Reflexivity

I tweaked my thumb somehow – a possible overuse injury. Reports (I now see) go back at least to 2005. :-/
I began wearing a splint this week to immobilize the thumb joint. Of course it is my dominant hand, so my signing appears a bit backwards (or worse) as I attempt to switch dominance by fingerspelling with my left hand and using my right as base (except when I can’t figure it out quickly enough, and revert back to dominant right, until it is clear my thumb is sticking out at an angle that obscures meaningfulness, when I switch back). I suppose it as if I suddenly became both aphasic and lispy at the same time: comprehensible, but with effort. sigh
Most of the conversations about ‘what happened’ occurred ‘offline’ – before or after an interpreting gig. Once, though, it happened during a small group discussion: one deaf and four non-deaf student completed their assignment with a few minutes to spare. Silence reigned for several seconds, with members looking around, shifting a bit in their chairs, waiting. One of the non-deaf students finally asked me, “What happened?”
I looked to the deaf student, hesitating. So many choices! “The rules” indicate I should ignore the direct query. Interpreters are not to be addressed directly by users (clients, consumers) during a job. We are working. The deaf student is gazing elsewhere….do I seek her attention? Ask permission to answer? “Interpret” the question so that the deaf student could answer on my behalf – since we had already discussed it?
I decided, instead of emphasizing the breach, to simply answer the question. For the next minute or so a round of teasing and questions went around with at least as much interactivity among all five of the students (and – yes – me too) as had occurred during the preceeding ten minutes. The deaf student was quite involved, possibly even more involved, than she had been previously. I was surprised at the change: perhaps the illicit nature of engaging the interpreter colluded with the illicit discussion of non-class related trivia? My involvement was on/off as I interpreted the interaction (sign-to-voice and voice-to-sign) and responded with answers/comments that only I (as the injured party) could provide; within thirty seconds I had fully returned to non-participatory status and was ‘only’ interpreting.
As most dynamics go, this all happened very quickly. In that blip of milliseconds when my instinct to check with the deaf person was thwarted, I considered that the entire group had functioned effectively, inclusively, and had in fact completed their assignment. There was no reason in that precise moment not to respond to the student’s question – except for a literal application of an inflexible boundary standard.
Funny, huh? We (interpreters) respond to such side comments from deaf consumers frequently (often without giving it a second thought). But if the comment is from a non-deaf consumer….tsk tsk! See how much background and rationalization I have already provided to fend off premature judgment? The event was random, circumstantial: the group was done. The deaf person was looking elsewhere. The question was directed at me because of something unusual that invited curiosity. The topic felt safe because it was not about interpreting, how I got involved, what Deaf people are like. It was, I felt, an honest question asked at an appropriate time in a respectful way.
So I answered.

Popularity: 1% [?]

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?

Popularity: 1% [?]

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?

Popularity: 1% [?]

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.

Popularity: unranked [?]

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).

Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 1% [?]

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 &emdash; ”Aha! &emdash; in a cascading sequence of minor revelations. ”No wonder,” I sometimes think, “some of my colleagues think I’m such a dweeb!”

Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 1% [?]

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 &emdash; such as the sense that I’m really unhappy even if I deny it &emdash; 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 &emdash; as in understood to express similar emotions &emdash; 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 &emdash; or may not &emdash; 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.

Popularity: unranked [?]

This conference on pedagogy next April is definitely a place I wish I could be, but instead I’ll be in Australia at Critical Link 5: Quality in Interpreting: A Shared Responsibility. I suppose I should not complain? :-/ (But when they finally get transporter technology, Beam Me Over Scottie!)
I submitted two proposals, they accepted one called “Interpreters: Guardians of Social Justice?” Meanwhile, the selected papers from Critical Link IV (held in Stockholm, 2004) are actually being printed (finally!) I don’t know where my piece is placed in the dang thing, but it is my first attempt at the kind of combination of theory-generating research and practical intervention that I hope might become “my thing.”

Popularity: 1% [?]

It has been some time since I made an error in judgment (while interpreting) that sent a deaf and non-deaf person into a spin of communicative confusion. I hope I can explain this clearly, as I realized immediately what I had done ‘wrong’ but could not un-do. Perhaps, by putting this in writing, I’ll be able to catch myself before making this faux paux again. It is familiar, if not common.
It is a classroom setting with the typical many-to-one ratio: one deaf student, a non-deaf teacher, and several non-deaf students. This deaf student has solid verbalization and strong lipreading skills, so it is one of those situations where I only work from spoken English into American Sign Language; the deaf person speaks for herself and occasionally does not even watch my interpretation. The teacher was explaining the difference between compound and complex sentences. One of the non-deaf students asked how a complex sentence is different than a comma splice. The deaf student was taking notes when the question was asked, and by the time she looked up at me I was interpreting the middle of the teacher’s explanation.
Two different ‘realities’ co-occurred. The teacher saw the deaf student appear puzzled, and asked if she was confused. The deaf student asked a question by voice and lipread the teacher’s answer. As I listened to the teacher’s answer, I thought she was answering a different question than the deaf student had asked. I assumed this was because the question the deaf student asked did not make sense in relation to the previous student’s question about comma splices. I said directly to the teacher, “but I was just interpreting the conversation about comma splices.” I thought this would clarify the context for the deaf student’s question. For the next few minutes confusion reigned as each of them tried to figure out what the other one wanted to know.
Interestingly &emdash; perhaps you’ve noticed? &emdash; I do not recall the deaf student’s question, even though all the other details of the interaction are clear! This is because I was confused about the difference between grammatically incorrect comma splices and grammatically correct complex sentences! My attention was on the other student’s question and the teacher’s answer, hence, I did not make the mental shift to the fact that the deaf student’s question was on another topic altogether! The teacher, not aware of my need to process the distinction, heard the deaf student’s question accurately, and responded appropriately. My “intervention” un-did the meaning the two of them had mutually constructed without me.
Eventually, the student inquired, “What question did you ask me?” to which the teacher replied, “I didn’t ask you a question. I thought you looked confused and asked if you had a question.” “I’ll let you know if I’m confused,” responded the deaf student. What I realized is that when the teacher asked about the deaf student’s puzzled expression, the student was working over some issue in her mind. Whatever it was (since I don’t remember what the deaf student asked), it had nothing to do with the question about comma splices. Being assertive, the student accepted the teacher’s invitation to ask a question and did so &emdash; about what was important to her in that moment. It was my inability to let go of the other student’s question that inspired me to intervene.
I can rationalize my decision, as I did in the moment, that the other student’s question was important and the answer included information that the deaf student needed to know and might otherwise miss. However, the student is the one who is learning, and the student chose to pursue the question that was most immediate in her own mind in that moment instead of being curious about someone else’s issue. Normally, I would go with this flow, adapting to the deaf person’s change in topic instead of holding on to a non-deaf person’s topic. What got in the way of my judgment this time? I wanted to understand the differences among a comma splice, a complex sentence, and a compound sentence! Conveniently then (I am embarrassed to admit), the teacher’s invitation to the student to ask a question opened up a window for me to ask my question &emdash; all under the guise of clarification for the deaf student.
Yep. I have been in this situation before. This is the first time I have been able to perceive the subtleties so well. The ‘reality’ I acted from my ‘best instincts’ as an interpreter was actually a mask for my own desire in the communicative situation. The ‘reality’ that the two primary interlocutors experienced (the deaf student and non-deaf teacher) did not even include me. Based upon my role, however, and the expertise assumed to accompany it, the teacher tried to incorporate my intervention into her conversation with the student. She believed that my saying I had just been interpreting something different than what the deaf student asked was meaningful and responded accordingly. In other words, the teacher privileged my information as the communication professional over her own immediate experience of direct conversation.
Now this is power.

Popularity: 1% [?]

I tried the non-stationary method again, with one of my favorite Wanda’s as my working team, in a new setting with thirty-one non-deaf individuals and one deaf person. I arrived early enough to meet one of the event’s coordinators in the assigned room and arrange the chairs in a double concentric circle with enough room for us to walk the periphery.
I met the primary facilitator and a few key participants and explained the communication scenario to them. They were good with it, and cooperated by asking people to please keep the circle tight. Some latecomers or others who weren’t paying attention (?) did not comply, so there were a few bottlenecks. The room was barely large enough to accommodate this plan, but it was really only tight at the points where the circle’s edges came closest to the square walls. There was plenty of space in the corners (maybe we could have arranged concentric squares instead of circles?) &emdash; although this fact did not register with the facilitator or group scribe.
The dynamics are so fascinating! I know, in large part, that most people interested in accessibility have been trained to ignore the interpreter: “just do what you always do,” “don’t address us directly, address the deaf person,” and “pretend we’re not here.” Challenging the legacy of these admonitions is difficult &emdash; change is always hard, especially when one believes one is doing it the “right/best/proper” way. “But this is how I was told to do it!” I know (sigh). Additionally, though, are issues of linguistic privilege and the cultural/perceptual biases of sound-based communication that complicate attempts to include persons who relate and connect through sight-based communication.
The root issue, I think, is one of attention. I tell people the key feature of creating communicative access for a deaf person is the line of sight. For a deaf person to have a realistic chance of equitable participation, both the interpreter and the non-deaf speaker need to be seen. Non-deaf folk hear and acknowledge that this dual visibility makes sense, but they struggle to translate momentary understanding into actual practice. “Hearingness” gets in the way. The easy assumption that one can look at one thing and still hear whatever is being said is a communicative habit with potentially ruinous consequences. “Ruinous” that is, if one desires to forge an actual relationship across the sight/sound perceptual boundary.
Actually, given the constraints of time (for training) and space (for movement and personal comfort zones), I think this particular group did exceptionally well. In fact, as I write this account, I realize that I can only criticize so specifically because the overall dynamic progressed so well. Turn-taking was paced, pauses were allowed to linger. If the deaf participant had wished to contribute, there were opportunities to do so in-the-flow, without an awkward interruption. This relative smoothness made the glitch with the note-taking of the brainstorming activity obvious.
When the scribe moved directly behind me to begin the recording process, I didn’t realize a sheet of newsprint had been taped to the chalkboard. Since the chalkboard extended around the room, I asked if the writing could be done “where there is more space.” I was thinking of my ability to walk to where I needed to be to maintain the line-of-sight with the deaf participant. The facilitator responded that they needed to use the flipchart paper; as I absorbed this information the notetaker started to peel off the tape to move it. Situation solved, I resumed active interpretation. The interaction took less than five seconds, a fleeting disruption, if that. Imagine my dismay, a moment later, when I turned and realized that the notetaker had moved the newsprint not all the way to the corner (where there was enough room for three persons to maneuver comfortably around each other), but to the exact point where the edge of the seats came closest to the wall!
Ah, the rub! No one noticed. Or, if someone did notice, they kept the observation to themselves. For me to have said more at this point would have been too much: disruptive, “out of role,” an interference with the group’s natural developmental process. Me and my team managed. It really wasn’t that bad. A few times I could not move to where I needed to be to maintain the dual line-of-sight; the group’s discussion continued. They accomplished their assigned task and &emdash; I would guess &emdash; were satisfied with the process. Indeed, as far as open group discussions go, my opinion is everyone performed very well. It’s just this tiny additional crux of establishing a wholistic foundation on the basis of two languages, not just one.
Talk about minority-majority power relations! Why should 31 people accommodate to the mode of one? How much change is necessary? Might the development of bilingual norms enhance the communicative possibilities for everyone? I don’t think many people know. I do not know, myself. I intuit. I have not seen bilingual/bicultural norms in actual practice very often. Habits are deeply-entrenched; questioning them as hurdles to be overcome is usually challenged as a deviation from the immediate work. I know non-deaf people ‘pay attention’ to the interpreter, but this attention is generally limited to the display of American Sign Language, to ‘the signing.’ Somehow, if that attention could be expanded to include the function of the signing, it might become easier to negotiate communicative norms that enable professional alliances and friendships to develop as an intentional outcome of interpreted interaction.
Without bringing the habits, customs, assumptions, and easy privileges of sound-based communication into question, what tends to occur in interpreted interaction is that accessibility is generated for the limited time-window of that event. If this goal is adequate to the purposes of the group, then the usual way of providing communication access does not need to change. If, however, there is a goal of continuing interaction, doing business-as-usual ruins the chance for effective future relationship. The reality is that such opportunities for connecting are rare. Deaf and non-deaf persons do not often have the resources or structures to create these chances. From this basis stems my urgency to identify and name the moments in each and every interpreted interaction when the absence of a bilingual/bicultural ethic become apparent, as well as to recognize and laud the examples when equitable inclusion does occur.

Popularity: 1% [?]