The Sign for Home by Blair Fell

Author:Blair Fell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria/Emily Bestler Books
Published: 2022-04-05T00:00:00+00:00

25 TABITHA

The conference center was massive, but within a few minutes I was able to find the hall and locate Mindy, my old colleague from Poughkeepsie, along with a whole gaggle of other interpreters. Interpreters are never hard to spot in a room thanks to their unflashy, solid-colored, skin-contrasting clothes, their usually obtrusive stance at the front of a room, and their quintessential interpreter faces, which say: Yes, you see us in this space, but we reside in a liminal world between you and the reason you are here, so don’t ask us questions.

Mindy looked different from when we worked together years ago. She had gone full-on glamour butch with short hair and a tailored black suit. She greeted me with a hug and then introduced me to the two other interpreters who were part of the consumer’s regular team. By the way they dressed and their just-bored-enough demeanor, it was easy to tell they both came from New York City. There was Liz, an olive-skinned woman in her late twenties with long dyed-blond hair. She was a Certified Deaf Interpreter (CDI), which means she’s Deaf herself and excels at working with atypical language users (Deaf folks who don’t use standard ASL or might be foreign born and have limited language) as well as the DeafBlind. I always felt like I hit paydirt when I got teamed with a good CDI, since I’d get to see how a native signer would make a difficult concept breathtakingly clear.

The other interpreter was Zach, a hearing guy in his midthirties who wore edgy earlobe plugs and had a military buzz cut, giving him a bit of a covert leather-man look. Zach was kind of hot and instantly flirty with me, which I might have reciprocated if I weren’t so nervous. I soon found out that the four of us would be responsible for interpreting only for our consumer, who was the main speaker. A second team of interpreters, two hearing and two CDIs, would be responsible for voicing/ASL interpreting for the Deaf and hearing audience Q and A. Add to all of us a whole boatload of Tactile ASL interpreters and SSPs who would be working with any DeafBlind folks sitting in the audience. Then there were the captioners who would make sure those audience members who didn’t hear and didn’t know sign language could read along. This is real access, I thought. Why can’t it always be like this?

“So, our boss, Tabitha, will present for about thirty minutes,” Mindy explained in ASL. (If you’re a sign language user in a Deaf space it’s expected that you will always be signing.) “You’ll love her. Brilliant and super easy to understand. You and I will take turns interpreting TSL and voicing onstage. Meanwhile Zach and Liz here will be doing Haptics stuff on Tabitha’s back. Even though she lost the bulk of her vision just last year, she’s very Protactile, so be aware.”

Haptics? Protactile? I had no idea what Mindy was talking about, but

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.