Who knew that while we western region RID interpreters are having a conference to ourselves in Honolulu, interpreters of all settings and languages are having a conference in Monterey? It amazes me how little I know of the wider world of interpreting, and I can only imagine that my fellow ASL-English interpreters are in the same boat.
It seems to me that a week never goes by without a colleague telling me that he or she was misunderstood, humiliated, obstructed, or underpaid while doing his or her job. Some of them react with anger, others with frustration, a few seem resigned, but a growing number of our fellow interpreters have been reacting to these real-life situations by taking action, doing something about it. Finally, interpreters finding a solution to this “never-ending” comedy of errors where the interpreter is often an unwilling character.
As those of you who know me personally (and many others have figured out by reading this blog) know, I have always considered myself a professional at the same level as all those who we provide our services to: Scientists, politicians, attorneys, diplomats, physicians, military officers, school principals; and I try to act that way when I provide my interpretation services. I feel…
I think that, in general, professional conferences are great! I don’t go to them all the time—one a year on average—but I always make some valuable personal/professional connections, and I always learn more about how to be better at what I do. For example, at the Conference of Interpreter Trainers in 2010, I met Miako (Villanueva) Rankin. We happened to chat at a lunch table, and now she is one of my master’s thesis committee members. Another example: I attended a Registry of Interpreters for the Deaf regional conference in 1998 and learned some life-changing lessons about participant-presenter interactions that have stayed with me both as a participant and a presenter of workshops.
I also think it helps to find more than one reason to go to a conference. When I attended the 2006 CIT conference in San Diego, it was a chance to visit my parents and friends in the city I had moved away from two years before. When I attended other conferences, such as the National Association of Black Interpreters (NAOBI), I was there as a presenter but I reveled in the warm welcome I received even though I am not black and I loved the festive atmosphere and cross-cultural exchange.
A conference is what you make it. If you can network and make friends and/or academic/professional relationships, combine both learning and teaching, and enjoy the city you’re visiting, I think a conference can be a great boon to one’s career.
pictograms used by the United States National Park Service. A package containing all NPS symbols is available at the Open Icon Library (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Yesterday’s Hangout On Air on American Sign Language (ASL) and Deaf culture is now a video on YouTube, and that video is being crowdsourced for subtitles at Amara. If you’ve never heard of Amara (I hadn’t until yesterday), it is a website dedicated to crowdsourcing the captioning of videos. How it works is that anyone can embed a video on Amara, and anyone can caption it on a volunteer basis. Captioning is very time-consuming. It involves both transcription, line division, and time coding. The average rate of speech is somewhere around 5 syllables per second (Kendall, 2009, p. 145). You have to listen to a few seconds of a video, pause the video, type what you just heard, and repeat the process. The transcription has to be time-coded; i.e., the words have to be matched with the time they appear on the video, usually at about 32 characters per line[1], so that’s time-consuming too. For these reasons, when it comes to help with closed-captioning, the more the merrier, especially because so many people make videos pro bono. This video is over 48 minutes, and of course it’s pro bono. If you would like to closed-caption a few lines of the video on Amara, please do. A little work by a lot of people will get the job done.
Footnotes
1. I don’t like to repeat statistics without sources, but 32 and 35 characters appeared often on webpages. Screen Subtitling’s white paper “Closed caption subtitling” [PDF] said “the number of characters per line or row is a set limitation” (Screen, 2008, p. 2) with no specification of the limit or reference to the authority. I searched the Internet for the “set limitation” on characters per line, and I found the same numbers repeated in different places with no traceable references. AutoCaption.com’s “Closed captioning defined” page said, “the features of traditional captioning are: … 32 characters per line” with no citation. Welstech wiki said the Department of Education required 35 characters per line, yet when I searched the US Department of Education website, I could find no such specification. CPC.com’s Closed Captioning FAQ answered the question, “What features are supported by CEA-608 closed captions for standard definition?” thus: ” […] A caption block can have up to 4 lines and up to 32 characters per line, although for accessibility reasons, it is recommended not to exceed 2 lines and 26 characters per line […].” I searched “CEA-608” to find the source, and I found the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) CEA-608-E Standard Details page. Unfortunately, the standards are published in a printed book that costs $300, $225 for members. Can anyone quote the source of authority? If so, please leave a comment.
I’ve posted some tweets lately with questions to the interpreting profession, but I’ve seen no replies. Maybe you can change that — reply to these tweets or leave a comment here.
I enjoyed watching the live feed of the Endless Possibilities Talks this afternoon. The Google+ Hangout on Air was viewable from within Google+ and on YouTube. Gerda S Prato-Espejo posted commentary on Twitter using the hashtag #EPT, and others including myself posted comments and questions using same hashtag. (The purpose of using the same hashtag is you can view a search of all Tweets with that hashtag, and refresh it often to keep up with the conversation.) (more…)
Daniel Greene 