This article was written by OZeWAI member Ricky Onsman.
My day job has me focus on digital accessibility – making sure websites and apps are accessible to people with any type of disability that might affect their ability to understand and operate web content.
Increasingly, this extends to anything with a digital interface, including native mobile apps, closed systems like kiosks (closed in the sense a user can’t apply their own assistive technology), and even digital interfaces on household products.
This doesn’t diminish my interest in non-digital accessibility, though, and I’ve recently had cause to think about some forms more deeply.
A few weeks ago, I attended a reunion of people associated with the Australian Theatre of the Deaf. It brought together actors, directors, writers, administrators, and anyone who worked with the company over the last 50 years.
The spark for this was a visit to Australia by Carol-Lee Aquiline, an American who worked with the company as an actor during the time I was there in 1982, and who went on to perform with them for many years, as well as writing and directing shows.
When I was with the company, we performed almost exclusively in schools: three shows a day, five days a week, often with two or three shows for different age groups. Like most theatre-in-education, the shows were as educational and instructive as they were entertaining, with the Theatre of the Deaf naturally focusing on deaf experience, history, communication, and advocacy, as well as disability awareness in general.
We had a team of two hearing actors (including me, despite my mild hearing impairment) and three deaf actors, while another team had another hearing actor and three more deaf actors.
One of my co-actors was a deaf woman of about 20, Martha Rundell, an extremely expressive performer who hadn’t had a lot of formal education and used a blend of Auslan – Australian sign language – plus gesture and facial expression to communicate.
It was wonderful to catch up with Martha at the reunion, and we had 42 years of life to catch up on. My Auslan is not as slick as it used to be, and it’s also a bit dated now, but I found chatting with Martha really easy and we fell into old habits quickly.
The organisers had arranged for two Auslan interpreters to be present to join in conversations and translate Auslan to English for hearing attendees, and English to Auslan for deaf attendees.
As you’d expect, there were speeches, including one by Martha on how she enjoyed her time at the company, which was translated into English by one of the terps.
Both I and another hearing actor noticed there were a few times when the interpreter seemed to falter, leaving gaps in the talk as if she wasn’t quite clear what to say.
I chatted with her afterwards, and she admitted there were a couple of times where she was indeed flummoxed, because Martha wasn’t using precise Auslan words.
For those of us who know Martha, this wasn’t a problem because we were used to her sometimes branching out beyond formal Auslan.
I asked the interpreter how she came to be a terp, and she explained she’d just decided on it as a career choice, studied it at university, and achieved certification. She had no association with the deaf community, no deaf people in her family.
One the one hand, it’s great that this is available to people as a career path and job choice. Certainly in the past, it’s often been hearing CODAs (children of deaf adults) who’ve developed their necessary childhood facility with sign language into a paid job.
But this incident did show me that interpreting for deaf people is not all about precise word-for-word translation, it’s also about understanding conceptual expression and being able to put that into English – or vice versa, for that matter.
This also comes up when you realise that, naturally, each spoken language base has its own sign language equivalent, and even a single spoken language like English can have regional sign languages that are extremely distinctive, such as Auslan, ASL (American Sign Language) and BSL (British Sign Language). For example, Auslan uses a two-handed finger spelling system, while ASL’s is one-handed.
I would imagine that a tertiary course in any sign language would convey at least a basic understanding of the deaf experience, history and language development, such as the difference between deaf and Deaf, and that sign language is the primary language for many people who are born Deaf.
But there’s also more to it than that. I was fortunate, although challenged, when I joined the Theatre of the Deaf to undergo a demanding six week period in which I had to rehearse two plays and learn Auslan. I achieved this by immersing myself in the deaf world, communicating with colleagues in Auslan as much offstage as on, chatting with people at the Adult Deaf Society in sign and finger spelling (at that time, some older deaf people only knew fingerspelling rather than Auslan), even going to shops and pretending to be deaf.
I value that time I had with the Theatre of the Deaf enormously, and it taught me so much about performing and the whole history of deafness, communication, and disability, all of which informs how I approach my work now in digital accessibility, not least in knowing that what I do matters – it’s not an academic exercise.
It also makes me think about things like captioning, where captions have to convey not just speech but informative sounds (“a door slams, footsteps recede, a train whistle sounds mournfully as the train fades into the distance”) and where audio description is not just about literal physical description (“the woman stands with mouth open and eyebrows raised” versus “the woman stands shocked and speechless, staring at the door”).
After talking with the interpreter, I have no doubt she’ll take this experience on board and think about how to handle those situations. She was definitely surprised that her gaps were noticed, though – she thought she’d covered them.
But then, it’s not every day she’ll have to translate for a deaf person to an audience of hearing people who have varying levels of sign language proficiency themselves.
For myself, I was grateful and surprised that I slid back into signing with relative ease at the reunion. Having grown up speaking Dutch, being multilingual has always been a huge benefit to me in understanding other people’s perspectives.
I’m glad I can still count Auslan as one of my languages.
Originally published: https://onsman.com/lost-in-translation/.