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Deaf Heart, confidentiality, vagueness, and transparency

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There is currently a discourse within the American Deaf community about the resignation of two Deaf members of the board of the Registry of Interpreters for the Deaf (RID). The members who resigned, Lewis Merkin and Naomi Sheneman, say that the confidentiality agreements they signed when they joined the board prevent them from discussing in detail what happened that they felt they had to resign. They say, vaguely, that they were reprimanded for something they did that was a trifling matter within the norms of Deaf culture, and that, in general, they do not feel the RID board has a Deaf Heart. The resigning members, and others who support embracing the values of Deaf Heart and Native View, demand more Deaf leadership in RID and more transparency from RID.

In an attempt to understand the term Deaf Heart, and to catch up on the conversation regarding Deaf members of the RID board, I sought, watched, and collected a playlist of videos about Deaf Heart on YouTube. I also Googled ‘Deaf Heart’ and read and listed two articles below (actually, I had read one of them when it came out last month, and I’m still not sure I understand). I’m sure this is not the complete discourse on Deaf Heart and the Deaf RID board member resignations; this is just all I was able to find. If you know of any other vlogs or blog posts I should add, please let me know. In the meanwhile, I hope these references help others who want to get the news and listen to the discourse.

Each of these videos touches upon the concepts of Deaf Heart and/or Native View, though none of them defines it. The first video in this playlists seeks clarification from the diverse membership of the Deaf community (including Deaf people, interpreters both hearing and deaf, people with Deaf family members, social service providers, and others) about Deaf Heart. Deanna Donaldson, the author of this first vlog, requests answers to four questions about Deaf Heart, and invites vloggers to make additional comments for up to two minutes. Her invitation goes out to Houston, Texas, but as it is on the World Wide Web it is a good prompt for vloggers everywhere, and I encourage people to post video responses. I would like to see what people have to say about this thing called Deaf Heart.

An observation that might make for another whole blog post is the vagueness in which these vloggers couch their discussion of these confidential issues. Anyone who thinks ASL is not a vague language, or there is no vagueness in ASL, will see that people can in fact use ASL to be vague. I invite those who know ASL — which, by the way, you have to do to be able to watch these videos (sorry) — to note the vague language and tell me what you see.

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Certified Medical Interpreter: A title in your future?

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Medical interpreting certification: An ASL/English interpreter’s perspective

Medical interpreting is a specialization, or at least it can be. Yet an ASL/English interpreter who interprets in medical settings is not required to hold a specialist certificate. RID doesn’t have one and never did. Recently, though, the National Board of Certification for Medical Interpreters (NBCMI), an independent division of the International Medical Interpreters Association, created a certification called Certified Medical Interpreter (CMI). They already certify English/Spanish interpreters , and have tests for several more spoken languages in the works. Asked about certifying American Sign Language / English interpreters, the National Board of Certification for Medical Interpreters FAQ says “The National Board is consulting with the RID to determine how to include ASL interpreters in this process.” According to their website, the NBCMI began developing the CMI certification way back in 1986. They first awarded certificates in late 2009. As of this writing, there are just under 500 CMI’s in the NBCMI registry.

Is it worth it to specialize in medical interpreting? To become a Certified Medical Interpreter?

I think it depends how much medical interpreting work you can get in your market. If you can get a full-time job interpreting in a hospital, then by all means it behooves you specialize. If you can get a fair amount of medical interpreting work, it is wise to specialize not to the point of excluding other kinds of interpreting work, but at least to focus some of your professional development on taking workshops and independent studies in medical interpreting. You could even seek a mentor who is a skilled medical interpreter. At some point, I believe that altruism is a motive to specializing and becoming certified so you can lead by example and raise the bar in the your interpreting community. Teaching workshops on medical interpreting is another great way to bring up interpreters who want to become better medical interpreters, and in researching and lesson planning, you will learn so much more (I know I always learn when I develop my workshops).

Should the Registry of Interpreters for the Deaf partner with Certified Medical Interpreters?

I believe so. It wouldn’t be the first time RID gave “certified” status to members who scored admirably on a test developed by another organization. The Boys Town National Research Hospital developed the Educational Interpreters Performance Assessment (EIPA) for ASL/English interpreters in K-12 settings in 1991. In 2006, The Registry of Interpreters for the Deaf (RID) began granting the “Ed:K-12″ certification to interpreters who had scored 4.0 or higher on the EIPA, whose maximum score is 5.0. It took 15 years for RID to accept the EIPA, but it finally happened.

Granted, the EIPA is an “assessment,” not a “certificate.” Still, the fact that RID set a precedent for certifying interpreters who have scored favorably on other organizations tests tells me that they might be willing to grant something like an SC:Med (“Specialized Certificate: Medical”) to those who have a CMI. Then again, even if they don’t, ASL/English interpreters/transliterators could still claim the CMI an extra credential, and add it behind their name like “Daniel Greene, MA, NIC, CMI.” Why not? Even before RID recognized the EIPA, there were RID certified interpreters who took the EIPA with the commitment to specialize in K-12 educational interpreting, lead by example, and increase the level of competence in not just themselves but the interpreting field. Yes, there were interpreters who only had their EIPA score to tout, and there are still interpreters who only have the RID Ed:K-12, but the point is that they specialize, and employers recognize this.

Would a CMI for ASL/English interpreters lead to a break with RID?

I seriously doubt it for several reasons:

  1. There is not enough work for most ASL/English interpreters to make a full-time living solely as medical interpreters. They would have to supplement their income with non-medical interpreting jobs, and for non-medical work they would need a generalist certification.
  2. It would not be in RID’s best interest to exclude medical interpreters from the larger ASL/English interpreting field.
  3. RID has already demonstrated a move toward inclusion with the recognition of EIPA and partnerships with the National Alliance of Black Interpreters (NAOBI) and Mano a Mano.

Do you specialize? Would you certify?

I can only speak for my experiences in the San Diego and Phoenix markets. What about where you live? Do you get enough medical interpreting work to specialize to the exclusion of interpreting in other settings? And, even if you couldn’t work solely as a medical interpreter, would you test to become a Certified Medical Interpreter? I would; that’s my position. What’s yours?

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SEE: Allow me to disabuse you of a common misnomer

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See more on Know Your Meme

From the way I’ve seen people use the term SEE in recent years, I don’t think they know what they’re talking about. I want to dispel the notion that SEE is any and every form of English-like American Sign Language (ASL). English-like ASL goes by many names — contact language, contact variety signing (CVS), conceptually accurate signed English (CASE), manually coded English (MCE), and pidgin signed English (PSE). The idea that English-like ASL is a pidgin was refuted by Cokely in 1983 and by Lucas & Valli and Davis in 1989, yet many people still use the term PSE, unaware of the research that disproved it 20–30 years ago. If people are still using the term PSE two and three decades after it was refuted by linguists, I don’t know there’s hope of getting people to stop using the term SEE so loosely, but I’m going to try, so hear me out.

SEE stands for Seeing Essential English, a sign system developed by a Deaf teacher, David Anthony, and the Deaf children he taught. David Anthony and his interpreter Arthur Washburn, in their article Seeing Essential English: A sign system of English, show that they had an insider’s knowledge of Deaf history, Deaf culture, and ASL. David Anthony developed SEE to help Deaf children learn English. SEE is a specific, contrived sign system that combines signs from ASL with handshapes from the fingerspelled alphabet; i.e., “initialized signs.” Washburn and Anthony argue that initialization is nothing new, pointing out that several signs Americans don’t realized are initialized actually were initialized upon French words; e.g. C for chercher (SEARCH), B for bon (GOOD), A for autre (OTHER), and C for cent (HUNDRED). In SEE, a sign can only be used to represent one English word, and one sign cannot be used to represent more than one word. For the purpose of teaching morphemic knowledge of English, SEE included affixes and suffixes such as -ness, -ment, etc.

Note well that there is hardly anyone who signs SEE anymore (which Luetke-Stahlman & Milburn noted way back in 1996). I could not find a single video of anyone signing SEE on the Internet. I did, however, find a video of Dr. Barb Luetke presenting a lecture on the subject:

Even when people use the term SEE to stand for Signing Exact English, they are not quite right. Signing Exact English is technically SEE², a later sign system based on SEE. Even SEE² is so uncommon I could hardly find any videos of people signing it. There are three humorous videos by Eric Witteborg and friend parodying Apple’s “I’m a Mac / I’m a PC” commericlals that demonstrate the way many members of the American Deaf culture (including CODAs) see SEE as unwieldy and complicated in comparison to the simple elegance of ASL. In these short videos you see a short sample of something like SEE (though I suspect one or two of the signs are parodies of SEE, not the real signs). Several of the videos of what people called SEE (here’s just one example) were really just what might be called Conceptually Accurate Signed English (CASE), a way of using signs from ASL in something approximating English word order with English mouthing. There are also many people using the term SEE in vLogs and comments, and it is clear from the way they describe it that they don’t know what SEE really is. One of the few videos I found of someone actually signing SEE² was by Dr. Barb Luetke, who I found in my research is one of the few experts on the subject (if not the only one):

Here is Barb Luetke speaking about SEE II at a conference:

Here is a video of three teachers signing a song at the end of a SEE II workshop:

As an ASL-English interpreter, I work to be an ally of the Deaf, and I hold ASL in high esteem. I am not suggesting people should sign SEE — nor am I suggesting they should not. Language is a matter of choice. My desire is for people to make educated choices about the language they use, which is why I want to make sure people who use the term SEE know what it actually is.

References

Cokely, D. (1983). When is pidgin not a pidgin? An alternative analysis on the ASL-English contact situation. Sign Language Studies, 38, pp. 1-24.

Davis, J. (1989). Distinguishing language contact phenomena in ASL. In C. Lucas (Ed.), The sociolinguistics of the Deaf community (pp. 85-102). San Diego, CA: Academic Press.

Lucas, C., & Valli, C. (1989). Language contact in the American Deaf community. In C. Lucas (Ed.), The sociolinguistics of the Deaf community (pp. 11-40). San Diego, CA: Academic Press.

Luetke-Stahlman, B. & Milburn, W.O. (1996 March). A history of Seeing Essential English (SEE I). American Annals of the Deaf (141). Retrieved from http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/detail?accno=EJ535800

Specializations vs. special skills: An interpreter’s scope and abilities

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Confused

Confused (Photo credit: CollegeDegrees360)

Having shared my first essay about settings vs. specializations with an Introduction to Interpreting class, I now realize I wasn’t clear enough the first time I wrote on the topic. One confusing aspect is that I called oral transliteration and tactile interpreting ”specializations,” which doesn’t quite jibe with the way the Registry of Interpreters for the Deaf (RID) defines “specialist” and “generalist” certificates. Let me break it down:

Oral transliteration and the Oral Transliteration Certificate (OTC)

Oral transliteration is what I would call a specialization — or at least I would have called it so last week. Not everyone can mouth clearly for people who read lips (or, more accurately, “speechread”). Certainly not every spoken/signed language interpreter knows how to mouth spoken language and use natural gestures without signing or mouthing the mouth morphemes that go with signs. Nevertheless, now that I have read and thought about “specialization” the last few days, I have to call oral transliteration a “special skill.”

…special skills, specializations, and settings are three different things.

I am coming to understand that “specialization” has more do with focusing one’s scope of practice in certain settings such as educational, medical, performing arts, religious, mental health, or legal interpreting. Yes, oral transliteration for oral deaf people and tactile and close-vision interpreting for Deaf-Blind people are special skills. And, yes, having those skills may lead one into specialized settings such as Deaf-Blind conferences and social events, but it is debatable whether Deaf-Blind interpreting is a “specialization” since one can interpret for Deaf-Blind people anywhere — at the doctor’s office, in a classroom, in a courtroom, at a conference of mostly hearing people, etc. In short, interpreters may “specialize” to work in certain settings, and special skills may lead you or equip you to work in certain settings, but special skills, specialization, and settings are three different things.

The OTC is a “Generalist” certificate

However “special” the skill of oral transliteration is, RID’s OTC is a “generalist” certification. RID’s Generalist Certification pagedefines “generalist” thus:

Generalist certifications recognize professional interpreters who have met or exceeded a nationally recognized standard of minimum competence in interpreting and/or transliterating.

Yet how does a certified oral transliterator to gain entry into legal interpreting? RID goes on to say:

Individual certifications vary in their scope, so it is important to know what each credential means.

So what is the “scope” of the oral transliterator? That page on the RID website does not say. To find out how oral transliterators specialize in legal interpreting, I Googled ‘”oral transliteration” legal interpreting’ and found an Oral Transliteration Certificate (OTC) Examination Information Bulletin that simply says in 1988, RID concurrently worked on developing certification for legal interpreters and (separately) oral transliteration. There is no mention of oral transliteration in legal settings (p. 4). It also mentions that one of the benefits of membership in the Alexander Graham Bell Association (AGB) is Volta Voices, a publication that has medical and legal columns (p. 5). I suppose an oral transliterator could specialize in legal interpreting by studying legal protocol and terminology. Unlike ASL-English (and/or Spanish) interpreters, they don’t have to learn how to talk about law in any language other than English.

Oral Transliterators licensed to do legal interpreting in Arizona

How can an oral transliterator get a license to do legal interpreting in the state of Arizona? (And when I say “legal interpreting,” I don’t mean “lawful interpreting” or “interpreting legally.” I mean interpreting in judicial and law enforcement settings.) I searched the Arizona Commission for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing (ACDHH) website for “legal interpreting” and found the Initial General or Legal License Application. The section for legal interpreting shows that someone who holds an OTC can only apply for a Class D license, not a class A, B, or C. That is okay, though, because according to this video on  interpreting licensure (which has both captioning and voiceover) Class D is only for oral transliterators and Deaf interpreters (“relay” or “intermediary” interpreters who work between hearing interpreters and deaf consumers who do not communicate effectively with the hearing interpreter and vice versa). Interestingly, according to the application form, applicants for classes A, B, and C all have to sign an affidavit stating they have worked over 10,000 hours since first becoming certified, while Deaf interpreters and oral transliterators only have to have 25 hours experience of any kind past certification.

The significantly lower requirements for deaf interpreters and oral transliterators in legal settings makes me wonder why legal interpreting requires a specialist certificate of some interpreters but not of all. If it is because of the specialized vocabulary and protocols, then those would apply to deaf and oral interpreters as well. I suppose the difference is a) the rarity of deaf and oral interpreters and b) the softer language barrier between sign varieties for deaf interpreters and diction for oral interpreters than there is for interpreters who have to know how to “interpret” legalese into and from two different languages. Given what can reasonably be expected of special interpreters serving special populations, and given the lack of motivation one might have to specialize in law, I guess it is sort of “sink or swim” for these practitioners. Their incentive to acquire the skills necessary to succeed as legal specialists probably stems from a desire to do good work for others or at least a desire to make it easier on themselves. Luckily, there are law classes people can take, and there are legal interpreting workshops offered by ASL-English-Spanish interpreters that are accessible to both Deaf interpreters and oral transliterators.

Specialization — when does it end?

Why do legal interpreters need a specialist certificate when medical interpreters do not? Is not medical interpreting a specialization? Yes, it is, but RID does not have a specialist certificate for it. Is performing arts interpreting a specialization? Yes, it is, and RID used to award a specialist certificate for it (the SC:PA), but it doesn’t anymore. How about political interpreting? Religious interpreting? Academic interpreting? Mental health interpreting? Sports interpreting? Should all specializations require specialist certificates? Once we start certifying interpreters for specializations, where does it end? So far it has stopped at legal, but there is something on the horizon called the Certified Medical Interpreter (CMI) and that, my friends, is “beyond the scope of this article.“

Psst! Stay tuned. I’ve already started a draft.

Silent Weekend via Western Region Interpreter Education Center

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Two weeks to Silent Weekend at Western Oregon University, and it’s not too late to register! I’m not presenting this time, but some of my MAIS cohort are, so take advantage of fresh scholarship!

Annual Silent Weekend

The Western Region Interpreter Education Center and Western Oregon University are co-hosting the fourth annual Silent Weekend immersion experience at Western Oregon University, July 20-22nd.

Save the Date for the 2012 Silent Weekend: July 20th – 22nd

Silent weekend is conducted completely in American Sign Language (ASL). The event is for Deaf and hearing students, interpreters, interpreter educators, and ASL instructors. It is held at Western Oregon University during the summer.

Attendees can choose from two possible tracks with corresponding workshops. The first is interpreter professional development, which is for working and pre-professional interpreters. The second track is for students and community members to develop their ASL skills and learn linguistic features of the language.

There are opportunities to earn up to 1.4 CEUs during this weekend. If you are looking for some worthwhile workshops, some great entertainment, and a chance to sharpen your skills then Silent Weekend is for you!

Registration Form and Agenda: PDF | MSWord

Workshop Abstracts: PDF

For more information regarding Silent Weekend, contact CM Hall at hallcm@wou.edu.

via WRIEC: Western Region Interpreter Education Center.