Personal/Reblog blog. Check out my art blog at astronomancer.tumblr.com 30 something year old Chinese-Am man living in the SF Bay Area. My stuff is tagged with a "my" ( my art, my fanart, my fiction, my face, etc ) in front of it, everything else should be credited to their rightful owners.
People are trying to bring back 1880s-era anti-ASL sentiment. Worst timeline.
You’d be surprised how often I’m told there is no interpreter at an event, there are no captions at an event, and they act like I’m asking for something absurd.
This isn’t a performative dance routine interpreting what is going on.
But hey, deafies, we’re woke now because we require interpreters.
This is all absolutely true. Also, to add, many deaf people receive a much worse education because the schools are unwilling/unable to invest in proper education for deaf people. So there are deaf people out there who struggle to read English because the structure of English is completely different than the structure of Sign Languages.
Also, Sign Language is NOT international. Signing in London is different that Ireland, or Paris, Toronto, Mexico, New Zealand, India– some of the signing may be similar or even related but they are all different languages. So if you see several interpreters at an event or a news broadcast or en EU summit, and they are doing different signs, this is why.
And for the idiots who still don’t comprehend that for many people English is a second language, even signers who were born in an English speaking country– and still argue ‘you get captions what’s the problem’ - Have you ever watched the auto-craptions on the news or a live event, or even a film on Amazon that they couldn’t bother to get a human to properly provide subs? Yeah. A good percentage of the time, it’s just word salad that means absolutely nothing. You’re likely to just get a pile of words that may or may not have to do with anything going on in what you are trying to watch.
Some time, put on the news with no captions or sound. Put on a film or show you have never seen before, and try to lipread what is being said. Try to figure out what the plot or context is from just the actor’s faces. Just try to engage when the only queues you have are facial expressions and movement on the screen– if you can even see them talk at all, a lot of films and shows are shot over a shoulder with the back of someone’s head.
Wear ear-plugs when you are out having a coffee with a friend and try to figure out what your friend is even saying. No music, no nothing– just earplugs and trying to figure it out.
Do all of this for a week and then tell me that craptions are enough. Then tell me we don’t need interpreters. After two days, you’re going to be angry and frustrated because you don’t know what the fuck is going on.
Interpreters do more than just tell you the exact words. They INTERPRET English language and put it into sign. They aren’t just randomly throwing around their hands and looking silly. And they do it on the fly, live, as something is going. A good majority of the times, Interpreters have no idea what is going to be said. In those moments they are hearing something in English (or French, Spanish, what have you), figuring out what the best way to sign these words back to a sign-user base, and they have to do it all in seconds. It’s a LOT of work.
So if you are at an event or you see two or even more signers who keep switching off after half an hour or an hour, know that the money is NOT being wasted having multiple interpreters there. They are not being lazy. They are doing a whole helluva lot, and their brains and hands and faces occasionally need a break.
So if you are hiring interpreters for an event, don’t be surprised if they say you’ll need to pay more to have several interpreters there. The interpreters are incredibly skilled, and they work bloody hard. If they tell you they need more than one, don’t have a fit at them and try to talk them into just having one interpreter, thinking you can pay less. Understand that they work their arses off, and it’s a very intense job that requires a lot of brain power and body power. So please, PLEASE be kind to interpreters.
And for chrissake, STOP DOING THIS. STOP DOING THIS. STOP FUCKING DOING THIS.
Seconding all of this, but also to get more specific on the first point:
ASL (American Sign Language) is not only different from BSL (British Sign Language), they’re not even in the same language family. Similarly, LSM (Mexican Sign Language) is different from LSE (Spanish Sign Language), and there are other regional sign languages in Spanish speaking South America.
My (hearing) kid is studying ASL and when there was a Deaf contestant on British Bake Off he said that he really didn’t recognize the BSL signing. But we traveled to Peru last summer and saw some people signing at a restaurant, and he said he recognized a few signs of LSP, even as he could tell it was a different language.
When you start to understand how much signed languages are full and complete languages with specific grammar and structure, you realize why captioning is not an equivalent to interpretation.
“Why would deaf people need interpretation in a language that’s their first language? Can’t they just read a fast moving faux-phonetic transcript of a speech made in their second language.”
Clown-ass behavior.
“There are closed captions on all broadcast channels and streaming services” I suspect people don’t realize that Closed Captions and Subtitles are not the same thing.
DVI, HDMI, and D-Port straight up don’t transmit or interleave CC data, and the most modern TVs can’t decode it correctly either. DVD, Blu-Ray, and media players have their own encoding and decoding built in to process and display subtitle files, bypassing the closed captioning on the screen entirely. Most people CAN’T use the embedded closed captioning technology in their TVs as originally designed in the way that human flipflop above described. Its just yet another way society has failed to meet the bare minimum of equity in communication.
This is a long read, but worth it. Some takeaways:
-Don’t use “buy now pay later.” The fine print isn’t what it seems.
-The fine print on medical financing, store credit cards, and contactless payment is also not what it seems.
-Payday loans are still predatory, even when offered by your employer
-Rewards programs are an income stream for the companies that run them. The points systems are manipulated so that the house always wins. They depend on people leaving money in rewards accounts and not in interest-bearing traditional bank accounts.
-Electronic payment apps like VenMo are not banks. You don’t earn interest. Your money is not protected.
-Your financial information is not private if your money is not kept in a regulated bank.
-None of this is regulated by the FDIC. Your money is not protected if it is held by a non-bank doing banking business. Our economy is not protected from the collapse of financial institutions that are not banks.
-The Biden administration was making progress in increasing accountability for non-banks operating as predatory financial services providers. The current administration is reversing those protections to favor corporations.
