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% [?]

Culture(s) and discourse(s) are among the most unmanageable elements of international business. “You can’t model panic.” Patterns of cultural interaction and, especially, the range of interpretations of these patterns, have profound effects on the design and implementation of business plans. For instance, are differences of language a problem or a benefit? Do the homogenizing effects of using English as the language of international management outweigh the constant adaptation required by working multilingually? Discourses about simultaneous interpretation (SI) at the European Parliament (with its 23 working languages) pit danger and loss against loss and resignation. “Loss” of fluency and clarity worries professional interpreters at the European Parliament (EP) and “loss” of direct contact between interlocutors (users of interpreting services, in this case Members of the EP) seem – counterintuitively – to express anxieties about multilingualism and the possibilities for control. Understood as a practice of intercultural communication, the tensions made evident when simultaneous interpretation is used are a vital source of creativity typically overlooked because of conditioned (monolingual) preferences for using a shared language.

Contemporary social theory can help us understand participation in dialogue interpreting as a cultural form of communication. In addition to transferring information between people who do not share the same language, using an interpreter is a type of communication practice with implications for identity. The roles and norms for participating in simultaneous interpretation constitute social rituals that contribute to the maintenance of linguistic and cultural difference. To the extent that participants are aware of the significance of participation, the stronger a contribution can be made to creating more just and equitable global societies.

Popularity: unranked [?]

The Fulbright Commission celebrated sixty years in Belgium and Luxembourg with a prestigious academic panel at the Palais de Academie in Bruxelles. I got to tag along with the more recent Schumann-Fulbright program that sponsors study of European Union institutions.
Professor Francis Balace complemented the education I gleaned a few days earlier at the Atomium’s fiftieth anniversary exhibition by describing the dearth of practical knowledge about the U.S. that most Belgians had until after the second world war when, he repeated several times, Belgium was “a good pupil” by negotiating specific policies regarding education in order to be included in the Marshall Plan. Two comments in particular caught my attention, both in the nature of an aside: one regarding the linguistic divide and another about war graves.
In the heat of WWII, and on the basis of prior history, no Belgians expected to be rescued by Americans; it was an article of faith that the British would prevail against the Nazis on Belgian soil. For whatever military and political reasons, part of Belgium was eventually freed by the U.S. and the line distinguishing those parts rescued by Britain and those by the U.S. “corresponds exactly,” Professor Balace emphasized., “with the Belgian linguistic division” of today. This is a matter of curiosity to me, as are the reasons why the Flemish Deaf Community dispensed with an umbrella label for all regional varieties of sign languages in Belgium that were once recognized as distinct from Dutch Sign Language, now describing a (supposedly) distinct Flemish Sign Language. Are the language politics of signed language communities being dictated by the language conflicts of spoken language communities? I do not know enough except to express sadness if this is the case. (See the last two paragraphs of this brief history by an external, non-deaf researcher.)
Someone in the audience felt it necessary, during the question-and-answer session, to expound upon Belgian reverence at U.S. military cemeteries – a theme that has been repeated at every official event I’ve attended since arriving here last month. The discussion that followed introduced some nuances, such as differences in memory and sentiment according to generation. The historical tidbit Professor Balace contributed was the fact of the United States government’s purchase (near the close of WWII) of “an extra five hundred graves in preparation for the next war.” This confirms the critique I offered of the U.S. Embassy film, An Invisible Bridge, of an underlying attitude of nationalistic preparation for institutional violence that might also be fed by the pomp of standing for both country’s national anthems. I did stand, of course, but uneasily. Such ceremonial prelude for an academic session felt awkward. (I find it similarly so at U.S. domestic sporting events.)
Professor Luc Reychler’s topic echoed Minister of State Herman de Croo’s introductory veneration of “fundamental connections” generated by the vision of J. William Fulbright, whose scholarships have enabled academics to reach high levels of influence in diverse communities across the globe. Professor Reychler described the network of 600,000 Fulbright scholars as an international brain trust, whose collective wisdom is needed to extract us from “the media crisis,” which, among other faults, promotes a counterproductive division between politicians and academics. The basis of Professor Reychler’s presentation concerning the present was a critique of the “unadaptive responses” of the U.S. government to a series of shocks since 2000. (9/11, evidence of our rich lifestyles adversely affecting the rest of the world, and the “inconvenient truth” of climate change – no doubt he used that phrase deliberately.) He summarized the cumulative effect as a “negative synergy” but sought to counter the inevitable gloominess of current global dynamics as “an unprecedented challenge” which can be successfully engaged.
Professor Reychler’s basic prescription includes a number of specific initiatives aimed collectively at improving relations and collaboration between academics and politicians. The usual dichotomy cannot be allowed to persist, regardless of whatever seeds of truth there may be in politician’s accusation that academics lack practical experience and academics tendency to cloister in the realms of teaching and research. (Just for the record, I’m adding a bit of emphasis to this critique of the academy, probably because I am operating right at that wall Professor Reychler described as the “talk about” transdisciplinary research and the effort to achieve it.)
Specifically, Professor Reychler described the 85:1 ratio of investment in military research versus peace-oriented research. Eighty-five to one! “Peace building,” he explained, “requires a combination of multiple, coordinated initiatives.” Not unincidentally, Professor Reychler noted declines in academic freedom, a trend that is apparently not even being tracked. (Although it is certainly a topic of conversation in my graduate program and others, where graduate students are coached to adapt our actual interests to the narrow parameters established by funders in their attempt to guarantee that research results generate profitability and/or contribute adequately to their own predetermined purposes.)
The final panelist, Professor Alison Woodward, spoke with an eye toward the future, describing the juxtaposition of migration with our so-historically-recent ability to maintain intimate connections with family and friends in geographically distant places. Drawing upon work in the sociology of intimacy, Professor Woodward noted how emotions are entering the realm of political discourse: even in the formal academic setting of this talk (attended by U.S. Ambassador Sam Fox) “love” had already been mentioned. This “rediscovery of the personal” is interwoven and interactive with the new age of migration that is in radical contrast with migrations of the past in which intimate ties were necessarily cut.
Others are also showing ways in which communication networks challenge international politics, matters of citizenship, and “the larger political economy of design,” simply put by Saskia Sassen as “the work of making“. Professor Woodward argues,

- among families in particular, and (I would add) between friends. What so many feel as a threat of interdependency need not be perceived as an ill, rather, the increasing ability to keep bonds and forge bridges (the two types of interpersonal networks that compose society, as defined by Robert Putnam) bodes well for international relations.
The first question of the open Q-and-A session concerned the problem of dragging publics into policies before they understand them. The speaker was critical of European organization, describing it (presumedly the EU) as “weak and disorganized,” with “the European population 20-30 years behind events,” a condition which forces progress to be made “ad hoc without popular support.” I would characterize the phenomenon of knowledge lag as, at least partially, an element of the media crisis that Professor Reychler named. I am not a technological utopianist (however much I tend to come across as one), and there are problems with blaming social ills on the media, however the rituals we engage concerning what is produced, seen, heard, and distributed – whether as entertainment, advertising, infotainment, documentary, or incisive fact-based and contextualized journalism – are problematic. Surely we can do better than we are.

Popularity: 2% [?]

I cannot disclose the location, nor can I say under what auspices I came to be here (with a small group having lunch with the CEO of an important multinational corporation). I can say the meal was delectable all the way through, from aperitif to braised scallops to the main dish and dessert.

The conversation was lively, from a comparison of the Belgian and U.S. educational systems to the creation of market practices in financial services to the role of citizens and businesses in social justice. For instance, which has the better curriculum for today’s world, the U.S. that allows such range of choice, forcing one to decide an academic path (and potential career) at every turn, or the intensive specialization in Belgium, that drives one deeply along a prescribed path until the achievement of a certain level of expertise? And, what of the drive to establish sweeping standardization such that translation between various software platforms becomes moot? And, not to be left out, how far should businesses go in contributing to righting the world’s wrongs?

I refrained from asking as many questions as I wanted; my mind will muddle along here by metaphorical comparison. Drawing a comparison between computer ‘languages’ (I know I oversimplify) and spoken languages is easy enough. There are times when generating common meaning (i.e., “understanding”) is tricky enough between speakers of the same language, let alone between speakers of different languages. There are also the gems of phrasing and imagination that one language captures that another is ill-or un-equipped to handle. Hence, interpreters always consider context and precedent – but do the people who use interpreters know that this is part of what is going on? Do they value the intelligence and creativity of this attempted mind-reading or perceive only concerns with control and error?
The drive to standardize reduces the chances of a miscommunication by limiting the parameters of operation and fixing (i.e., making permanent, solid, inflexible) the code for representing these parameters. This is valuable, a good, when the information being standardized is itself fixed, inflexible, not subject to interpretation. My U.S. dollar has its value; the Euro has its own. There may be a relative comparison and some complicated system of equations that determine the actual ratio of value from one to the other, but these mathematical formulations adhere to unvarying principles: the structure that determines what qualifies as wealth may change, but the math used to count it probably will not.
Standardization in and of itself is . . . a very mixed bag. Inevitably, the creation of a standard implies its imposition. By definition, a standard establishes the non-standard and makes it “other” = less desirable, penalized… a whole series of consequences – intended and unintended – issue forth, like water seeping through a dam: inexorable, unavoidable, serious.
But we need standardization, this much is obvious. The questions of interest to me are, where do we need it, how extensively do we need it, when do we need it, and how can we ensure we can change it if/when such becomes desirable or even imperative?
The assumption guiding my research at the European Parliament is that language is NOT the place where standardization is desirable. Yes yes, it is one thing to be painstakingly articulate with precise diction for legal documents that institute the sociopolitical and economic structure, but it is another to assume communication occurs best when people speak the same language, and only then. My assumption may be wrong, of course. Or it may be wrong under certain conditions, with particular people seeking specific aims. If so, what are these conditions, who are these people, and what are these aims? Because if we define these parameters, then we can begin to design language policies that are not based in forms of elite cosmopolitanism.
This is what I think, now, before embarking on the research project per se. I am open to being proved wrong. I am open to being shown that it is always better for persons to use a lingua franca (if they have one) no matter what disparities in fluency, unfamiliarity with the social system and/or jargon of the specific situation, similar or different desired aims of interlocutors, or variations in knowledge of the particular content area under discussion. My action research hypothesis is that, in arguing these stances, an articulation of the vital criteria indicating the need to provide simultaneous interpretation will emerge. Likewise, guidelines for the kinds of situations and circumstances which enable interlocutors to be effective via a lingua franca will also be made more clear.
Such knowledge will, I propose, enable more efficient, efficacious, and effective use of simultaneously interpreted language as a creative resource, rather than as a perceived barrier to intercultural, inter-institutional, and interdisciplinary understanding.

Popularity: 5% [?]

Popularity: 2% [?]

Yesterday will be remembered fondly by many. I received the wonderful news from Maria Claudia:

Today there are photos on Facebook. Joy in the morning! I would say Alf does not appear any worse for the wear, but no doubt changes have been etched into his character after nearly five months in captivity. Although I do not know him personally, choosing to care has constituted some of my own always-in-process character, too.
The kidnapping of Alf and his girlfriend, Ana, occurred just two weeks before the beginning of the spring semester. I wrote:

“Violence creeps closer, no matter how hard we try to keep it at bay, no matter how thickly we deny that it could happen to us or those we love.” (the bubble thins)

At the time, just two months back from visiting Israel and the West Bank, I imagined some parallels between FARC and Palestine, between the Colombian government and Israel. This view was refuted or met with silence: uncontinued. (Perhaps I could have remained more involved in the conversations that I did have access to?) I was not (and am still not) invested in proving such a claim, only in thinking through how violence gets perpetuated by unyielding stances on both/all sides. Uribe (for instance) is not without fault (no government is); and the people born into life with FARC are not essentially evil.

“…in the end it’s the Colombian political will — one, to make these steps, and two, pay for them — that has made this happen,” said … a [US] deputy assistant secretary of state for the Western Hemisphere.”

That’s from a story in today’s NYTimes about the rescue of Ingrid Betancourt and other hostages yesterday – a coincidence of timing reminiscent of Alf and Ana’s capture at nearly the same time as a massive global protest against FARC was being organized on Facebook. I spent some days working through a range of thoughts and emotions: grim realities & the force of spirit , weird twist of synchrony , and hyperempathy. Somewhere in the course of all that I decided to invite students to consider involvement.
They were (understandably) confused (!), however they rose to the occasion with a series of blog entries about deciding not to attend. Meanwhile, I read Gabriel Garcia-Marquez (News of Kidnapping), considering the long trip home,

“trying to imagine a way out for the millions of Colombians who only want to go about their daily lives, rather than being pawns in someone else’s brutal “game” for wealth and power.”

Perhaps it is apparent (but maybe not) that I consider average Colombians to be representative of average human beings – the great grand masses of us subject to the machinations of gargantuan social institutions and historical habit. What befalls them could confound us, too, and certainly is representative of occurrences and happenings to normal, typical folk in most countries around the globe. And there are, indeed, more organized and increasingly large protests developing: persistence will win the prize!
Ana was freed the first week of March. I mused then about coincidences of timing in-and-at the swirling center . In this situation – the random/chaotic juxtaposition of my friends, my passions, my ambitions – synchronicity abounds! I name (by choice, for the purposes of design) such events as centripetal dialogic force.
Yesterday’s headline, which I saw mere moments after reading Maria’s glorious announcement, read: Colombia Plucks Hostages From Rebels’ Grasp. I only know a few Colombians, but they have enhanced my life in a million ways. I agree with today’s NYTimes’ featured journalists, Simon Romero and Damien Cave,

Popularity: 1% [?]

Within minutes of each other I watched and listened to Steve’s rousing (northern) seasonal greeting from (as he says) “a happier time, before Vietnam, the Civil Rights, and all the “horrors” of our “modern” world,” and Tamer’s reminder of other realities: snapshot of a modern horror.
Meanwhile, the economic news is better in Bethelem this year, tourism has increased since a sharp dropoff after the second intifada in 2000. The increase of visitors is, however, a qualified “good”: the occupation is as real as ever.

Popularity: unranked [?]

Spark posted a great summary of a book I think I’d like to read. It critiques the role/rule of experts, a phenomena which caught my attention when a history professor whose class I interpreted frequently mentioned the rise of experts with disdain.
I tried to post a comment but my Korean is insufficient for decoding the directions:
“Great summary! I’m intrigued, especially by the conditioning of excess, the separation between reality/representation effected by the new logic of economy, and its location/operation as a source of power.”

Popularity: 1% [?]

Uttered in at least five languages (Arabic, Spanish, English, Japanese Sign Language, and Japanese), this film plays with the stereotype that different languages are a problem. As we follow the stories of four families, one realizes the source of confusion is not “in” the language; rather, it is the challenge of interpreting language in the context of a given person’s life story.
The relationships and connections among members of these families range from the incidental to the intimate. “May I speak with you, sir?” inquires a police officer? “There’s been an incident.” “I have raised these children, fed them breakfast, lunch, and dinner their entire lives, can’t you tell me if they are alright?” “That’s none of your concern,” replies the immigration officer.
There are two threads linking these families, two factors that bind them together tight: violence and the law. More specifically, a rifle and the institution of law enforcement, with the manipulations of politics hovering in the background. Acts of innocence and practicality unfold in scenarios of accident and opportunism. Babel exposes the vise of circumstance and consequence: in Morocco suspects are brutalized by military police, in Japan interviews are civil and police officers humane, in the US physical violence is replaced by emotional and psychic violence: ” I guarantee that if you pursue legal action you will simply postpone the inevitable.”
The systematic (peaceful?) order of Japan and the US masks the random unpredictability of sudden death; the apparent chaos and wildness of Mexico and Morocco highlights the human urge to seek experience in order to feel alive. Help appears as a rare offering in either place.
Language difference has nothing to do with these dynamics. Indeed, in Babel, the fact of linguistic diversity enables core commonalities of human suffering and ambition to be revealed.

Popularity: 3% [?]