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Deaf History ≠ Interpreter History: A Preamble

     Signing Deaf people throughout history have always drawn upon a range of strategies when communicating with hearing people who use only spoken language. Sometimes these approaches are co-created through intermediaries. Versions of interpreters have perhaps always figured in Deaf lives, and by definition, at least one Deaf person is in every interpreter’s life. Our respective paths have run a parallel course, with intersections, merges, and medians to hop—but though maintaining sightlines, they are not strictly in the same lane. They cannot be.

Deaf Figures Gesturing AN01307612_001 [British Museum]
British Museum Creative Commons License
The constellations of interests, risks, and rewards are never identical. At times, the interpreter must call to reroute the Hearing person a few paces. At others, the imbalance is reversed, and the Deaf person runs ahead, then doubles back to signal the interpreter along.

As interpreters’ utility and virtue rests in not inserting ourselves into Deaf-led discourses, we have been careful to integrate but not colonize Deaf spaces with our own narratives. Without question, interpreters must learn to pivot toward Deaf people in our own research and practice—and back. To conflate the two perspectives, or relegate the study of one group as subpart to the other is an oversimplified and unrealistic solution. This is the underlying research assumption of this project: Deaf History does not equal Interpreter History.

In more recent centuries, the two camps have converged in a symbiosis,  and the expectation of the interpreter’s identity as part of an attached squadron to the Deaf-world has become inextricably fixed. After pre-Deaf culture protocols for hearing interpreters began to resemble contemporary practice, Deaf interpreters emerged as a direct outgrowth from 19th-century Deaf communities. Their role-space reinforces our allegiances and grafts interpreter and Deaf histories more closely together.

roots
Intech

Relaxing the focus away from Deaf communities, and the toward the pedigree of hearing signed language interpreters will deepen and nourish our own roots. Ideally, this may heal growing pains through a more nuanced understanding of our position, and more practically, it could feed new analyses back into primary Deaf narratives. This is the underlying aim of this project: to disentangle Interpreter History from Deaf History, so each can be examined individually.

 

 

Pro Tips: Migrating to Video Remote Interpreting

The first virtual interpreting assignments were probably those carried out in front of console radios for deaf groups in the 20th 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. 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. 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!

 

Ambrose Isted, Queen Victoria’s Deaf BSL Teacher

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.

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: 

Dedication: “Ambrose Isted, Tunbridge Wells 1834.”

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! 

Boyce (2001). Ambrose Isted 1797–1881. In Deaf lives: Deaf people in history (104–105). BDHS

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

 

 

 

 

Deaf Interpreters as Localis/zation & Adaptation

Speaking of things I am working on other than my PhD, this. Thanks for asking!

The role and responsibilities of the Deaf Interpreter (DI) are constantly under review. Many have claimed that the most common task is not even “interpreting” in the strictest sense. One interpreter educator and deaf native signer argued:

“They do not translate from a language into another except for the rare situations where they translate from printed English into ASL or from one sign language to another sign language.”1

Fair enough. The DI job varies widely, and includes mirroring, sight translation, all of the tactile and close-vision tasks, among many other things. Maybe we have been miscategorizing some of the intra- / interlingual and intercultural transfer, and bulldozing it all into a big “interpreting” pile.

Rather than contrive a special case to go “beyond the CPC if necessary” to fulfill some “higher level of ethics,”2 maybe some things can be discussed in terms of other existing functions. This might resolve the “DIs are different! It’s not just interpreting!” and “DIs are the same as any interpreter! Stop saying we’re Deaf!” paradox.

In order to not explode both words in the title of “Deaf Interpreter,” I offer these unfinished thoughts on

Localis/zation & Adaptation 
Localis/zation takes language from one place, and moves it to a more appropriate place for the users. You can insert whatever DEAF-space or Deaf-World metaphor, or Eyeth parable you like here.
For example, one interpreter renders into unadorned English, and the localis/zation specialist converts it into a regional dialect — or an HI feeds a DI working on a platform. I think it is a matter of specificity. Depending on the nature of the interaction and the primary participants, an interpreter might be expected to get people to the right
continent

time zone

country

village, or

an exact chair.
Adaptation is about how the interpreted event functions as a whole. What is this language supposed to do, and what is the best format to accomplish that? Transforming a text into a movie or play is an apt metaphor for what all signed language interpreters do. For our purposes, the HI might sketch out the plot, for the DI to animate in Technicolor onstage. Or the reverse: an HI delivers the unabridged version, and the DI distills the salient points to a minor.
If there is still “no standard definition of Deaf interpreting,”3 I think discussing HI–DI teams in these terms could diffuse some of the rhetoric. Whether DIs apply objective judgment or subjective intuition to drop a character or add one, omit or invent dialogue, or turn a salteña into a pasty, I’m guessing Danish gravediggers would be equally satisfied with either. 
More on this later, and much more much later! 
  1. Johnston, E. (2005). Guest editorial. CIT News, 25(2).
  2. The National Consortium of Interpreter Education Centers Deaf Interpreter Work Team. (2009). Analysis of deaf interpreter focus group discussions conducted April–July 2007.
  3. National Consortium of Interpreter Education Centers Deaf Interpreter Work Team. (2009). Findings of deaf interpreter educator focus groups conducted December 2007.

10 Years of Interpreter History

I know we’ve only just met, but I’ve been at this interpreter history game for over ten years now. In fact, it began February 13th, 2008. It was not a Friday, but it might as well have been. That day, I made a stack of copies for a project I worked very hard on, but was only allowed to share a small portion of it.

I still have the folder.        

Since then, I’ve spent thousands of hours, and the equivalent of two years’ earnings on tuition, research travel, equipment, copies, postage, you name it. I did a master’s in Communication, and now 2/3 of a Translation Studies doctorate—the first such scholarship showing how interpreting emerged in the UK and US, before BSL, ASL or Deaf communities came about.

Here’s evidence of how this accelerates the breakdown of collagen in the face, and pigmentation in the hair: 

2008   vs.   2018

Okay, you cannot see it clearly in the pictures, but things have taken a turn. No matter! The kind of “work” I need to get done may be as expensive, but much more gratifying. After 30 years of not speaking my own words, or using my own voice, it is deeply cathartic to tell our story.

The traditional gift for a 10-year anniversary is aluminum, so here is one of the first figures cast in that metal. It is the god Anteros, born for a playmate to his more famous older brother. He is the god of requited or returned love, which is fitting for a labor like this one, where nothing is lost.

My road to academia has been fraught with traffic delays almost as severe as Piccadilly Circus, where that Anteros statue has balanced for over 100 years. It seems that I have been waiting at least that long. So I got myself an anniversary gift.

Throughout this research, my favorite discovery is a brief reference in a 17th-century Canon law treatise on marriage. I first presented about it five years ago this week, first wrote about it in 2015, and have mentioned it at every available opportunity since. Before his death in 1624, Henry Swinburne declared that if one or both marriage candidates gesture their vows of consent silently, and

“neither of the parties express any words at all, but some third person recite the words…the Contract is of like Efficacy, as if they themselves had mutually expressed the words before recited by that third person” 

Wait, what? A deaf person doesn’t necessarily have to speak the vows, but if the priest prefers to hear the liturgy recited, a third party can read the frozen text while the deaf party gestures, nods, and otherwise indicates willing participation. And it counts as though they had said those exact words themselves. That was almost 400 years ago. 

So I found a deal on an original (1686—it was published posthumously) copy of A treatise of spousals, or matrimonial contracts: Wherein all the questions relating to that subject are ingeniously debated and resolved. I give you, my friends, the unboxing of the first interpreting “textbook” in history:

Leahy, A. (24 Aug 2013). In search of Interpreter 0: Tracing Anglo–American sign langauge interpreting since 1198 A.D. Presented at the Utah Registry of Interpreters for the Deaf, Taylorsville, UT.
Leahy, A. M. (2015). Interpreted communication with deaf parties under Anglo–American common law to 1880 (Master’s thesis). Southern Utah University, Cedar City, UT.
Swinburne, H. (1686). A treatise of spousals, or matrimonial contracts: Wherein all the questions relating to that subject are ingeniously debated and resolved. London: S. Roycroft for R. Clavell.

This post was approved by Johnny Dollar.  

BSL Proto-Linguists: Missioners ‽

A quick post in response to a request…

In British Deaf history, the figure of the missioner is a complicated one, and will not be examined here. Except to say that in training hearing people to sign and ultimately interpret, these historical pastoral–social service workers deserve credit for recognizing linguistic principles of British Sign Language. Eventually, I will focus more on their theories, methods, and attitudes about L2 instruction in academic writing. For now, here are some fun things!

Rev. Thomas Henry Sutcliffe (1907-1996) lost his hearing and learned BSL as an adult. He afterward published and worked vigorously for the recognition of the community, and the language. In his 1954 booklet Conversation with the Deaf, he enumerates various features of what he called “gestures,” or signs and classifiers. See how he observed indexing, non-manual markers, depictions, instrumental classifiers, synecdoche references, etc. And this is only a fraction of his insights!

Gallaudet Video Library (link broken)

In his memoirs, the Rev. Percy Corfmat (1914-1990) revealed he was chosen as the first full-time RADD interpreter in 1938. He grew up signing, but in this 1961 letter to William Stokoe, he confessed some ambivalence about the legitimacy of his parents’ language “gestures and signs”.  In other writing, Corfmat describes signs in usage among various categories of Deaf people, and strategies for effective interpreting along the continuum with English. His request below confirms that missioners were seeking academic sources to inform their work, and wanted to apply linguistic principles to what would eventually be known as BSL (Brennan, 1975).

Corfmat, P. (1990) Please Sign Here

But Brennan (1975) was not the first to name the manual communication used in various dialects throughout the UK. The Rev. Alan G. K. F. Mackenzie (1911-1997) was the son of a Deaf missioner. In 1966, he reviewed a copy of Stokoe, Casterline and Croneberg’s A Dictionary of American Sign Language on Linguistic Principles which had been published the previous year. Again, he did so in order to share the new findings with his colleagues, and improve their understanding and practices of working among Deaf people. Mackenzie never proselyted “E.S.L.—English Sign Language” like Fant, another Deaf preacher’s son, later would with “Ameslan”. Suffice it to say that neither stuck (notwithstanding any differences with fingerspelling and signing in Scotland and Wales), but update your research, folks! Rev. Mackenzie made one of the first known published attempts at labeling BSL. 

British Deaf News (May 1997)

Brennan, M. (1975). Can deaf children acquire language? An evaluation of linguistic principles in deaf education. American Annals of the Deaf, 120(5). 
Corfmat, P. (1990). Please sign here: Insights into the world of the deaf. Worthing: Churchman.
Fant, Jr., L. J. (1972). Ameslan. Silver Spring, MD: National Association of the Deaf.
Mackenzie, A. F. (1966). Dictionary of American Sign Language on Linguistic Principles. Deaf Welfare, 4(6).
Stokoe, W. C., Casterline, D. S., & Croneberg, C. G. (1965). A dictionary of American Sign Language on linguistic principles. Silver Spring, MD: Linstok Press.
Sutcliffe, T. H. (1954). NID Booklet number 491: Conversation with the deaf. London: National Institute for the Deaf.

ABCs of Deaf Translation Research in 1932

You may already be familiar with the legendary Alan B. Crammatte (1911-1996) from his work as a teacher, author, and leader in the American Deaf community, who called him “ABC.” 

 

He was both interviewer and subject in several archival films which Gallaudet has digitized and made available on the Web.

 

 

The purpose of this post not his illustrious career, but an enterprising project of the young Crammatte, just before he graduated from Gallaudet in 1932:

During his last semester, Crammatte was either enrolled or serving as a teaching assistant in Irving S. Fusfield‘s English class. This beloved hearing professor seemed to understand the importance of sign language, and his lecture notes included the statement:

“Speech work [is] acquired at the expense of other content subjects.” 

In 1937, Dr. Fusfield also served on a committee for the Conference of Executives of American Schools for the Deaf to abolish the terms “deaf-mute, deaf and dumb, semi-mute, semi-deaf, and mute,” in favor of “Deaf” or “Hard of Hearing”. Significant to interpreters, the 1970 (no. 1) issue of VIEWS reported that he had recently become a member of RID. His name sign looks like FINLAND, presumably for the dimple on his chin:

In 1932, Dr. Fusfield’s class participated in a two-part study which would have supported his ongoing research to understand how Deaf people think. Working backwards, Part 2 gave a brief sentence in English, and recorded how different students rendered it into signs. Here is the sentence in Fusfield’s handwriting:

Here’s the transcription: 

Exercise
How the deaf mind works in ideation.
The sentence: “The cook’s dress is beginning to show signs of age.” Recorded by the observer as different individuals sign it.

The same file also includes a bundle of paper slips that recorded each student’s response. The experiment had two prompts: the one above was probably for the second one that elicited signed renditions. In Part 1, the experimenter gave a signed prompt (which unfortunately was not recorded or no longer exists), and requested an English translation. These data cards were labeled as belonging to Crammatte, and the Gallaudet Archivist confirmed they are indeed in his handwriting.

Here are two examples of student translations. This one from student Achille Buzzelli offered two different responses for the Signs-to-English prompt:

“A window of the farmhouse needs cleaning”

(or)

“The windows of the farmhouse must be cleaned”

For the English-to-Signs exercise, Buzzelli signed

HER COOK DRESS START SHOW SIGNS OLD

Another student, David A. Davidowitz, gave two options for each response. Crammatte’s field notes include a transcription key that words in (parenthesis) had been fingerspelled. The image below indicates the researcher coded the second response as “conversational” signs, or what we would understand as having more ASL features:

Signs to English:

“The old country or farm house’s windows need cleaning ^ or must be cleaned”

English to Signs:

(First attempt) THE COOK DRESS (IS) SHOW SIGNS (OF) OLD

COOK DRESS APPARENTLY OLD (conversational)

 

All of these responses were copied onto a master data sheet, again in Crammatte’s handwriting. Here is an example of the signed data:

O’Brian – HER COOK ER DRESS START SHOW OLD.
Davis – DRESS HER COOK ER START SHOW ^ SIGNS YEARS.
Gamblin – COOK HER DRESS START SHOW OLD WORN-OUT.

And here is an excerpt from the English translations:

Like Stokoe would observe 30 years later, the study revealed that there were different varieties of signing, and part of that continuum was very different from English. I am not sure what Crammatte’s role in this experiment was, but it is clear that Dr. Fusfield kept all of his original data for decades.

More details may be waiting to be discovered, but at this writing we can be confident that these materials represent the earliest known systematic analysis of English–Sign translation by a Deaf researcher. Thank you, Alan Benn Crammatte for leaving a record of thorough and careful work, and most of all for being our A-B-C at the beginning of a rich linguistic and entrepreneurial legacy.

Oh, and Happy 106th Birthday from your many grateful heirs.

The Irreplaceable Ellen O’Hara

Ellen O'Hara, May 2015
Ellen O’Hara, May 2015

Yesterday, our friend, sister, and colleague Ellen O’Hara died in a traffic accident near Salt Lake City, Utah. She was an extremely accomplished woman, and touched many lives. Let’s celebrate her!

I first met Ellen when she was no more than three years old. My Deaf Culture class at Brigham Young University had to learn a nursery rhyme or children’s story in ASL, and perform it for local Deaf kids. The large O’Hara family was mix of Deaf, hearing, and hard-of-hearing people, and welcomed us into their home.

We were terrible! The kids gave us blank stares, but were very patient. Luckily, none of them whom I’ve now known for years as adults remember much about that day.

Ellen was well-known and had always been a savvy consumer of interpreters. Because Ellen had exceptional presence, she was a go-to Deaf interpreter I wanted for both paid and pro-bono assignments which required a fearless performer. The last time we worked together, she had just been awarded the Certified Deaf Interpreter credential. She possessed the rare balance of enthusiasm to both teach and learn from hearing interpreters, in equal measure. It was exciting to come full circle with Ellen — at our first meeting, I was about to become an interpreter; at our most recent, she was a newly-minted CDI! It was an honor to witness her success.

Indulge me in one quick memory. Remember the Wells Fargo Video about the adoption of a Deaf girl? To launch the promotion, the company wanted ASL translations of short phrases on the website masthead. Ellen was chosen as the sign model, and I was onsite as interpreter/lady-in-waiting. Here she is being fussed over during a camera check while quickly snarfing some food.

Ellen O'Hara, May 2015
Ellen O’Hara, May 2015

For a brief period, Ellen’s hands were featured in the campaign. I’ll always remember our (long!) day, and the many other times we enjoyed working together. I watched her sign those marketing phrases dozens of times, but the one I can remember most clearly is the lesson for all Deaf–Hearing teams, and indeed everyone:

TWGFThanks, Ellen! Looking forward to retracing our full circle with you again someday!

Stokoe was No Fool (about Interpreters)

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?

UU Stokoe 1960 Cover 07 Apr 2013After 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)”.

Page 7 from Stokoe, W. C. (1)
Stokoe 1960 p. 7 (1)

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

Page 7 from Stokoe, W. C. (2)
Stokoe 1960 p. 7 (2)

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.”

Page 7 from Stokoe, W. C. (3)
Stokoe 1960 p. 7 (3)

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.

Meryl Streep, “Deaf mute Interpreter” Part I

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?

Meryl Streep (1949–Forever)

Woodside, Sarah - Obit 1909
Sarah Woodside (1844–1909)

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

Robert 28 M Lab(orer) Pa Deaf & Dumb
William 24 M Lab(orer) Pa Deaf & Dumb
Samuel 22 M Lab(orer) Pa Deaf & Dumb
James 20 M Lab(orer) Pa Deaf & Dumb
Archybald 9 M   Pa Deaf & Dumb

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:

Woodside Family 1850 Census Detail
Woodside Family 1850 Census Detail

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

Sarah Woodside 1909 Death Certificate Detail
Sarah Woodside 1909 Death Certificate Detail

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

A Hoe, Missing Clothes, and Two Trustworthy Interpreters

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.”

Evening Star 1 Oct 1875
Evening Star 1 Oct 1875

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.

Ada Weekly News 30 Jun 1932
Ada Weekly News 30 Jun 1932

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.