Daniel Greene

Author: Daniel Greene

  • The dilemma of self-promotion

    Tonight, after posting the participant’s review of my workshop this morning, I see that there are no comments on the blog post and no “Likes” or comments on the Facebook post. My first thought is “people thought it was obnoxious.” Self-promotion can be a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t proposition. You want to win people over, but you risk turning them off in the process. I don’t know if I ever strike the right balance when it comes to talking about my accomplishments or promoting my work. Lately, I fear that some of my status updates have been boldface brags; e.g., “New blog post: Rave Review for my Vague Language Workshop http://bit.ly/zWrno” (tweet), “I’m happy that 24 people came to my workshop in Phoenix, five of them all the way from Yuma and four of them all the way from Tucson.” (tweet), and “New blog post: Speak & Spell II a Successful Workshop http://bit.ly/171bC9” (tweet), especially the fact that I shared my teacher evaluation scores. Ugh.

    What may or may not be apparent is that I have felt shame and failure in my life, and there have been a few times I doubted I’d ever achieve anything. When I do manage to do something good, my feelings of past failure and inefficacy drive me to shout my achievements from the rooftops. “See! I’m not a complete failure! I DID something!”

    Perhaps it is the fact that there have been so many times in my life when I have felt paralyzed into inaction. I’ve wanted to do many things that I didn’t do because I didn’t believe in myself. Now, when I finally do things that I’ve only been dreaming of doing for years, I feel… well… vindicated! Especially when other people didn’t believe in me, either. It’s like, “How do you like me now?!” Well, maybe not very much, I fear.

    What good does it do to shove my success in the faces of people who doubted me? Are they really going to “like me now”? Or are they just going to resent me for rubbing it in their faces that I succeeded in spite of them? My fear is that they are going to resent me as much as I resent them. Resentment begets resentment. The thing to do is forgive everyone for everything, starting with myself.

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  • Rave Review for my Vague Language Workshop

    I was honored that a participant in my Vague Language (VL) workshop for ASL interpreters was moved to write this review for our local chapter of the Registry of Interpreters for the Deaf (Arizona RID). The writer wishes to remain anonymous, but I found out who they are and got their permission to publish their review on my website. I assure you that this review was entirely unsolicited and is reprinted here in the writer’s original words. Here it is!

    Hi everyone. I was able to attend the workshop this past Saturday by Daniel Greene entitled, “Just What They Said: Retaining Ambiguity When Interpreting Vague Language.” This was an excellent workshop for a number of reasons and I’m thrilled that Daniel has taken it up to present this topic because it is one thing I know I have struggled with and it hasn’t been addressed enough in regards to the work we do as interpreters. There was so much that I learned.

    It was all about vague language of course which has really been brought to light, I think, by video relay interpreting but certainly applies to the work we do in education. It is a fairly new topic in linguistic studies too. It is the concept that people do use vague and unspecific language in their everyday interactions and often it is for a purpose that they are being vague. This brings up the question, do we as interpreters then clean it up and make it clear, do we interrupt the conversation to get clarification, or do we just render the message as vague as it was given? Keep in mind it might be the person’s goal to be vague.

    For example: a teenager might wish to cover up the truth to avoid getting in trouble; a teacher might wish to protect a student’s feeling when giving feedback about work; a person might just be trying to be polite in their use of words; a doctor might wish to be less direct about a person’s life expectancy; a counselor might purposely need to ask an open ended question without leading the client with examples. How much of this can and should an interpreter try to clarify?

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  • I Don’t Represent the Deaf Community

    I was criticized by a deaf person for posting a one-minute long closed-captioned spoken video on YouTube the other day. The deaf person said that they were disappointed that I didn’t sign my video and that, being a sign language interpreter, I “represent the deaf community.” This is my response, signed and closed-captioned.

  • Vague Language Facial Expression

    I could really use your help to find one word — and it has to be a NOUN — for this facial expression people use in both English and ASL (American Sign Language) when they’re using Vague Language (VL). Maybe my facial expression / noun pairs will help you. Now maybe you can help me… thanks!

  • Struggling to manage my use of the Internet

    I have struggled to manage my time on the Internet ever since I first got online in 1995. I hesitate to say that I have an Internet addiction, because I don’t like all the baggage that comes with the term “addiction,” but I will say that there are times I spend too many hours on Web sites. And maybe I do have an Internet addiction.

    Lately, I notice — especially with Facebook — that I get pain in my elbow and wrist from so much mouse clicking to follow everyone’s posts. I read all my Friends’ postings, regardless of how well I know them, and I just keep reading and commenting and reading and refreshing pages. There are people in my Friends list that I’ve spent more time with on Facebook than in real life. But no matter what our relationship in real life, I find myself reading everything they post. It begins to seem as though my “best friends” are the ones who interact with me the most on Facebook. Yet that’s insidious, because it doesn’t mean they’re closer to me; it just means they’re on Facebook a lot and they like to interact with people on it. It’s seductive to sit there clicking, clicking, clicking on everyone’s content, yet I have to do something about my overuse strain. I am, after all, a sign language interpreter, and I have to save my hands and arms for work.

    And speaking of seductive, it is so tempting to add all the people Facebook suggests to me as Friends– well, all the people I know, anyway. I never went and added all my friends Friends or anything crazy like that, but I did add almost all the classmates, coworkers, and friends I recognized. It got to the point where I had 378 Friends! As I started following more closely, I realized that I hadn’t even remembered some of my classmates correctly. In one case, I thought I was following a guy who was one class ahead of me until I realized that I was following his brother who was two classes behind me. He seems like a great guy, but the last straw was when he made that “tell me something you remember about me” prompt in his status message, and I realized, well, I didn’t remember anything.

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