations have come to accept as knowledge. I resist, for just awhile longer. For now I relish the odd sensation of perceiving new synapses making new connections. There have been several specific time periods throughout doctoral coursework when I’ve experienced understanding snapping into view – ”Aha! – in a cascading sequence of minor revelations. ”No wonder,” I sometimes think, “some of my colleagues think I’m such a dweeb!” :-)

I wrote a while back about thin-slicing. I have nearly finished Gladwell’s book on rapid cognition. He spends a chapter discussing the face, linking the ability to discern emotional expression as akin to mind-reading: in his words, “the physiological basis of how we thin-slice other people” (213). Face recognition and object recognition are usually handled by two different parts of the brain, respectively the fusiform gyrus and inferior temporal gyrus (219), but more interesting to me are two things: the interplay between voluntary and involuntary facial muscle responses, and the evidence that simply making certain facial expressions generates corresponding physiological states.

All of us can control our expressions to varying degrees, but people exert this control only after our faces have involuntarily displayed our emotional reaction. He describes several examples, including a slow-motion microexpressions of Kato Kaelin looking like “a snarling dog” during the O.J. Simpson trial (211), the smirking double-agent, Harold “Kim” Philby (211-212), “I’m a bad guy” Bill Clinton (205-206), and a psychiatric patient, Mary (208-209), citing research from Paul Ekman, Silvan Tomkins, Wallace Friesen, and Robert Levenson (singly and in various combinations). “We can use our voluntary muscular system to try to suppress those involuntary responses. But, often, some little part of that suppressed emotion – such as the sense that I’m really unhappy even if I deny it – leaks out…Our voluntary expressive system is the way we intentionally signal our emotions. Bur our involuntary expressive system is in many ways even more important: it is the way we have been equipped by evolution to signal our authentic feelings” (210).

The above is based on a summary of research findings that there is a finite number of meaningful expressions and most, if not all, of these are intelligible – as in understood to express similar emotions – across cultures. These findings are gathered in a tool created by Ekman and Frisen called the Facial Action Coding System, now used by computer animators and applied in various kinds of psychological and social research (204-205).

The second point, more fascinating than the first (categorizing is cool, but inducing change is cooler), involves a claim by Ekman “that the information on our face is not just a signal of what is going on inside our mind. In a certain sense, it is what is going on inside our mind” (206, emphasis in original). They tested this claim rather ingeniously. Through some casual experimentation they discovered they could induce the physiological indicators of distress and anger: “As I do it [move specific facial muscles into particular facial expressions],” said Ekman, “I can’t disconnect from the [autonomic nervous] system. It’s very unpleasant, very unpleasant” (207). Two different teams of researchers documented that the pathway of internal emotion stimulus and facial emotional expression works both ways. “These findings may be hard to believe, because we take it as given that first we experience an emotion, and then we may – or may not – express that emotion on our face. We think of the face as the residue of emotion. What this research showed, though, is that the process works in the opposite direction as well. Emotion can also start on the face. The face is not a secondary billboard for our internal feelings. It is an equal partner in the emotional process” (208, emphasis in original).

Claims made by Gladwell are contested by Posner.