Daniel Greene

Category: Language

My observations about grammar, language, and linguistics

  • Happy twenty-ten! (Not two-thousand-ten.)

    Why do I hear people saying “two-thousand-ten” or worse “two-thousand-and-ten”? How laborious is that! People, there’s a reason Prince didn’t sing “Tonight we are going to party as if it were nineteen-hundred-and-ninety-nine”! He sang “Tonight we’re gonna party like it’s nineteen-ninety-nine” because brevity is vernacular.

    Sure, it was fine to say “two-thousand.” No problem. I was great with “two-thousand-nine.” But that decade is over, and time’s a-wastin’.

    Let’s look forward. Ten years from now, are you going to say “two-thousand-twenty”? God, I hope not. It takes too much time. And the unity and brevity of twenty-twenty is so much cooler. Well, so is twenty-ten.

    Don’t let ten years of starting years with “two-thousand” stand in your way. Break out, baby. Try something new. If you don’t start pronouncing your years with “twenty” now, you’re going to sooner or later. Might as well be among the cool people who do it right from the start.

    Here’s to 2010. Make it a good one.

    Betcha said twenty-ten! 😉

  • 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?

    (more…)

  • 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!

  • Dennis Cokely "Culturally Rich Realities" Workshop



    Cokely Workshop 7 of 15
    Originally uploaded by danielgreene.

    This was the first time I had photographed a presenter giving a workshop in sign language. Those who know American Sign Language (ASL) can guess what Dr. Dennis Cokely was talking about. Those who don’t know ASL– well, they can have even more fun guessing. I don’t want to give away the content of his workshop to those who know ASL; rather, I encourage them to take his workshop themselves! As for those who don’t know ASL, there would be so much lost in translation if I simply said, “Dr. Cokely is signing X,” that I would be guilty of oversimplifying his message. And his workshop “Interpreting Culturally Rich Realities” is all about not oversimplifying any interpretation! I thank Dr. Cokely for his permission to photograph him as he worked.

    While I don’t want to give too much of his workshop away, I do want to use these photos to help myself and others who took his workshop recall some of this repeated points. One of the things Dr. Cokely repeatedly discussed was having multiple lexical items in one’s “mental files” to choose from when confronted with signs or words that represented “culturally rich realities,” or words that are not easily conveyed from one culture/language to another in a 1:1 ratio.

    As a photographer of a speaker presenting in ASL, I used the textual analysis and predictive skills I’ve developed as an interpreter to study Dr. Cokely’s rhetorical devices so that I would be prepared with my camera to capture him at the very moment when he would repeat one of his themes. As an instructor, he was very deft at using repetition to drive home a point.

    You may view my set of photos of Dennis Cokely on Flickr.

  • Interpreting or Transliterating?

    In previous installments, I’ve written about the importance of matching the Deaf speaker’s mastery of language, vocabulary, and register, especially when it comes to our ability to produce spoken English that is worthy of that speaker’s signed language. In my last, somewhat “controversial,” column, I wrote about the dilemmas we must face as interpreters when Deaf speakers produce signed English that is “wrong” or “broken English,” (as many second language speakers do). I believe that some of the controversy really turns upon the issue of whether we are voice interpreting or voice transliterating. This article will examine more closely the process that we might use to determine whether a Deaf speaker is producing an ASL message that must be interpreted or a signed English message that must be transliterated.

    I’d like to start off with the assertion that, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!” Many of the sentences that Deaf people sign, either in ASL or some form of manually (and orally!) coded English, follow the same syntax as regular, spoken English sentences, and should be voiced exactly as they are signed. This means that we, as interpreters/transliterators, must constantly assess the speaker’s syntax and encoding system to ascertain whether each particular word, phrase, and sentence should be interpreted or transliterated. We must ask ourselves, “if I say exactly what they are signing (and mouthing), will the Hearing audience receive the same message as the Deaf speaker intended, or must I change the wording and/or phrasing in order to produce an equivalent message to the speaker’s intent?” My assertion is that, more often than some would have us believe, transliteration is the way to go. (more…)