Category: Posts

The first virtual interpreting assignments were probably those carried out in front of console radios for deaf groups in the 20^th century. The source language was transmitted remotely, and the target audiences located onsite. For example,

	Mary Ayliffe (1878–1966) at a royal address in 1930s Liverpool
	Eva Fowler (1912–1979) and  Eula Pusey (1896–1984) in 1940s Utah for a church conference

Today, thousands of signed language interpreters are scrambling to fill their schedules, and many are flocking to home-based video remote interpreting (VRI) stations, in various states of readiness. Most best practices for general online meetings apply to VRI work, and plenty of worthy advice is available. Also, in-person meeting protocols that benefit everyone, and remove barriers to our best work also apply to on-screen formats.

Of course, deaf people are best positioned to advocate for themselves, and so we must be prepared to represent our own partially-overlapping interests. This is not an exhaustive primer, but here are some considerations to remind your newly-virtual clientele. Please note that I use the word “speaking” to indicate signed and spoken comments, questions, or logistical and administrative remarks:

1. 1. Include the interpreters for advance documents, agendas, and participant lists.
   2. In business settings, wisely decide what is for e-mail, and what needs a meeting.
   3. Plan additional time for technological and communication considerations.
   4. Signal to the chair, and wait to be acknowledged before speaking.
   5. When taking the floor, identify yourself before speaking.
   6. Whether audio or video, make your remarks a bit more slowly and deliberately.
   7. Ensure those using video are framed and lit properly.
   8. Signers, please confirm visual attention of the interpreter before speaking.
   9. Mute your audio when not speaking.
   10. With multiple signers, you may need to mute your video when not speaking.

Now what about you? Again, professional expectations of onsite interpreting still apply to VRI. Also, decades of Video Relay Interpreting (VRS) practice have taught us and the sign language users we work with how to adapt to cameras and 2-dimensional screens. While we might be more exposed to the view of all meeting participants during VRI, we are also freed from additional regulatory restrictions on how we conduct ourselves. Here are some preliminary things to consider:

1. 1. If work is scarce, do take care to accept gigs you can do well, and do right.
   2. Participants’ communication may be scared, frustrated, and overwhelmed.
   3. To others in random environments and clothing, bring calm, visual stability.
   4. Be classy and assertive about what logistics you need beforehand.
   5. Arrive early to advocate for yourself, & gently remind folks during the meeting.
   6. Dress and grooming are heightened when your image is closely cropped.
   7. Yes, you can sip water, move your hair, scratch your nose. But see #6 above.
   8. You need the right setup. Make do until you can get, re-purpose, or DIY it.
   9. You need the right gear. Think of yourself as a YouTuber, and work toward that.
   10. We may impose more “presence” than we are used to for teaming, turn-taking, etc.

Any one of these topics deserves its own post. We’ll get there!

Please indulge me in a stretch in topic to wish a Happy 200th Birthday to Queen Victoria, born 24 May 1819! Deaf Victorians loved and celebrated VR1 as much as their fellow Britons.

But she is often specifically associated with British Deaf history, for two reasons:

• • The famous account of the widowed queen in her mid-fifties fingerspelling with her deaf beneficiary Elizabeth Groves Tuffield (1840–1874), whom she visited on the Isle of Wight.

• • This story was popularized by the 1889 painting “Royal Condescension” by deaf artist William Agnew (1846–1941):

You’ll see plenty about that story and the various versions of that picture this week. My bicentennial gift to you is evidence of the roots of Queen Victoria’s interest and ability in BSL fingerspelling some 40 years prior.

When Victoria was 15 years old, she was staying at Calverley House, Kent (now a shopping district of Tunbridge Wells), where she met many visitors who came to hunt, socialize and dine with her family.

We owe young Victoria herself for many of the details, which she recorded in her journals. Among the aristocrats gathered for dinner one September evening in 1834, the guests included: 

Lady Julia Hay Hobhouse Wife of Hard-of Hearing Baron De-facto Interpreter?
Ambrose Isted, Esq.  Deaf Country Gentleman Ecton Hall, Northampton

Isted sat across from the Princess, who observed, 

“Poor Mr. Isted has the misfortune to be both deaf and dumb; but he is a very pleasing, agreeable and intelligent person.”

Sure, teenagers (and week-ends) hadn’t been invented yet, but this was a very insightful and generous memory to record in One’s journal. How did young Victoria arrive at this conclusion? Because she was privy to his counsel with Lady Hobhouse: 

He talked a great deal with his fingers to Mrs. Hobhouse who sat next to him.

According to highly gifted and trusted Deaf historian Tony Boyce (2001), Ambrose was private pay pupil under Joseph Watson in London, and in adulthood, remained a patron of the London Association in Aid of the Deaf and Dumb. He did not have intelligible speech, so relied on his personality, pencil and paper, and of course fingerspelling in conversation with hearing people who demonstrated the ability. 

This 1834 recollection from Princess Victoria is particularly tantalizing, because Deaf historians have never concluded how the Queen would come to be fluent enough in the alphabet to be friendly with a deaf subject in the 1870s. I am confident we now have an answer!

See the moment that her curiosity and ease with Isted leads her first tenuous steps: 

He
sat just opposite to me
^at dinner^ 
and he asked me some-
thing with his fingers, which
I almost understood, only
that I was very much
frightened to speak my-
self.

A few weeks after this exchange, Isted combined his talents of foxhunting and drawing, and presented the Princess with what she called “a very pretty little pen-drawing.” She kept it, and it has been preserved by the Royal Collection Trust: 

For the first time, we can draw all of these details together, to form a picture of Isted’s effect on the Princess. Her reign saw great developments in the lives of signing deaf Britons, and as I mentioned, her personal interest has been well-documented. Thank you, Ambrose Isted, elusive Squire of Ecton Hall. You are on my list. Stay tuned for more! 

Queen Victoria’s Journals (2012), Royal Archives & ProQuest

Happy anniversary to the genesis of modern signed language studies. It’s been 56 years since William C. Stokoe’s Sign Language Structure: An Outline of the Visual Communication Systems of the American Deaf was completed on April 1, 1960. A few years ago, I finally held an original printing in my hands. Why had it taken me so long?

After all, I’m named on the first page—and so are you! Three times.

In that seminal announcement, Stokoe not only only introduced the features of what would come to be called American Sign Language, but recognized that the linguistic community included “deaf and hearing user(s)”.

These “hearing companions” shared culturally-received behaviors and linguistic patterns which had developed apart from “the normal communication” of the hearing world.

The page ends with a reference that certain gestures carried meaning between “the deaf mute and perhaps also that of his hearing partners in communication.”

Though Stokoe typically confined his subjects to signing Deaf people in the United States, he is careful to include hearing bilinguals in his analyses, lamenting that such were “in scarce supply.” Some of these people develop into “the most valuable interpreters not just of language but of those aspects of hearing culture not directly accessible to the deaf” (Stokoe, 1972, p. 157).

Twenty years after that blue monograph changed the world, Cokely (1980) applauded the fact “that Stokoe’s work has been responsible for fostering much of the research on the linguistic structure of American Sign Language,” adding that “the training of interpreters” might be one of the more significant long-term effects of that legacy (p. 155).

But these sources deal with a fully-realized language within a mature Deaf community. My research into early interpreting includes the question, “How did bilingual–bimodals emerge before Deaf communities and standardized signed languages were formed?”

We can draw one example from Stokoe’s more recent criticism of the analysis of an isolated deaf resident in an area of the Solomon Islands. He noted that Kuschel (1973) called “Kangobai the Silent Inventor, but of course his sign language was not the invention of one individual. It grew out of give and take, the everyday interaction in that island culture, between deaf Kangobai and his hearing companions.” Within Kangobai’s lifetime, many hearing friends and family collaborated with him, and had already formed linguistic rules around their signs (Stokoe, 2001, p. 70).

I believe this collaborative pattern has always existed, and hearing interpreters can re-imagine their distant past, developing alongside, not directly from Deaf communities.

References
Cokely, D. (1980). Sign language: Teaching, interpreting, and educational policy. In C. Baker & R. Battison (Eds.), Sign language and the deaf community: Essays in honor of William C. Stokoe (pp. 137–158).
Kuschel, R. (1973). The silent inventor. Sign Language Studies, 3, 1–27.
Stokoe, W. C. (1960). Sign Language structure: An outline of the visual communication systems of the American deaf. 
Stokoe, W. (1972). Semiotics and human sign languages. 
Stokoe, W. C. (2001). Language in hand: Why sign came before speech.

When the biography of Sarah Woodside is optioned for a film, the cinematic chameleon Meryl Streep should be cast as the heroine. With her gifts for accents and physical transformation, surely she could add Yinzer and turn-of-the-century ASL to her repertoire?

Sarah grew up with five Deaf older brothers, shown in this 1850 Census:

Her brothers attended the Pennsylvania Institution for the Deaf and Dumb in Philadelphia, so home was surely a rich language environment. Subtract 10 years from the ages of the last two hearing children, which were incorrectly recorded, making Sarah 6 years old at the time:

Sarah never married or had children. She worked in a variety of educational, social service and pastoral positions with Deaf people for 40 years, and was remembered by one congregant as “one of the oldest and best interpreters for the deaf in the world.”

She is listed as both a speaker and the sole interpreter “for the benefit of  hearing people” at the 10th anniversary celebration of the Pittsburgh Branch of the Pennsylvania Society for the Advancement of the Deaf on March 13, 1909. The grateful Deaf members of her beloved Reformed Presbyterian congregation threw her a reception to celebrate her years of service on April 29th. She fell ill soon afterward, and died six weeks later, missing her 65th birthday by a few days. Sarah had contracted meningitis — likely something that many of her Deaf friends knew well.

Her last month was spent at the Reformed Presbyterian Aged People’s Home, which remarkably still exists on the same property. Etta Jamison, matron of  the facility, was the informant for the death certificate, and what she reported to the Allegheny County Registrar is quite remarkable:

Occupation: Deaf mute – Interpreter

Etta certainly had known Sarah, and attested to her life’s work with that title, over 100 years ago. She may not be the “oldest,” but for now Sarah Woodside is one of the earliest I have found who carries the professional designation of a sign language interpreter on an official record.

References
Deaf-Mutes’ Journal, 25 March 1909
Pennsylvania Death Certificate #52793
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 30 April 1909
R. L. Polk & Co. Pittsburgh City Directory, 1909
The Christian Nation, Vol. 51

Interpreters — Have you ever felt victimized by your clients? Read on.

In 1875, Edward Miner Gallaudet’s 16-month-old daughter Eliza died. One month later, his  house was robbed by a disgruntled former student. William Richards took items which were valued at an amount high enough to invoke the charge of grand larceny, and was brought into court. There is no indication of any question to Richards’ culpability and fitness to be tried as any other defendant.

In court that day, EMG found himself pressed into service as the interpreter of record. According to customary protocols for interpreters of the time, he stood alongside the accused man inside of a small enclosed area known as the “dock.” 

“The testimony fully sustained the charge, and Prof. Gallaudet communicated the result to Richards in the prisoner’s dock, by signs, when he expressed his penitence in the sign language, and his desire to restore the things he had taken.”

As for William Richards, the Gallaudet University Alumni Cards collection has no record of his enrollment, or dismissal. He seems to have been erased from the institution’s history. The Family History Library near me doesn’t have the relevant court or corrections holdings for Washington, DC., so the D.C. Archives will be on my next research trip. Instead of pursuing what happened to the Deaf party, my focus will be the clerk’s minutes describing EMG’s role, his own prosecution, and any transcribed testimony he might have interpreted. I will also search the EMG diaries at the Library of Congress.

Onto the second case of somewhat lighter fare, which happened in Ada, Oklahoma in 1932. If you’re familiar with 20th century U.S. history, you can appreciate why tensions might have set farmers in that region on edge, and occasionally ignited a scuffle or two among neighbors.

The pandering headline grabs the reader’s attention: Why would a case be dismissed without due process of entering witness testimony? (After all, such cheap tactics worked to get you to read this post, didn’t it?)

The unnamed Deaf defendant who “conversed only with the nimble fingers of his left hand,” stood accused of attempted assault with a garden hoe. Justice Hill did not read sign language or fingerspelling, so enlisted the only other person present in the courtroom who did — the alleged unnamed victim of said hoe-strike.

The sitting judge conducted the examination from the bench, with “reason for confidence in what the interpreter said,” because the defendant was acquitted. Through the earnest efforts of the vic.

This remarkable man is worth knowing, but unfortunately, I don’t have access to Pontotoc County, Oklahoma criminal or court records. If Hoegate was heard in a municipal court in Ada, there are probably no extant files to search. If you know of an historian interested in Deaf people, please forward them this interesting case or have them contact me directly.

All four items are shown below in chronological order, and the preceding dates link to the respective pages from the Sundial Archive. Click on the image to see a larger version. Any readability problems with the images are due to the archival format, and cannot be adjusted here.

Cover Story 2  —  1 March 1990 p. 1

From a Veteran  Interpreter  —   1 March 1990 p. 5:

From a Deaf Upperclassman  —   7 March 1990 p. 5:

This story is particularly interesting when considering California’s legacy of signed language interpreters leveraging their collective position in the workplace. Perhaps the seeds of our colleagues’ decision to join the California Federation of Interpreters were planted a quarter century ago.

If you are interested in researching more 20th-century interpreting history, please consult the Sundial Archive at CSUN’s Oviatt Library. There are still gaps in the coverage, but staff are working to add more back issues to complete the collection.

Discreet and civil comments welcomed.