Daniel Greene

Tag: grammar

  • 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.

  • Would You Want a Leader Who’s Not One of You?

    As an American Sign Language interpreter, I think I have a perspective of American Deaf culture and the issues at Gallaudet University that few hearing people can grasp — and, unfortunately, the messages the average hearing person gleans from the hearing media don’t seem to be doing much to illuminate the situation. I would like to try my best today to speak as one hearing person to another about my understanding of the issues transpiring at Gallaudet University from the perspective of a person who has a fairly good understanding of both the deaf and hearing worlds.

    It seems to me that the only message hearing people are getting about the protests against Jane K. Fernandes (JKF) as the incoming president of Gallaudet is that she is “not deaf enough.” I would like you (my fellow American who can hear) to put yourself in the shoes of those deaf students and ask yourself not “is she deaf enough” but “is she one of us?” And ask yourself, would you want a leader who’s not one of you?

    Perhaps we must begin with the understanding that the main criterion for membership in the American Deaf culture is the use of American Sign Language — not one’s degree of hearing loss! There are plenty of people — particular senior citizens — who are stone deaf, but they do not use American Sign Language, and they do not identify themselves with the Deaf culture. In light of the imperative that one reach out to other users of American Sign Language and make themselves understood in that language, my opinion as someone who has been trained for many years at communicating fluently in ASL is that JKF fails this primary criterion.

    (more…)

  • Working on bylaws in HTML and CSS

    Yesterday, I spent some time revising the bylaws I wrote for SDCRID so they could be repurposed for AzRID. The AzRID president asked me to do this, because she had heard from a little bird (Rob Balaam, RID Region 5 Representative) that I had done the bylaws for SDCRID. Since there are some interesting lessons to be learned from my work about bylaws and, incidentally, about HTML and CSS, I thought it might be beneficial to share them here.

    First of all, my sources for the bylaws were the RID bylaws, the RID Affliate Chapter Handbook Sample Bylaws (pp 238–257), and the AzRID bylaws (which link will probably be broken soon when they upload the new ones). I also consulted Robert’s Rules of Order Newly Revised when I was writing the SDCRID bylaws. I pretty much followed the Sample Bylaws except when I felt the RID bylaws were clearer or more up-to-date. I also, of course, checked the AzRID bylaws for any special bylaws that needed to stay. That takes care of the bylaws part of it.

    I also had an interesting challenge and a gratifying success with writing the bylaws in a plain-text editor (BBEdit) using XHTML 1.1 and CSS. I did this because I wanted tight control over sectioning and listing. Bylaws documents need to be very structured. One can write in all the sections, subsections, and list numbers, but that is a waste of time, especially if one ever wants to rearrange the order of sections and list items. If one does use styles in a word processing program, sometimes formatting can become corrupted during routine editing operations such as cutting, pasting, deleting, etc., and then one can lose the document structure. Besides, I enjoy the challenge of hand-coding HTML and CSS, and I like to demonstrate the power of these structural and presentational markup languages working hand-in-hand.

    (more…)

  • Poetic License in Interpreting

    In my search for blog posts about ASL interpreting, I found this interesting post regarding poetry, interpretation in general, and the poetic license visible in ASL interpreting:

    Reading Finnish Rhapsody in particular reminded me of watching a live sign-language interpreter while listening to a live speech. I experienced this while at a convention when one of the ASL interpreters was often more dynamic than the speaker in her communication. I do not know ASL and I was listening to the speaker, however I found that the way in which the interpreter communicated was much clearer on an emotional level. And even though she was obviously quite skilled, I was pretty certain she didn’t interpret the speech word-for-word.

    Even though interpreters are charged with “render[ing] the message faithfully by conveying the content and spirit of what is being communicated,” (RID Code of Professional Conduct Section 2.3), sometimes an ASL interpretation is just more poetic and expressive than the English source message. Sometimes this is because there is an inherent passion in the words that is missing from the speaker’s facial expression and body language.

    (more…)

  • 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…)