Moving Hands

Historically, Deaf people have been a bit suspicious of the ulterior motives of an interpreter – would it not be easy for an unscrupulous person to simply sit back and do nothing? In effect, exploiting the Deaf client for easy money.¹

But recently, I have been learning something interesting – interpreters are actually very concerned about ethics, and they tend to have very progressive politics.

Well, I suppose that that should have been obvious – for as long as I can remember, interpreters have been some of the most liberal people I have known. For example, my interpreter in high school was a Mormon who was completely and utterly unfazed by my gayness and very non-stereotypical gender presentation. I also had an interpreter who queried me about polygamy in Utah, saying something about how hard it would be for her to keep track of seven wives. Et cetera.

But, now that I am in the social work field, it’s becoming ever more obvious. I have a tendency to talk to classroom/workshop interpreters about the subject matter that is being discussed, so it is quite interesting to pick their brains.

I am learning that many of them are concerned about many of the same things that Deaf people are: Deafhood, identity, educational opportunities, diversity, and so forth. They talk about things like the best way to provide equal educational opportunities to the Latino Deaf boy with three languages in his home (Spanish, English, and ASL) in a xenophobic culture.

They also are concerned about more progressive political issues, such as class equality and anti-racism and anti-patriarchy and so forth. As an example – a few weeks ago, I learned that the sign for ‘foster care’ is the same as the sign for ‘fake mom & dad.’ I actually interrupted my interpreter in the workshop and said, ” ‘fake mom and dad????’ ” incredulously. She said, “I know! It’s not conceptually accurate!” and resumed interpreting the speaker. And another example – my interpreters asked me if it was okay that they signed “sexual preference” rather than “sexual orientation” even though that’s an offensive term in English – they weren’t sure of the correct way to sign “sexual orientation.” I appreciated their willingness to work with what they had.

It all makes me wonder – should we Deaf people try to overcome our mistrust of interpreters and welcome them as allies in our struggles? After all – one of the most important components of any successful social justice struggle is to build coalitions with others in order to maximize our collective political power.

I don’t know. We shall see.

1. Although this may sound a bit far-fetched, I have to say that I have personal experience with this very phenomenon – when I was a kid, my parents hired this girl who was four years older than me to be my babysitter. Eventually, they also hired her to be an interpreter at church. She just talked to me in a sign language monologue of her most recent party exploits, cop escapes, beer bong adventures, etc throughout the whole service instead of interpreting to me – but I didn’t care because I no longer believed in God. But, yeah, she basically made money off of telling me all her party stories in church. Pretty cush, I’d say. [↩]