A Greene Man’s Blog

A while ago, a colleague of mine made an interesting interpreting choice that got me to thinking about how much we should “correct” the signed messages we voice in English. As my team person was voicing, the deaf client misused an English idiom, and my team person voiced the English idiom in the same “broken” way the deaf person had signed and mouthed it. The hearing people in the room softly chuckled, not only because the deaf person had said something funny, but because the way s/he said it was funny as well. I will point out here that the deaf person was taking a turn speaking in a group in which the register was casual, and the deaf person was using a combination of ASL and PSE with a good deal of semi-audible mouthing. “Interesting choice!” I thought to myself, as my ears pricked up when I heard this “broken” English coming out of the interpreter’s mouth. Why did the interpreter choose not to “correct” the deaf person’s English? Is it our job to interpret any and all signed messages into perfect English, no matter how they are signed? Perhaps not, I thought, and I’ve been thinking about this issue ever since.

Let’s take the above scenario and place a hearing immigrant in the deaf person’s place. Let’s take the interpreter out of the picture as well, because in the above case I believe it can be said that the deaf person did not need the interpreter so much to bridge languages as to bridge communication modes (from aural/oral to visual/gestural). The immigrant is likely to speak English like a foreigner and occasionally misuse English idioms (sometimes to charmingly humorous effect) just as the deaf person did. The native members of the group might softly chuckle and might, perhaps, offer the correct English idiom to the foreigner, so as to teach them the right way to say it. Or perhaps they will try to be polite and not correct the foreigner’s speech. The immigrant either learns the correct idiom or not. Either way, a natural process has occurred among people whose respective languages have come into contact with each other. The natives acquire a natural understanding of the foreigner’s level of familiarity with English, and the foreigner may or may not acquire a better familiarity of English through the feedback s/he receives from the natives. There is no intermediary present to smooth out all imperfections and create a false sense of the foreigner’s fluency in the natives’ language. Without the intermediary, mistakes come to light, and the participants are empowered to make choices based on this knowledge.

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In my first column, back in June 1998, I wrote about how we as sign language interpreters for the Deaf are also “spoken language interpreters for the Hearing.” I emphasized the importance of brushing up on our English so that we could do justice to our clients—both Deaf and Hearing—when we voice-interpret. But is English really all we speak when we voice-interpret? Consider the following scenario:

You are interpreting for a Deaf man who is teaching a Deaf Culture class about the origins of ASL and how it differs from signed languages of foreign countries. How many foreign words and names, from how many different countries, are you going to need to pronounce? How many different speech-sound systems, or phonologies, do you need to have at least a passing familiarity with in order to successfully complete this assignment? How many phonemes will you be able to “pull out of your hat”? (Phonemes are the smallest units of meaningful sound in a language, for example, the sounds “f” and “th” [IPA Θ] which make the difference between “deaf” and “death”—a distinction I’m sure many of us wish more people understood!)

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“If I was you, I wouldn’t have went there and did that.”

“This agency is ran by the Deaf.”

“I move that the board purchases a new computer.”

“It is mandatory that she is on time, and that she has fun and does a good job.”

Do the above phrases sound right to you? If you answered no, your ear is finely tuned to the proper use of tenses in English grammar. If you answered yes, or were unsure, you may be running the risk of annoying—or worse, confusing—your hearing audience, and making a Deaf person sound less educated than s/he is.

This article will cover two of the most often misused tenses in the English language: the past participle and the subjunctive. In some regional dialects, these tenses seem to have disappeared, but they are still very much a part of Standard English. Let’s look at the examples above to see if we can make more sense of them with the proper tenses.

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