Reflexivity

Region 1 Conference
Registry of Interpreters for the Deaf
Albany NY

Rene Pellerin froze in motion when the interpreter placed her hand on his back. While telling his story, he had been rotating gradually toward his right, giving the camera his profile and making it difficult for those in the audience to his left to read his signing clearly. Rene thanked Regan for saving him from talking to a wall. The laughter from the audience was rich with appreciation.

Rene shared several anecdotes from his personal life and professional career with the State of Vermont. Rene uses normal, everyday events that anyone can relate to in order  to draw us into his experience as a Deaf person gradually becoming blind. His detailed explanations take full advantage of the linguistic capacity of signed languages to put you in your body. For instance, when Rene described his train ride to college, he included walking through the carriages to get a drink from the cafe car. I didn’t just remember my own struggles with those dang doors, trying to balance against the rocking motion, and how many cars they can string together – I re-felt the embodied sensations that generate those memories.

You can perhaps imagine how relieved we were, then, when Regan pulled Rene back from his slow migration toward the front edge of the stage! And how we winced when he described the drastic shifts in visual perception that accompany moving from well-lighted environments to dark ones and vice-versa. And how we cringed when he recounted some of his strategies for getting around without his flashlight or cane. And groaned upon discovering the mistaken use of baking powder instead of starch.

only connect

Maybe I am projecting Rene’s desire to connect with us, the audience, as the reason for his movement in our direction. This is what the skilled use of interpreters enables – relationships across differences that appear insurmountable. Selecting Rene to provide the entertainment program for the conference is in keeping with a decades-long trend increasing the prominence of providing interpretation services for deafblind people. Giving Rene the stage also shows the deep heart of many interpreters, especially those who invest long hours becoming skilled providers of tactile sign language and often develop strong bonds with some of the people for whom they work.

As I watched Rene give humorous accounts of difficult situations, I was struck by the tremendous commitment to the social aspects of being human that is lived out by people associated with this profession.

“In the end,”
Thomas Merton said to a friend engaged in peacework,
“it is the reality of personal relationships that saves everything.“[1]

why pie?

I attended the Closing the Gap workshop offered by Young Professional Interpreters hoping they would show me some cool technology that they’re using to build bridges among experienced and new interpreters and/or with members of the deaf community.  We talked mainly about the informal peer support model that YPI is using to encourage and motivate each other while getting established in the profession. We seemed to agree that the best way for anyone to build a peer group (whether experienced or new – to an area as well as to the field) is to participate in their affiliate chapter. It is crucial for interpreters to feel good enough about our work to be able to go back to the job everyday. But emotional support is only one part of the comprehensive network of support for the high quality provision of service that is required by a practice profession like ours. Other mechanisms are needed to constantly build skill, not only knowledge. Dennis Cokely made the point in his Closing Address that building knowledge at three- or four-hour conference workshops is not the same as subjecting our skills to regular assessment in order to target and focus attention on improving particular and specific areas of performance.

Time for Supervision

Informal support is great. I’m not knocking it; indeed I wouldn’t mind more! It is just that informality, comfortable though it is, is not enough to strengthen ourselves for the immense challenges of the next decade or two. As Dennis Cokely pointed out, more people want mentoring than are able to receive it, and less than a third of the organization’s members are willing to provide it. Peer mentorship and process mediation are useful tools, but they each rely upon personal preferences and a kind of interpersonal chemistry to be effective. These supports are a significant step up from the casual informality promoted by the YPI (and we need all these types of support), but – as far as I am aware – none of them are standardized enough to be implemented in a systemic way. And, like it or not, want it or not, RID needs a system that can be institutionalized. By “institutionalized,” I mean organized procedurally so that it can be delivered across the country in a relatively uniform way to practicing interpreters of any language combination, in any setting, at every level of competence.

If you were inspired by Dennis’ argument that our profession is right now in a state of crisis, bear with me while I try to explain the logic. My argument is teleological and interpersonal.  The roots of our profession tell us that the relationship matters most. But which one? Aren’t there many relationships happening all at the same time? Where we are stuck (imho) is that we keep trying to make the entire profession about only one of the multiple ‘relationships’ present and active in any and every interaction involving simultaneous interpretation. We’re asking the deaf-interpreter relationship to bear the weight of the sum-total, all-encompassing, complete and irreducible whole of interpreted interaction as if all the other relationships are simply irrelevant. This bias made sense in the early days of the field. In fact, our profession could have begun no other way. But acting on the belief that the deaf-interpreter relationship is the only justification of our being a federally-mandated profession disregards the most important lesson we’ve learned from working as professionals providing simultaneous interpretation:  context matters.

Transnationalism is the context

Language policies are being contested around the world. Minority languages continue to fight for survival against the imposition of national languages and the spread of dominant languages.  Immigrants are moving in droves from country-to-country and most will need access to high-quality simultaneous interpretation at one time or another. We know that cultural diversity resides in languages!  Yet, in the embattled way of weary soldiers who can only perceive the outline of the trench they’ve been trapped in for the last … 100 years? … we are still strategizing as if the conditions of the fight are identical to what they were four decades ago.

What transnationalism does is inject global economics into interpersonal relationships. It isn’t only the interpreting profession that has become corporatized. Nearly everything has. The cushy middle-class lifestyle of professional interpreters is under threat, or at least the fear of threat. Some traditional ways of Deaf cultural life are changing, perhaps even vanishing, but these old ways are being replaced by new cultural forms of deafhood, some of which need interpreters less than they ever did before! We grieve the loss of ‘the origins’ so much because that era – the personalities and relationships – is a point of clear focus amidst a maze of multiple losses.

Vision looks ‘ahead’ to the unknown,
memory looks ‘back’ to the familiar

As many people said in various ways throughout the conference, RID needs a coherent vision. The birth was grand and the adolescent years were rough. Now, the sea is turbulent, but we’ve found a pool of calm by re-forging connections in sync with the original raison d’être.  This must remain our touchstone, but we need to enlarge our imagination to take in the ramifications of being players on the international scale. Sign language interpreters in the English-speaking countries are not only experts in sign language interpretation; we are uniquely positioned to become experts for all forms of simultaneous interpretation. Rather than looking to the charitable ethos of spoken language interpreters laboring under the voluntary or underpaid conditions of (the bad part) of ‘the good ol’ days’, we should be figuring out how to bring their working conditions up to par with our own! Strengthening the use of interpreting in all situations, with any languages, is a possibility that will open more doors for Deaf people than anything else we are in position to do.

Why? Because as people learn to interact well during interpreted interaction, they build new skills for communicating when the flow is un-even. The more flexibility in skill, the more capacity for making connections across difference. Increased capacity for connecting leads to more chances for relationships. This is the gift our profession can give the world: a specific practice of intercultural communication that improves equality, promotes justice, and even enables democratic participation in a more fair – and still diverse! – society.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Region 1 Conference
Registry of Interpreters for the Deaf
Albany NY

Laughing our way to a healthy profession

I attend conferences in several different fields. No one laughs as often or as loud as sign language interpreters. Robyn Dean’s workshop, “I don’t think we’re supposed to be talking about this….” Case Conferencing and Supervision for Interpreters, was punctuated with humor a dozen times an hour, and occasionally we would hear outbursts from the neighboring workshop group as they took Steps to Feel More Comfortable Interpreting the Twelve Steps. Having a sense of humor is prerequisite for survival in this field, especially being able to make fun of oneself and teasing colleagues in affectionate ways. In the open comment time after Keynote Presenter Lewis Merkin’s small group activity about the passions we bring to the profession, Betty Colonomos commented on the health of growing pains: instead of staying stuck in comparative judgment, we’ve become more cooperative with each other time, allowing the recognition of each other’s humanity. Her reflection reminded me of Robyn’s definition of “responsibility” as the act of continuing in conversation. Instead of being stopped from communicating because of an unanticipated reaction, to be response-able means finding a way to respond again.

Lewis had just taken us on a journey back to RID’s founding and shown a few clips from the organization’s 25th anniversary video (Silver Threads). RID’s 50th anniversary arrives in 2014; it makes sense that thoughts turn to organizational history. It was fascinating to watch MJ Bienvenu describe her reluctant entry into RID in a calm, almost nonchalant, manner. At first, she explained, she didn’t want to be troubled by all the commotion, but was told that things were “getting better” (because by 1985 there were two Deaf interpreters) and eventually decided that she wanted to invest time and energy in this field. Patrick Graybill was prescient, forecasting ahead from the tumultuous ‘80s to indicators of maturity and stability as we close in on half-a-century of growth and development as an organization representing an increasingly significant profession.

Welcome to transnationalism!

There is no way to know what would have developed if dynamics from the 1980s had not been interrupted, but Video Relay Services happened. Mary Lightfoot’s presentation on Video Interpreting: The State of the Practice and Implications for Interpreters reinforced Janet Bailey’s information from RID’s Government Affairs Program. Although VRS was an industry initiative – a technological and entrepreneurial invention – it brought sign language interpretation to the attention of the FCC. Suddenly, interpreters were confronted with law.

The professionally-engaged American Deaf and interpreting communities are mainly of white/European descent, and thus have been cushioned by the global state of political affairs for several generations. The resulting mindset is the unconscious attitude of privilege. So far, the best way I’ve come up with for explaining “privilege” is the experience of flow. Everybody wants flow – the easy experience of thinking, doing, and communicating when comprehension is not a problem. It seems to me that white people in the US experience uninterrupted flow more consistently than nearly everyone else. This is not to say that other people do not experience flow! Everyone does. You are most likely to feel flow when you are with your own kind (however you define the groups you belong to) and are comfortable in your status/position among the members of that group. It is the presence of difference, often combined with some kind of force, that disrupts flow.

Coming from a background or context of privilege simply means that shocks and disruptions to the experience of flow are minimized. This is the essence of whiteness. At a certain very basic level, ethnicity or audition has nothing to do with privilege, because individually you may have been very well protected from difficult or challenging life events (by chance or design, it doesn’t matter). The problem with privilege isn’t that someone has privilege or comes from a privileged background. The problem with privilege is that it creates an incapacity for handling interactions that do not conform to expected or desired flow.

Beauties of bilingualism

Learning another language, and interacting with people who think in another language, requires us to cultivate the capacity for dealing with differences. But fluency doesn’t necessarily mean we manage the differences gracefully! Experience doesn’t make the relational challenges go away when the pushes and pulls of accommodating difference upset the intrapersonal experience of flow. While RID and NAD continue to celebrate the reunion of the Deaf and interpreting communities after the eighties’ uglies, some of the core tensions persist. The evidence from the large group attending the Region 1 Conference has to do with language policy. Do we use ASL all the time, exclusively and only? Or is spoken English allowable, and if so when and under what circumstances?

Upon arrival to the conference venue on Thursday afternoon, Hartmut Teuber greeted me at the end of the registration table. Did I understand the meaning of the ASL Committed! button? I had already seen – and misread – the button, thinking it was a club membership (for an ASL Committee). When I realized the slogan was intended as a political statement, I had played through the joke about being “committed” to a mental institution. (I wasn’t the only one, an interpreter from NYC made the same joke while arguing passionately in support of the ASL/signing policy after Lewis’ keynote address.) At any rate, in the way that I do this kind of live/action research, I have been watching the group dynamics about language use carefully.

Ethics and Effectiveness

Placing myself with all of those who remember Bob Pollard’s single slide on the liberal-conservative political spectrum of interpreter decision-making (more than the other 75 slides that Robyn Dean has created about the Demand-Control Schema, wink), there are at least two ways to frame the question of language policy for RID. One way is how I’ve introduced it above, as a matter of competition between privilege and disenfranchisement. Another way is as a contest between deontological and teleological ethics. Does RID want to be a rule-based organization (deontological) or an ends-based organization (teleological)? If only the choice was simple! Answers to the latter question (where does the profession base our ethics) are ‘in discussion’ with the former framing of language use in the dynamics of oppression/empowerment.

The way interpreters and the Deaf community talk with each other about privilege and oppression is one discourse. The way interpreters and the Deaf community talk with each other about ethics and effectiveness is another discourse. Each discourse has its own internal patterns, and the two discourses interact with each other in another layer of discursive patterning. Every individual, meanwhile, is situated within each of these discourses in a particular ‘position.’ It is these positions that bounce and bang off of each other or bond tightly with and to each other that result in various kinds of group dynamics.

The way we talk and interact with each other about language policy is another discourse. I would call it a nested discourse, because whether or not to sign or speak is a specific example that can be used in service of either of the ‘larger’ discourses about ethics/effectiveness or oppression/empowerment.

Button up!

I am a teleologist, which partly explains why I am not wearing the button. I have never been good at ‘going along with’ the dominant, main, or ‘in’ thing. I resist going along with ‘the rules’ just because it is the politically correct or otherwise fashionable thing to do. I am not criticizing people who are wearing the button – I support the cause! Signing in the presence of Deaf people is the right thing to do, and it should be the official policy of RID to use ASL whenever Deaf people are involved. Wearing the button is a symbol of intention, but wearing the button is not the actual behavior of signing in the presence of Deaf people. How does one build the common culture that inspires people to sign whether or not they are surrounded by political reminders?

What I’ve noticed during the course of the conference is that it really matters whether the presenter signs ASL or speaks in English. During the Thursday evening updates, Cheryl Moose and Janet Bailey set the tone by signing from the main stage. They generated enough momentum that when the next presenter used voice instead of sign, the group overall maintained the mode of signing (even though the percentage of Deaf to non-deaf attendees is small). It happened that both the workshops I attended on Friday were presented in spoken English. Please understand, I’m not slighting that choice! I have preferred to present in English too – I am more confident expressing myself in my native tongue. (I am also more competent, as the reparative (clarifying) captioning of my talk to the New England Deaf Studies Conference illustrates!)

During Mary’s workshop, we had several breakouts for small group activities, and I wound up in a group using spoken English. This communicative mode was good for me, as the challenge of taking notes while watching ASL is real. Karen, Julie, Elizabeth and Julaine were awesome: they knew I was double-tasking (listening/learning and watching/recording) and kept me in the loop, filling in whatever I missed, clarifying what I partially understood, and correcting misunderstandings. Other groups were using sign, but as the morning’s session drew on, the switch from ASL to English became more marked. At one point, a woman behind me complained (loudly) that she couldn’t hear the presenter because of the noise from everyone’s chatter. The sudden silence that filled the room was thick with guilt. It was as if the hundred of us had all been ‘caught’ and were stunned into suspended animation, waiting for the punitive blow.

The woman who made the intervention commented, “Wow, its quiet now” (or maybe she said, “Wow, that got everyone’s attention”), which broke the ice. Mary then engaged her around whether it was an issue with the mic and – after a few turns back-and-forth – clarified for all of us that there was so much talking occurring throughout the room at such a volume that Mary’s voice was drowned out, despite being broadcast through speakers from a microphone. The depth and starkness of the group-level silence, combined with the confusion about what exactly the problem was, suggested to me that this moment was about language policy.

Only a short time later, the session ended and I ‘caught’ a guy talking in the lunch line. At least, he made me feel as if I had ‘caught’ him. He said something to the woman across from him and then startled, turning to me and apologized, explaining how well they knew each other. It seemed he reacted as if I might report him for violating the signing rule. Perhaps he had just come out of the same workshop, and was still affected? At this point in the conference, there is probably a roughly equal percentage of signing and speaking. The background buzz of audible conversation accompanies the visual field of multiple moving hands and animated faces.

Discomfort: Adjusting to the Loss of Flow

That afternoon, during a break in Robyn’s workshop, one person walked away from talking with me in a rather abrupt fashion. Was it because I was speaking English or did she have something else on her mind? Probably I was oversensitive. Since I am deliberately trying to ‘tune in’ to these dynamics, I may be ‘reading’ them in interactions where they are not actually operating (especially at the interpersonal level, because one never knows what is going on in another person’s mind). Behaviors at the aggregated group level are a more reliable measure. So I was acutely aware of the stony lack of response to Lewis’ announcement of the target date of 2013 for RID to host a national conference with an all-signing policy.

Given all of the celebratory rhetoric about the special, happy relationship between RID & NAD and between interpreters and the Deaf community, the prospect of ASL as the preferred official language of our professional conferences ought to have been greeted with cheers! Instead, a sense of stillness passed through the room: the hint of displeasure, perhaps even a solidification of resistance. What is the right thing to do? How is one supposed to feel? Why do we have to be reminded – in the midst of enjoying each other so comfortably! – that there are still matters of justice and fairness to be addressed?

Scope of Responsibility

Social change usually involves a combination of breaking old rules and enforcing new ones. Each individual will have to come to terms with your own stance in relation to the changing language policies. The teleological question may be useful in figuring this out. What is the desired end result? Because we are talking about language policy for an entire profession, the end result has to be imagined in terms of the function we want sign language interpreting to play in the larger scheme of world affairs. My stance is that as an organization, RID needs to be positioned further toward the liberal end of the ethical decision-making spectrum. As individual practicing professionals, we may still perform mainly toward the conservative end of the spectrum, but as an organization, we have to attempt to direct the influence of our aggregated decisions within the larger society.

This means perceiving our individual actions from the outside, and projecting the accumulating impetus of our combined individual choices over time and in relation with other people’s choices. We cooperate to generate the social conditions of our work and our world. Whether we cooperate with awareness and consciousness of consequences, or by accident – come what may – is a measure of how seriously we embrace the responsibilities of providing simultaneous interpretation.

Popularity: 3% [?]

indexical timespace
Region 1 Conference
Registry of Interpreters for the Deaf
Albany NY

Where is your meaning?

Opening night at the Region 1 conference for American Sign Language/English interpreters featured two information-rich sessions on the strategic organizational development of the Registry of Interpreters for the Deaf (RID). The Government Affairs Program presentation by former RID President Janet Bailey illustrated RID’s progress in earning recognition as experts on interpreting with the federal government. The report from Tracey Frederick of the Strategic Challenges and Bylaws Review Task Force revealed intra-organizational schisms on issues such as the range and type of certifications authorized by RID, the extent of linkage between “certification” and “membership,” and the distribution of voting rights and limitations according to certification status. The question of control is at the core of both internally and externally oriented topics.

The historical inheritance of the sign language interpreting profession in the U.S. privileges the control of space over efforts to control time. The emphasis on controlling space parallels global patterns in communication technology since the invention of mail (the physical delivery of letters) and railroads (the industrial distribution of goods). Faster forms of travel (of material things as well as communicative messages) are a major contributor to the pace of today’s society. Control over territory (including the people within that area) is determined by the capacity to manage distance. Imagine a three-way chemical reaction: the further you can go, the faster you can get there, and the reliability with which you can go and return all interact to produce a desire for speed. The demand for speed is a result of attempts to control space.

Janet Bailey gave a brief history of RID showing how, as an organization, despite funding ties with the Department of Education and some connections with Vocational Rehabilitation, we were essentially unknown to the federal government until video relay technology blasted onto the scene in the 1990s. The technological capacity to transmit two-way video signals in synchronous time allows the Deaf Community to communicate with each other as easily as non-deaf people have been using the telephone for the past century. Curiously, the obvious fairness of making communication access as available and everyday for the Deaf as it already is for the non-deaf is one of the institutional challenges of our era. Actually, I overstate the case. Deaf people have figured out very well how to use technology to communicate among themselves and with anyone who is fluent in a sign language. The serious challenge for RID is leveraging the intercultural communication skills of video relay simultaneous interpreting to helping people connect across significant language differences.

Building relationships is a matter of time

Connecting with other people is a function of understanding. Humans tend to become friends with the people we understand, and enemies (or emotionally indifferent to) the people we do not understand. If understanding comes easily we appreciate the flow. When understanding requires a process, most people do not seem to enjoy the interaction as much. Wait. Let me qualify that last statement: most monolingual people do not enjoy interactions that require effort in understanding. My evidence is both personal and professional. As a simultaneous interpreter, I am constantly under pressure to understand instantly with a level of accuracy possible only by telepathy. Failures to immediately grasp meaning are heavily criticized by all parties to the interaction. In contrast, anyone who seriously begins to learn another language develops individual capacity for handling difference. If you want to connect with someone who uses a different language, the first step involves accepting the fact of differences – whether they are cultural, grammatical, or perceptual. The second step in building a relationship with someone who is not the same as you requires learning how to manage the time of trying to understand them and their ways.

Recently I was privileged to attend a wedding between two amazing people whose combined network of family and friends is a microcosm of diversity. During quieter activities before and after the main event, I observed the bride and groom’s family members and friends communicate with each other. All of the Italians and Romanians who had learned a bit of English made efforts to connect with each other as well as with the Americans (and guests of other nationalities using English as the lingua franca). Since both Italian and Romanian belong to the Romance family of languages, Italians speaking Italian to the Romanians and Romanians speaking Romanian to the Italians supplemented (in some situations) limited vocabularies in English. Spanish is also a Romance language, unlike English, so Spanish also served as a communicative bridge.

The point is that no one with any degree of bilingualism was upset about making the effort! No one complained that communicating took “extra” time! What was important was the mutual desire to connect, and whatever language was available was what was used. The relationships were forged in-and-by the process of figuring out the meanings together. There is a special quality to connections based on conscious cooperation that distinguishes them from relationships that stem from the automatic flow of using the same language. This is the zone where the intercultural communication skills of simultaneous interpreters have particular importance and special use. No other communicative practice has as much potential for forging individual, cultural, and systemic capacities for the equitable embrace of diversity and fair treatment of difference.

Dynamics of Simultaneously Interpreting Signed & Spoken Languages

Tracey shared results of the 2007 member survey with us, including the dismal statistic that a mere three percent identified as Deaf. Although RID is officially invested in putting a positive spin to recent efforts at increasing and enhancing the Deaf role in the organization, this figure represents a drastic drop from the percentages at the organization’s founding in 1964. What I want to emphasize is the disproportionate influence of this tiny slice of the membership on the organization overall. The success of such a numerical minority to shape organizational goals, mission, and culture brings to mind Margaret Mead’s famous quote about small groups of committed people being the only effective agent of large-scale change.

One of the historical puzzles that Janet clarified is why the law requiring sign language interpretation as a reasonable accommodation uses the adjective “qualified” instead of “certified” to establish a baseline measure of interpreter competence. This is because, at the time of the public hearings, RID was a small organization (less than 5000 members) and only a fraction of those members were actually certified. The law could not be written with a requirement that would be impossible to satisfy. The result is a chaotic and contested terrain that contributes to some of today’s tension among interpreters working in different institutional fields.

A distinction I heard in Janet’s talk that I will continue to listen for involves a difference between “consumers” and “clients.” Janet mentioned consumers referring specifically to the Deaf, and clients in reference to who pays the bill. One of my criticisms of our field is the general disregard for the non-deaf, “hearing” participants in interpreted interaction. Until we bring all interlocutors into the overall professional discourse, we cannot resolve persistent problems nor achieve the promise of the field: the unprecedented capacity of simultaneous interpretation to contribute to multicultural practices of equality and democracy.

Popularity: 2% [?]

documentary timespace

That’s so #DEAF! from Stephanie Jo Kent on Vimeo.

This is the first ten minutes of a presentation about what the Deaf Community can teach the rest of the world about using interpreters. Later in the talk I explain some details in a timeline, ReTaking RID: A Story of Deaf Empowerment. I summarized the other events of the day-long conference event in Showing Empowerment.

I’ve been pitching Ryan Commerson’s video since I first saw it a year and a half ago. Redefining Deaf is a masterpiece of contemporary theory and political activism. His newest short film, Gallaudet, is the best artistic rendering of how the Deaf see/perceive that I’ve come across.

Can’t get enough of Deaf consciousness?  Watch the post-production video.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Real World Ethics

One thing I love about the sign language interpreting community is how seriously we take the matter of professional ethics. We have no choice, actually, because the Deaf community holds our feet to the fire on a regular basis. It is an extraordinary dynamic. The effects of participating in simultaneously-interpreted communication may appear to be concentrated in the interaction between the interpreter and the signer, but the significance of using interpreters extends as well to the entire group and among all languages. Patty Azzarello writes of a team-building activity without an interpreter, detailing the embarrassing lessons learned by the team that discounted the member who was not fluent in English.

He was the smartest guy in the room.

He tried to share his good ideas with us – over and over again.

We basically threw him overboard.

I cannot speculate as to how the dynamics in Patty’s team would have been changed if there had been an interpreter included, but I can say that interpreters witness Deaf people being “thrown overboard” on a far too regular basis.  Michael Harvey has researched and written about vicarious trauma  and interpreters. Notice the disturbing chain effect: Deaf empowerment is (largely) directed at interpreters, who are (often) traumatized by the effort to balance Deaf claims for accessibility to goods, resources, and other forms of participation in democratic society against the (too typical) non-Deaf person’s disregard not only of the claim, but even of the person asserting the claim.

What Can Be Done?

Two dozen interpreters gathered last fall to explore “The Intersection of Ethics and Interpreting” with Robert Nash (author of Real World Ethics: Frameworks for Educators and Human Service Professionals) and Patricia Chau Nguyen (Assistant Dean of Students and Director of  The Asian & Asian American Center at Cornell University). We spent the day exploring the “three moral languages” framework to our experiences as professional interpreters.  “Each of us,” Nash explains, “lives our lives in at least three overlapping moral worlds, and each world features its own special moral language” (Real World Ethics: A Holistic, Problem-Solving Framework, p. 3).

First we explored what Nash calls “zero-level first moral language.” His investigatory questions inspired a range of passionate identifications with deeply-felt personal beliefs:

• “giving back” as a volunteer because without that “we don’t survive as a community”
• “treating people equally,” “not making judgments on them”
• the absolute significance of children: “children have the right to claim my full attention without any preconceptions”
• the ultimate prioritization of right here, right now, “All that I’m sure of is being right here right now right away.”
• “I believe relationships are primary in this short life that we live.”

Among the challenges of making good moral decisions – and of being a good interpreter – is not getting stuck at the zero-level – because there is no “resolution” to be found there. The zero-level involves an individual’s intrapsychic being, which is usually not amenable to alteration. The second language refers to moral character and the role of a person in relation with others. Someone characterized the narratives of the second moral language as a “responsiveness” that is “more than duty.”  I jotted down two examples that captured the gist of this language in relation to sign language interpreters (who tend mainly to be female):

“I think I should be a big girl and stay.”

“I got my big girl pants on today.”

Interpreters are on the boundary not just between languages (and the cultural norms, values, pains, and pride of the people who use them) but also between the second and third moral languages. Naming and excavating our second moral language elicited as much – and in some cases even more – passion than we discovered at the zero-level!

“Brimming over with Beliefs”

• “people should be there for each other when there’s a need”
• “meaning is in deep connection”
• “there is a duty to love”
• “everybody should get what they  need”
• the need for balance: “If you push a virtue to an extreme, it becomes a vice.”  I think this was illustrated by someone’s tease: “You never had a feeling you didn’t express!”
• the skill of empathy, defined as “feeling for” (which raised questions about “the authenticity of generosity” and the risk of vice through “overgiving” and/or “becoming a doormat”)

While the second moral language occurs at the level of the community, Nash and Nguyen showed us how the third moral language is the one imposed by the professional working world. This third level of moral language eschews both the first (personal) and second (communal, cultural) moral languages, emphasizing codified rules and principles rooted in respect and tolerance of moral differences.  Rather than promoting one moral  language over another, Nash and Nguyen both shared examples of ways in which all three languages are always interwoven in any professional discussion of ethical behavior and decision-making.

Interrupting Moral Silence

“Whoa!” Patricia was excited. “That brought out the signing!”

A Spring Thunderstorm in New England

One of the interpreters shared a horrific situation that she’d just been through with a medical doctor who had aggressively refused to negotiate how to make the communication with a Deaf patient work. Her story hit us where we live; we’ve all been there.  Stuck.  Because there is a Code of Conduct that governs the boundaries of the professional delivery of services, and because you can’t reason with people who aren’t willing to listen. Implicit throughout the institutional-level moral language in the professional code is that we won’t disrupt the proceedings by making issues out of dynamics that are problematic. Debate over when and how we should and why we should or should not has raged over decades between the Deaf community and interpreters. Meanwhile non-Deaf users of interpretation services remain generally oblivious, content to assert the supposed role supremacy of their status and their normal ways of doing business.

Our colleague was still fuming over the blatant disrespect that the physician had shown for the client (not to mention herself). We took the situation as a case, and applied the nine questions Nash has developed for analyzing and deciding upon an ethical course of action. The involved interpreter reflected on the range of perceptions she had about the doctor being unaware that the (new) patient was Deaf, not knowing an interpreter had been hired for which his practice was financially responsible, and otherwise being completely unfamiliar with interpreted communication. In general, we agreed that all these factors combined still did not justify his reaction, however the involved interpreter was able to perceive that if he was already having a bad day and then “all this” happened….well, even doctors are human. After the initial exchange, he had made an effort to work with the situation and the patient did receive treatment.

Knowledge for Action

A few weeks later that same interpreter happened to be driving by the offending physician’s office with some time on her hands.  She decided to stop in. As it happened, the doctor was available, and they spoke about the incident, de-briefing it together.  I’d like to report that the doctor made a 180-degree shift, but that would be exaggerating. However he did apologize, and it seems possible that he won’t put another Deaf person through the trauma of watching non-Deaf people argue over whether or not communication access is going to be provided to them while they seek health care.

Popularity: 6% [?]

Voices from the In-Between: Aporias, Reverberations, and Audiences
Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures
University of Massachusetts Amherst

“When I saw you with the laptop,” Cecilia said to me, “I thought you must be really far behind on your presentation.”  More or less! I was in my “live” discourse and dynamics mode, self-interestedly collecting connections with other presenters (or at least with their topics). I wanted to show as well as tell about my findings and speculations based on the research I’ve done concerning language, meaning, and simultaneous interpretation.  The conference would have gone by in a blur for me, otherwise. As it was, I had a handful of heartfelt conversations with fascinating human beings, beginning at the banquet, smuggled into the quiet of rehearsal/prep space in presentation rooms, and during breaks over the abundance of food.

Warning! Relationship implied!

Huda did not believe that I really wanted to quote her presentation. “You really are dangerous!” exclaimed Nimmi, before vanishing back to Texas. Jiwei questioned the possibility of as fluid an identity as I propose – that I am ‘called into being’ by the interactions I have with others, especially those that are overtly communicative. (I’m not saying its easy, only that it can be extraordinary.)

The keynote presenter, Vittorio Marchis, emphasized the importance of ritual to memory, explaining the mind’s need for regular re-freshing of knowledge and society’s need for icons representing history: lest we forget. He took us on a romp through Italian magazine covers in the era post-WWII, showing what he described as “the bearable weightness of things” in-between the use of images of current scientific progress and fine artistic works projecting images of the future, which he described as “prophecies.”

As far as invoking a certain quality of timespace, what more important social ritual than eating together? Juan checked in on everyone as we dined at the Faculty Club; the exuberant conviviality carried everyone through the cold rain we had to traverse afterward.

With the theory, you can move…

Nimmi set the tone for a great day by busting the title of my talk: “Isn’t that an oxymoron?” Could be! Her Rumblings included a quote from KS Maniam that struck me as a description of how I do action research.

“…me?

I’m going out there, into the … incomprehensible….”

When I got to this slide during my presentation, my peripheral vision detected Edwin nodding. I hope I haven’t taken Maniam’s words out of context, but I was gratified at the evidence of resonance that my usage fits what others experience when I’m “on.” (It’s not like I know where we’re going, either!) Nimmi was on the panel Negotiating Hybrid Identities with Xuefei and Huda, and (it seemed to me) they were all engaged with exploring the search for a center – for some thing or some way to ground be-ing – you know – living awake on this planet right now, wherever we are, with whomever is there, too! Huda’s presentation on Ghada Al-Samman suggested one’s orientation to time is relevant, as in, does one look to the past or the future for points-of-reference? A debate was inspired by Xuefei concerning whether “assimilation” can be construed as a mix of ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ features or needs to be understand exclusively in the negative.

Industrialization, Race, and Displacement

Darlene asked me, later, about her claim of experiencing the brutality of displacement even though it happened four centuries ago. I think there is a qualitative difference between people who have suffered physically just to survive and those of us who have had that part soft, but I agree with Enhua’s response that it’s all about when industrialization happened to hit your family: this generation or several generations back. The cumulative effect of migration having occurred in historical time for most white Americans appears most obviously in the disconnect from the land. I am not atypical, having parents who met in a city distant from where they grew up, and then continued to move around.  I have no home rooted in place; only the sensibilities of comfort I create for myself in the spaces I happen to be.

Choosing what we carry

I met Maria waiting for the panel on Authorship and Narrative Techniques. The next day I would be stunned by her story, shocked by the contrast with our joyous first encounter. Meanwhile, Cecilia’s presentation, Blind Spot: The In-Between-ness of a Child Narrator sparked a lively post-panel discussion and reminded me of the interpersonal communication tool by Joseph Luft and Harry Ingram, the Johari Window. The dynamic processes of feedback (sharing what I know/perceive about you) and disclosure (telling about myself) are so important! (It crosses my mind, now, to wonder if there is a parallel with the Chinese “mirror” that Enhua mentioned, in which one is supposed to see one’s true self?

Navigators of the In-Between

Morna labeled us conference participants as “navigators of the in-between” while folks debated whether a child could be wise in the ways depicted by Lya Luft, the  author of O Ponto Cego, featured in Cecilia’s talk.  The Q&A following this session was the one I found most stimulating.

A quote from Herman Melville that Brian had used kept floating through my mind, in reference to the space of a sailing ship (one of its chronotopes): “We expatriate ourselves to nationalize with the universe.” From this forward-looking perspective (which I appreciate despite its reliance on the nation), I went to the panel on Theorizing Coloniality and Postcoloniality, where the gaze of the presenters was focused keenly on the past.

Where do creoles come from? Beccie enthused on her problematic. I’d like to think about this more in contemporary terms – when/why/how do new languages still come into being (or are we killing off this possibility as surely as old languages are dying?) Juan noticed the power of the colonizer everywhere, and Loc Pham’s description of the Vietnamese ‘non-identification’ strategy intrigues with the evidence of such apparent non-resistance being a powerful mode for preserving cultural integrity.

A frontier that unites rather than a barrier that divides

I’ll be honest, sometimes the theorizing gets too abstract for me – yes yes I know, as if my work doesn’t go there too (grin). Still, I’m with Javier when he said, “The fundamental issue is not to come up with a perfect name, but to understand what is going on and ____”. Funny, my notes stop there – did I not hear the rest? Was I distracted by someone or something else? For me it is the understanding in order to act, or even misunderstanding but still acting so as to stay engaged with those who are different than me – and together finding ways to be here and move on with attention to the implicit as well as explicit relationships. This is what I heard in the Personal Narratives of In-Between-ess shared by Maria, Claudio & Marcelo, and Elena: no matter what has happened to us – childhood trauma or adult humiliation – we must bear up, dig down, find an ethical way to go on.

The In-Betweeners

I was thrilled when Edwin said I “might be on to something” with the distinction I drew between interpretation and translation (dissertation forthcoming). And I’m eager for any uptake on my conjecture that the postmodern condition, defined by David Harvey (1990) as time-space compression, is the historical moment when white people figure out WTF we’ve been doing with language. The next time you’re reading social theory, just notice how many times the word “tension” is used, and then see if you can figure out “what” is “in tension” with “what”? Social theorists deploy “tension” as if it is self-explanatory and obvious (sortof like how people throw around the term “dialectic.”) An engineer (for instance) would be quite unlikely to discuss tension without its complement of compression.

If language (language use, language-in-action, English, Vietnamese, Chinese, Portuguese, literature, poetry, rhyme, whatever you want to include in the category) is the social means by which timespace has become compressed, then it is only through language that we are going to be able to un-compress it.  I support Vittorio Marchis’ conclusion:

“We need more time to talk together and find solutions.”

Popularity: 9% [?]

Haverhill, MA
New England Deaf Studies Conference

It has been . . . six or seven years? . . .  since I’ve relied so much on my eyes in the special visual environment inspired by Deaf people and ASL. Last fall’s sign language interpreter conference was close, but there is something different about an event that is planned and run by Deaf people for Deaf people. I was excited and happy to be invited!

The program of the New England Deaf Studies Conference was slick: all four keynotes and the film complemented each other very well. Conference co-chair John Smith (my friend who likes to put me in risky situations!), had me present first on the topic of identity development and empowerment. I shared some theoretical models on identity development, and used a history of the profession of sign language interpreting as I have witnessed it over the past two decades as an example of community-level empowerment. As an outsider (not Deaf) and an academic, I hope to show that the success of the Deaf Community is a powerful example for users of other languages – yes, even spoken languages!

By asserting their right to have a major, influential voice in the workings of the professional sign language interpreting organization, the American Deaf community scores a victory for minority language users everywhere. This is a story that needs to be told!

Ken Relihan presented next about the quest in New Hampshire to get fluent, Deaf users of American Sign Language credentialed in order to teach ASL as a Modern World Language. The politics of language recognition are intense: these are hard fights in every country, with every minority language group. ASL is treated in much of the U.S. as a modern language  – not a foreign language, because Deaf Americans are not foreigners! I like the way Ryan Commerson describes sign languages in his excellent film, Redefining Deaf.

“ASL is a human language.”

Self-Advocacy and Institutional Structure

Ken described with great detail the tricky path of trying to make law and policy conform to what most of us recognize is just good common sense. Languages should be taught to students by teachers who are fluent in that language! But there are barriers to entry for teaching at the college level that make it extremely difficult for fluent, native signers – and also immigrants speaking foreign languages – to get hired.

The pre-established system will not change just because we want it too! Ken repeated this point several times: if you want change you have to talk to the right people, at the right times, about the right things.

1. Who are the right people? It depends on the issue. In the case of creating an alternative credentialing system for qualified teachers who haven’t happened to go to college, the right people to talk to belong to groups in the pre-established system. (And all of them went to college! Which means, for instance, imagining compelling arguments to convince them that it is okay that other people did not have to work as hard as they did to get to where they are.) For instance, if I am upset about the trash pick-up at my apartment, I don’t go to the librarian to fix it! (Unless I need his help researching trash services in order to prove there are better ways.)
2. When is the right time? When the meetings are scheduled! Especially when there are chances for open/public comment, but also in private, behind the scenes with those key people. Over and over again.  Not once!  Every year!  Maybe every month!  How much do you really want the change?!  Two “rights” – picking the right group (for the issue) and the right time (to talk with the people in that group) – do not, however, add up automatically to the third “right.”
3. The other thing you’ve got to get “right” is the content of what you say to those right people at the right times.  Saying the right things is the hardest part of advocacy.  This is where things got a little bit tricky in the Question and Answer period, because Ken knows about credentialing teachers, but some folk in the audience wanted to talk about getting more interpreters. It just does no good to complain about the shortage of interpreters to someone who has no authority (no role or status in the power structure) to influence rules, policies, or laws about interpreting.

I thought Ken’s talk was exciting because he is sharply focused on the challenge and he is crystal-clear about the barriers. Learning the right things to say means learning what arguments will convince people; sometimes this means not saying the things that feel the most important or are of primary urgency at that moment. I might, for instance, want to complain vigorously to a school administrator about how frustrating it is that my ASL teacher is not a fluent sign user because I need to learn fast and well in order to communicate with my deaf child.  My emotion, however, is not going to convince the administrator to change policy. They might feel sorry for me; they might argue back that I should agree to cochlear implant surgery; they might think about something else while they nod along because they are pretty sure they have heard this before.  Instead, I need to have arguments and evidence and possible solutions that appeal to common sense: information that is based on more than my opinions.  I do not know the details of the ASL Committee’s work in NH (who might already have all of the following), but they could use (for instance):

• comparisons of development between language students who have fluent teachers and students who do not,
• reasonable alternatives to a traditional college education for demonstrating competence
• examples of successful models in other countries
• creative thinking about how to get teachers teaching while they also pursue formal credentialing
• etc

Speaking of Formality!

Janis Cole’s presentation followed after Ken’s beautifully. She illustrated for us the difference between the casual register of ASL that most people use in regular conversation with each other, and the formal register necessary for exactly the kind of public, official advocacy that advocacy groups for Deaf issues need to use. I have a strong sense that if more Deaf people had been able to teach ASL for the last several decades, then we would already be aware of the visual differences, particularly in uses of space and choice of diction, that Janis showed us.

In addition to providing a kind of proof of the teacher credentialing problem, Janis’s presentation also complemented mine in many ways, especially in the desire to be part of a re-constitution of meanings associated with the concepts of “deaf” and “ASL.” She gave a series of examples designed to raise awareness about how assumptions work to associate unrelated things to each other as if they are natural components of one whole.  She got us to experience, viscerally, the unsettled feeling when things don’t go together: my favorite was the flower decals on a sub-machine gun! The point is that we should start to notice the easy feeling when things do “go together” – because there might be a problem there! For me, by the way, there was a problem when Jane Fluman busted me for stealing (two of) her (five) napkins!

History all the way through

Pax McCarthy led the assembled participants in an activity to remember Deaf history in each New England State.  The brainstorm will be collected and compiled into a comprehensive regional history. I am curious about this process, because all of the stories, experiences, and big events are related. It is not a surprise that a movement in support of bilingual and bicultural education in residential schools for the Deaf (historically the heart and soul of Deaf culture) coincided with the Deaf President Now movement at Gallaudet and the upsurge of Deaf activism to retake RID (the interpreter’s organization).

Deaf people from all across the country were involved in those efforts, but it does seem like something special was happening in the New England states, something that fostered all three movements.  Maybe, once these stories are fully told, we will be able to learn the secret ingredient? I hope so!

Never an End

Most participants did not stay for the evening film, as they had long drives back home, however those of us who did saw an intriguing short film. Voices from El Sayed is a layered documentary about a Bedouin village in Israel much like the historical Martha’s Vineyard when everyone on the island knew sign language.

In El Sayed, like nearly everywhere else, there are two main storylines, one that follows Deaf pride in a cultural and linguistic identity that recognizes being Deaf as a good, natural, moral way of being. The opposing story, the medical line, sets up the perpetual battle between sameness and difference. Love and acceptance, we are made to believe, go together with being ‘of the same type’ as each other. It is as if people have “to be” the same way in order to be accepted! In this case, the message is that love means communicating in the same way. Janis, when you come up with the way to unveil the ideological assumption in this, I want to know about it!

I was intrigued, myself, in the brain’s process of growth and change. We watch the young boy not notice sound for a long time after the surgery which inserted the cochlear implant. He has to be trained to recognize the stimulus of sound. Eventually, he does begin to distinguish sounds and learns to say some words. The biological achievement is profound.

Neuroscience today has proven that you can change your brain. This change is at a deeper level than changing your thinking or your opinion about something. The young boy’s brain had no wiring for sound because, without the implant, there was nothing for his brain to hear. Once sound was present to his brain, the brain itself changed. I am not advocating cochlear implants – I think the premise of sameness is bankrupt. However, the plasticity of the brain is amazing. What I find truly exciting is that one does not have to undergo a life-changing surgery to discover the amazing flexibility of your own brain. What is most thrilling is that you can change your ways of thinking so much that your very own thought processes change your brain. Literally, your mind can change your brain.

Now that, my friends, is constitution!

Popularity: 22% [?]

Haverhill, MA
New England Deaf Studies Conference

The following timeline is an outsider’s view over twenty years of involvement with the American Deaf Community. It was presented as one of four keynote presentations at the New England Deaf Studies Conference on Saturday, 3 April, 2010 at Northern Essex Community College. Please comment with additions and corrections!

My involvement as a hearing person in this story is limited; the exposure I have is only what I have witnessed or learned about because of my initial rich education by members of the Bilingual-Bicultural Committee at the Indiana School for the Deaf (circa 1990-1993) and on-going professional training as a certified ASL/English interpreter.

References:

Affiliate Chapter Relations Committee. (2003, 2004, 2006). “RID History: The Bridge to the Future” in the Affiliate Chapter Handbook, 3^rd Edition. Registry of Interpreters for the Deaf: Alexandria, VA. Retrieved online April 2, 2010. http://www.rid.org/member_center/chapters/index.cfm/AID/7

Bienvenu, MJ. “The Heart of RID.” Presentation at RID’s Biennial Conference, Philadelphia, August 2009.

Fant, Lou. (1990). Silver Threads, as performed in “RID – The Musical” by Maria Ruiz-Williams and Amie Seiberlich at RID’s Biennial Conference, Philadelphia, 2009.

Kent, Stephanie Jo. (2007). “’Why bother?’ Institutionalization, interpreter decisions, and power relations” in Wadensjo, C., Dimitrova, B.E., and Nilsson, A.L., The Critical Link 4: Professionalisation of interpreting in the community. John Benjamins: Amsterdam.

National Association of the Deaf. “History.” Retrieved April 11, 2010. http://www.nad.org/node/540

RID’s “Prints on the Past: A Decade in Review.” (2010). In Views, Winter edition, pp. 36-37. Registry of Interpreters for the Deaf: Alexandria, VA.

Wattman, Joan. (April 1, 2010). Oral history, audiorecorded at a Western Massachusetts RID meeting. Esselon Café, Amherst MA.

a bit more background:

See also, previous links in Reflexivity about the 2009 RID Biennial Convention in Philadelphia, including a post specific to MJ’s presentation and the performance of highlights from Lou Fant’s book on the history of RID’s first 25 years:

Embrace Change, Honor Tradition

and a proposal for the 2011 Biennial RID Convention in Atlanta, GA.

Popularity: 42% [?]

…calibrating…
follow-up to UMass Translation Center

Go to the edge of the cliff and jump off.

Build your wings on the way down.

~Ray Bradbury

Meaning(s) of Action Research

I got closer to an actual definition during the blog commentary that followed my first talk on paradigm consciousness.  Julian provided a terrific stimulus when he wrote, “I get the feeling you are discussing the research of a system with the consciousness of being within that system.”

What keeps returning to mind is Edwin’s German translation, “All scientific research is action research.”  He utilized one of German’s functional strengths to establish a context of comparison, yet he remained uneasy with the need to invent a new term. I have felt uneasy with de-limiting the notion of ‘research’ only to the scientific, as the broader motivation is to show all uses of language (in any sense, research or everyday living and working) as a force that generates effects. The entire discussion of all the translations has continued to percolate: what do such translational moves accomplish?

Two weeks later (!), I finally had the aha about the meaning of “all research is action research.”  Where we got hung up, I think, is because of the focus on translating, instead of on interpreting. Julian’s insight struck such a responsive chord in me because of the ever-present challenge of distributing one’s attention: if you’re looking to the left, for instance, you simply cannot also see what is happening to your right. In group dynamics, this plays out most starkly at the division between “content” and “process.” The whole notion of paradigm consciousness is to develop the perception to recognize the juxtaposition of different frames and – ideally – begin to learn how to tack back-and-forth among them as suitable for one’s aims.

All research has consequences.

Or, to put it more neutrally: All research has effects. I’m willing to bet (and I invite everyone to try!) that this interpretation of the claim, “all research is action research” is easier to work with, and more clear to convey, than the tight linguistic mapping attempted during the workshop.

I am not forgetting that I offered no help! The honest truth is: I did not yet know – myself – the most concise way to convey the meaning of the claim! And here you see the heart and soul of action research as always-and-forever in motion. This understanding provides the criteria, I believe, to distinguish the essential difference between “translating” and “interpreting.” Translation presumes a static target, and its goal is precision (in the engineering sense). Interpreting, however, presumes a dynamic process (at least relatively so, I know we can quibble!), and thus relies on the possibility of iteration (i.e., turn-taking to build clarification and mutual understanding) in order to generate greater accuracy.

Engineering precision vs engineering accuracy

I am finding the language of engineering quite useful to muddling through some bits of the tangled morass of social theories – be they critical or otherwise.  This site illustrates the distinction between accuracy and precision very well. As interpreters and translators, our goal is to be both accurate and precise, however I suggest that the material with which we work – language – is inherently not amenable to the achievement of both goals, simultaneously. It seems to me that what interpreters do (in the face of uncertainty about a particular meaning in a specific social interaction) is select the highest probability ‘meaning’ for the context of the situation and according to the character (if known) of the speaker. I am not versed enough to know whether translators rely on established discourses to the same extent, but my suspicion is that they do: on what other basis can one decide among the range of potential meanings for any given snippet of text?

My observation is that if you listen carefully to how interpreters and translators talk about our work, it winds up – more often than not – that we privilege precision over accuracy. I would describe this as an empirical feature of our professional discourse. I suspect we do this because it is reassuring to interlocutors, who are generally even less inclined to consider the trajectories of their utterances (written and spoken), if they are even aware of communicating in patterned ways.

And herein lies the power of interpretation and translation: we know these patterns – even if we have yet to figure out the extent of our own participation in them!

Popularity: 49% [?]

UMass Translation Center

I recently gave my first talk on paradigm consciousness. The ideas have been floating in my mind since the spring of 2003, but only in the last few months has the knowledge come together well enough for me to try teaching them. My own mode of learning is through action research, and there actually is a sub-division called action learning, which is how I labeled my methodology after fending off the attacks of my dissertation committee’s self-appointed “bad cop” faculty member during the defense of my research proposal.

My main objective for the presentation was to test a method for raising “paradigm consciousness,” because this is a pre-requisite for understanding what motivates action research. There is a variety of literature about action research, much of which tends to skirt the really hard stuff: like what to do when someone in an organization really does not want to learn, grow, or otherwise be open to, let alone support, dealing with new knowledge. By being transparent about my method, I am attempting a parallel task with social research as Yonjoo advocated when she said that it is not whether a particular translation is “right or wrong,” but that the translator has been conscious enough of making decisions and choices so that “the translation can stand up.”

Producing Research that Stands Up

Most scholars want their research to stand, but how many of us investigate the foundation on which research is supposed to stand? There is a choice between engaging knowledge as based in terms of philosophy (abstract, without application) or based in terms of practice (grounded, with consequences). Action researchers are engaged in practice, and “practice is messy” (personal communication, Dr. Leda Cooks). Applied research is messy because people are messy. No offense to anyone!

In Assault on Reason, Al Gore (2007) explains, “One of the world’s leading neuroscientists, Dr. Vilaynur S. Ramachadran, has written,

Our mental life is governed mainly by a cauldron of emotions, motives and desires which we are barely conscious of, and what we call our unconscious life is usually an elaborate post hoc rationalization of things we really do for other reasons.”

The tension that action research taps derives from fairly modest claims: that

1. meaning is co-constructed in interaction, and that the
2. meaningfulness of interaction (especially at the microsocial level) is malleable by human consciousness.

(If you disagree, let’s get it on!) I use a distinction between “meaning” and “meaningfulness” that tries to distinguish between definitions for words, phrases, behaviors and such that are relatively fixed in social time (the present) and the relationship between this ‘fixity’ and dynamical processes of understandings, disagreements, and other outcomes of communication that occur over time.

My imagination about how the presentation would go is that I would share new information (specifically Burrell & Morgan’s four paradigms of social theory), and create some activities that would make it possible for participants to find ‘where you fit’ in that scheme. I realize some of you rejected the model outright or found it too simplistic, but I am not convinced that the schema is inadequate…? I am quite interested in further engagement on this point! Cris caught my attention with his observation that translation theory in recent years has moved quite far away from the “objective” end of the horizontal axis toward the “subjective” end. We did not get into the details of Burrell & Morgan’s components, but they include individual views on ontology, epistemology, human nature, and methodology along the horizontal axis. Their vertical axis involves views on social cohesiveness and unity (how societies regulate themselves to stay together) and modes of domination and structural contradictions (how individuals strive to overcome structural limitations by inducing radical change).

At any rate, I’d like to reflect upon the notes I scribbled all over the board while we were talking about the challenges of translating the claim:

“All research is action research”

The diversity of languages was pretty exciting in and of itself: Chinese, French, Galician, German, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, and Vietnamese. There are different tools one can bring to the service of action research; my primary tool is discourse analysis. So what interested me the most was not the actual translations, but what was said about making the decisions. (The words and phrases I recorded appear mostly in blue, but sometimes black – I wanted more colors, and a few times I was rushing and didn’t switch colors.) This level of discourse (the descriptions, opinions, and judgments) shows what is normative about translation decisions – and these norms and prescriptions bring paradigms into view. In this ‘on-the-spot’ workshop-like situation, unless you were lucky enough to know the equivalent jargon for “all research is action research” in the target language (as happened with Korean), you had to rely on “literal” or “equivalent” words on a term-by-term basis that everyone recognized was probably inadequate. Maria Jose succinctly summarized this choice: “Be literal or guess!”

We spent the most time talking about the Chinese translation because of its idioms and the special way it treats quantities. Also, I admit that I especially enjoyed its artistic quality because of the combination of precision (at the level of semantic meaning) and accuracy (the general aim of what I am reaching toward: interpretation – and action research – as kinds of art). The French version also captures the definition: it was back-translated as, “All research has an element of action.” But – so what?! Does the content knowledge (the “finding” of an acceptable way of saying “all research is action research” in another language) establish the baseline for what matters most in the work of translating and/or interpreting? Is the bottom line always the “non-risky” translation, the one that is confirmed when two or more translators come up with the exact same diction, grammar, verb tenses, and phrasing in the target language?

Work with me here, okay? Let me extrapolate a little bit. The need to know context, relationship, or ‘what comes next’ is about control. Remember the vertical axis of Burrell & Morgan’s paradigm grid: from the sociology of regulation at the bottom to the sociology of radical change at the top? Now, I am not saying interpreters or translators do not need to know context, or that it does not matter whether we do or do not know the terms of engagement. Several of you said you needed to know the context, that you understood there is an implicit movement, even a kind of changeability that comes about because of interaction, because of the implications of engagement and interaction… and I agree in general, but why do you need to know?

In our example, someone explained that the term “action research” is “loose,” it “tends to the subjective,” and “is charged with possible meanings.” Yes, but is it the range that is so problematical, or is it because, as someone else said, the meaning of action research is “more political”? Let me ask, why is this “meaning” – the meaning of this term, this concept – any more, or less, “political” than any other? While acknowledging that you may consider all translation choices political, let me get really crazy and pose a hypothesis: the stakes are higher because claiming an element of action in all research means NO research is without effect. The German translation boldly went all the way, “scientific-research is action-research.” In other words, any and all kinds of research ACTS upon the world, in this or that direction, for this or that purpose, with effects that have material consequences. Good, bad, sloppy, indifferent….. and so it is with language, too, even conservative choices have an effect. If, for instance, the goal of interpretation is to strive to say the most common thing (the non-risky, that which is verified by others), what happens when the interlocutors are not seeking such banality?

goddag yxskaft

What is “the action” of action research? If I’ve done my job well, you are considering paradigms more carefully. This matters, because the way we talk about translation and interpretation shapes what clients expect. I suspect that Members in the European Parliament, for instance, are motivated to use lingua francas partly because they have been consistently disappointed in the measurement of ‘objectivity’ they were taught to expect. It is as if, in the professional desire to reassure clients that we are sticking true to their text, e.g., not changing anything, we wind up contributing to a structure of regulation that minimizes or discounts our labor. If you are happy with this, no problem! But if you are not, the take-away is not to confuse the current lean toward subjectivity as necessarily having anything to do with societal change. This is precisely the point that Loc Pham asked about: can one tread between paradigms? Finding a meaningful answer to that question requires much more attention to the vertical order-conflict axis. As interpreters and translators, we must be able to conceptualize our work in terms of a ratio between supporting the current regulated order and working toward radical change.

Popularity: 100% [?]