Here I am singing and signing the song “Pure Imagination” from the movie Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (more…)
Tag: sign language
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Super Bowl Broadcast Proves Sign Language Underestimated
I was excited to hear that Marlee Matlin would be signing the American National Anthem (“The Star-Spangled Banner”) at Super Bowl XLI, but was disappointed to see her on television only during the phrase “the bombs bursting in air.” Whatever happened to the “signer in the bubble”? I would think they could put an Academy Award-winning deaf actress in a picture-in-picture “bubble” so that her performance of our National Anthem could be enjoyed throughout the duration of the song. Apparently, the director of the televised broadcast underestimated ASL and its many users.
I would like to believe that in the year 2007, accessibility for deaf people and the beauty of ASL would be esteemed by American society. Sadly, the Super Bowl XLI broadcast reminds me that American Sign Language and Deaf Culture are still relegated to a momentary side show.
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Was Canonized Saint at Milan Conference?
When I heard last week on NPR that an Italian priest who “helped the deaf” in the late 1800s had been canonized as a saint, I couldn’t help wondering: was he at the Milan Conference of 1880, a conference of “educators of deaf-mutes” who moved to forbid sign language and mandate oralism.
Filippo Smaldone lived from 1848 to 1923 in Italy, and the infamous Milan Conference was held in 1880. According to one source, he founded “institutes for deaf-mutes” (not necessarily a disparaging term back then) in 1885 and 1887, but he had already worked with “deaf-mutes” as far back as the 1870s. He might truly be worthy of sainthood if he had rebuked the Milan Conference and promoted deaf people’s preferred mode of communication, but somehow I doubt that happened, because that would have gone totally against the grain.
Just think what an irony it would be if our dear Father Smaldone had been one of the killers of sign language and “got away with murder” by being canonized as a saint!
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"Sign-Chi-Do" Butchers ASL, Excludes Deaf People
A fellow interpreter tipped me off to a bizarre website the other day called signchido.com. The website is a sort of “infomercial” for an inspirational form of “moving prayer” that attempts to incorporate ASL into
Tai Kwan DoTai Chi. The woman who invented it says she is a doctor who designed Sign Chi Do to help patients “synchronize body, heart, and mind.” I suppose one could argue that anything that helps people heal is a good thing — and they may have a point — but there is something so “infomercial-ly” about this whole scheme, and I don’t believe anyone should profit from ASL at the expense of the American deaf community and their language.I would not take issue with Sign Chi Do if it incorporated ASL in a way that would make sense to a person who relies on ASL for communication, if all of the videos on the website were captioned, and if even one of the three “testimonial” videos featured a deaf person!
Unfortunately, the whole scheme seems to be a concoction of someone who has co-opted the language of a people without involving the people she took the language from, and no attempt seems to have been made to reach out to the very people who created the language in the first place. It all appears to be a feel-good entertainment for hearing people who have never met a deaf person nor taken a sign language class.
For the benefit of people who cannot hear the singing on the videos, as well as for the benefit of people who don’t know ASL, I have watched and listened to the introductory video, transcribed the song lyrics, and translated (or back-translated, if you will) the “ASL” (if you can call it that).
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Now You Can Closed-Caption Your Google Videos!
Screenshot of my captioned Google Video. [Update: Above is a screenshot I saved before my video went away. As of April 29, 2011, videos uploaded to Google Video will no longer play.]
This is my first Google video, and my first video with closed captioning. Click on the little “CC” icon to watch the captions.
I must say I’m a bit frustrated by the fact that there’s no sound in the video even though I uploaded the video with sound. I uploaded it as a QuickTime movie (.MOV). I don’t know if that made the difference or not. If anyone can help me make sure the videos I upload retain their audio track, please leave a comment. It was also a bit frustrating that the captioning did not appear as soon as Google said it was finished “processing” my video. I waited about 15-20 minutes for the captions to appear when I played the video (I kept refreshing), but it was after midnight and I really had to go to bed. In the morning, at about 6:30 AM, I watched my video again, and the captions were there.
Anyway, this was a successful experiment from the standpoint of captioning. The one mistake I made was typing one of my time codes with a period, rather than a colon, between the minutes and seconds. This made the time code show up in the captions. I corrected the captioning text and re-uploaded it.
For those interested in captioning, (more…)
Daniel Greene 