Tonight we are going here to celebrate our friend Pam’s birthday. Eight people will meet for drinks, dinner, and what I hope will be good conversation — most of these folks are strangers to us, from a different part of Pam’s life.
Pam is a (hearing) ASL interpreter, as are many of her friends who will be there tonight. They are, based on my small experience of the Seattle Deaf/deaf/hearing ally community, an elite group — accomplished, expert, well-known and widely respected, deeply involved in the communities. Not just a j-o-b. I have looked through windows into that world, but I’ve never really walked there, and it strikes me as being like military service or sex work or firefighting, the kind of work that you don’t talk about to civilians. Partly because of the confidentiality that is essential to the interpreter/client relationship, but also, I imagine, partly because it’s an intense world and you just have to live there to understand. Interpreting is such a huge responsibility — to facilitate true understanding between people of different languages requires more than just a working vocabulary. I think the best interpreters have great empathy and a practiced, expert understanding of how to make a bridge between different languages, cultures, worldviews… all in the middle of Real Life happening to someone, a trial or a medical situation or a work issue or financial crisis. Or a concert or play or celebration. Or an interminable business meeting. I expect some specific interpreting jobs are just boring. But I don’t expect any of them are easy.
When I was studying ASL, and considering pursuing interpreting, I found myself on a regular basis wanting to slap some of the interpreting students I met (and some of the so-called professional interpreters as well). People who just “signed it in English” because it was easier than actually interpreting cultural meaning — to those folks, it was more important to be fast and flash and just that wee bit smug than it was to give people more complete access to each other’s meaning. Interpreters who didn’t know the difference between ASL and signed English, who “didn’t believe in” Deaf culture or assumed that it was like hearing culture except, you know, without the hearing. Snarl. I am no expert on any of this, and am prepared to be wrong about it, but that’s how it felt to me, and those people really did make me want to scream.
I do not expect to be screaming about that tonight (grin). And I hope it goes well. I know we’ll all make sure that Pam has a great time, that’s the goal and the pleasure. But I also hope that we like each other.
It’s always interesting to meet the friends of my friends, but it’s not always successful. I don’t mind that in general (although I sometimes find it very tedious in the particular). It’s one of the fascinating things about being human, this variety of others that we connect with. The space that we make in our lives for all kinds of folks, and the bias toward relationship that I think most people have — the tug toward establishing some kind of positive connection, or a negative connection if that seems the only option. But it seems like we do have to establish some kind of relationship, you know? Even ignoring someone is a relationship, if the ignoring is an active choice (and sometimes even if it isn’t).
At any rate, it’s a party! A celebration of my friend and all the good moments I’ve had with her, the things I’ve learned, the comfort and connection and recognition I feel with her. It will be nice to share that with people, and perhaps by the end of the evening some of us will no longer be strangers.
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Edited to add: Lovely evening, lovely people who are no longer complete strangers. There’s nothing like a five-hour dinner… Good conversations and lots of laughs and hugs, and my friend Pam glowing in the center of it all. What better way to celebrate someone’s life?
It sounds like you have a great evening to look forward to.
I’m glad I have Esmeralda to guide me into some of these worlds that rarely touch with the mainstream. Otherwise, I think I would have been one of the people you’d want to scream at.
Deaf culture is especially difficult for outsiders to understand, I want to say it’s even harder than empathizing with the blind. Perhaps because deaf communities are far more self-contained than others. A blind person can always walk into any group of non-blind and have a conversation with them. We share the same language, the same grammatical constructions. Deaf people have an entirely different and unique way of translating the world into thoughts and ideas. It’s not just their perception that is different from that of the hearing, but also the expression of that reality. So much that even written communication—which common sense tells the average outsider should be easy for deaf people to engage in, since it’s purely visual—is a steep learning curve for someone used to parsing ideas the way deaf people do.
You are right about the social-worker/soldier aspect of interpreting. As a translator, I only have to deal with semantic and cultural meaning. That’s quite a load alone. As an interpreter, there would be not only that, but the pressure or doing it in real time and with immediacy, reading the non-verbal language, monitoring the flow of the conversation and knowing when to pause and explain a footnote that may be key to understanding. Add the high charge of emotions most of those situations bring along as the backstory unfolds… Too. Much. For. Me. On one hand you must have a thick enough skin and foundation to stand the pressure, on the other you must remain highly empathic and compassionate.
I don’t know Pam, but I wish I did and could say Happy Birthday and that I admire the work she does. I hope you come away from the evening with new friends.