Train Go Sorry

by Leah Hager Cohen

  Less than a year after I first went to Alec for ASL tutoring, I began to support myself as an interpreter. I had just moved to Brooklyn, taken an apartment in a brownstone in Prospect Heights, and commenced looking for work, any work, although interpreting was about the last thing I considered doing, since I was convinced that my skills were as yet inadequate. But there was another reason I shied from exploring the possibility: I wondered whether I could ever feel comfortable in the role of interpreter. Not whether I could feel confident—this had nothing to do with ability—but whether I could feel honest. Ethically comfortable, I mean.

  These doubts had arisen during the past three months, during my internship in the performing arts department at the National Technical Institute of the Deaf. I was housed with another hearing intern in an apartment just off-campus but spent most of my time at the college, conducting interviews for a booklet on deaf theater, taking classes in ASL, working in the offices of the performing arts department, viewing stories told in ASL up in the videotape library, and, of course, attending rehearsals.

  The bulk of my internship consisted of working on the fall production, Great Expectations. The script had been adapted and translated into ASL by the director, a deaf man and a veteran of the National Theater of the Deaf. The play was staged for both deaf and hearing audiences: a primary cast, composed of deaf people, enacted the drama in sign; a secondary cast, of hearing people stationed like a Greek chorus on the aprons of the stage, provided simultaneous voicing. Many of the hearing actors were not proficient signers. A rehearsal interpreter was needed, and the director asked me to fill this role. Flattered, nervous, and against my better judgment, I accepted.

  At the first read-through, more than two dozen cast and crew members packed into the rehearsal room. We began with introductions, the deaf people fingerspelling their names. I was supposed to voice them. I missed, I think, every single one. I could hear blood swishing through my ears, could feel something hot, like steam beneath my skin, rising halfway up my face. My hands, clasped loosely in my lap, formed a cold, sweaty pocket. I tried to steady myself and read the spelling fingers, tried to focus not on individual letters but on the shape of the word. I told myself that fingerspelling is the hardest thing to apprehend, and consoled myself by saying that proper names are the hardest of all, with no context, no way to anticipate or use cloze skills. And all the while I felt myself becoming tiny, shrunken, like my own clenched hands, into a sodden, chilly knot.

  One of the hearing cast members was an interpreter at the college. When her voice rode, unbidden, over the silence, I felt both quashed and relieved. Later she apologized to me for breaching etiquette. I thanked her and assured her I was grateful. That afternoon I resigned the position of company interpreter.

  In the end I became stage manager, and from the relative safety of that position, without conscious effort or even awareness on my part, my signing and interpreting skills quietly flourished. During rehearsals I presided over a card table downstage. From there, referring to a script threaded into a black loose-leaf notebook, I recorded blocking, prompted and cued actors, and took notes about props and sets from the director.

  The director’s language was ASL, which he used in its purest form, autonomous from English, never mouthing glosses to go with his signs. Only rarely, when his patience was sorely tried, did I hear him use his voice, and then it was simply a loose rasp, a sort of feathery growl. His signs, uncompromised by English, were a pleasure to behold. I found it so easy to understand him that it was several weeks before it registered that the notes I was jotting down in English had originated in ASL. All those times that I had written what the director said, I had been unconsciously, instantaneously interpreting between the languages inside my head.

  I further realized how much I was grasping, not just of the direction but of the conversations that went on among deaf actors who were not busy onstage, when some of the hearing actors began to sidle up during breaks and ask me to interpret. I offered to oblige them as best I could, only to surprise myself by being able to voice whole conversations. At the same time, the ASL stories in the videotape library were making more and more sense. But the real breakthrough came when I began to get jokes.

  As the deaf people I worked with gradually included me in their banter, I started picking up subtle scraps of their humor: the way one deadpan adjustment could convert an innocuous sign into a double-entendre; the way English and ASL could be blended to yield richly punning alloys; the way English words and phrases could be slyly manipulated so as to appear, in sign, nonsensical, inane. This last kind of joking was wickedly barbed, a counterhegemonic response to oppressive hearing people and the language they so righteously touted. I felt honored by the invitation to share in this joking, by the permission to laugh at it.

  Finally, I began to detect another sort of humor, related to this last but more pointed, as well as more veiled. It took various forms but always targeted certain hearing people, who, I gathered, were perceived as trespassers who had trod into the deaf community lacking proper credentials. At first I thought “credentials” were a matter simply of language—good signers were accepted; bad signers were not. But I soon saw that this rule did not apply. One of the other hearing interns had come to NTID as a novice signer; she struggled with the most basic hand shapes, labored to string a few signs awkwardly together, yet within a few weeks deaf staff members and students had afforded her a certain warmth and trust, taking her under their wing and helping her with her signing. Moreover, another hearing woman working on the play possessed far more advanced signing skills, but the same people subtly snubbed her. I saw them poke fun at the way she signed, the way she used certain ASL conventions in the wrong context, or with peculiar emphasis, or just too abundantly. It was as though by flaunting her knowledge of certain superficial features of ASL, she were trying to ingratiate herself with deaf people. She didn’t mean it to be condescending, but it was. Like a white politician trying to talk jive, it aroused suspicion and distaste.

  For centuries, hearing professionals have assigned themselves the task of “rehabilitating the deaf” without ever troubling to educate themselves about deaf culture and language. Now that the culture and language have caught on with the hearing world—have become, in a sense, fashionable—new problems hover. While hearing people’s interest could lead to positive outcomes for deaf people, it could also present a danger: that the culture and language will become tools with which hearing people can further control deaf people’s lives.

  By the time the play was performed and my internship ended, I was in a sort of moral quandary over the concept of interpreting. I recognized the need for interpreters. At the same time, I began to think there was something terribly strange and complicated about the job, in the power and dependency inherent in the relationship between interpreter and client, in the fact that almost all interpreters are hearing, in the idea of appropriating the language of an oppressed minority and exploiting it for financial ends.

  I was twenty-two years old, feeling very raw in the skin of a grownup and prone to feverish investigation of my own actions as well as their motives and consequences against a larger social backdrop. The whole framework of deaf politics was looming gigantically in my mind. This new construct had jettisoned my old sense of place within the deaf community; I couldn’t feel my way clear to a new spot.

  What had seemed when I was a child like a natural act of goodness now seemed more complicated, tainted. I no longer viewed interpreters simply as agents of connection. I also saw them as members of the very group that had dictated the hierarchy of languages that positioned ASL last. Good interpreters function as cultural mediators; now I wondered how, as hearing people, they could fairly represent both cultures, when they must harbor an inevitable bias toward their own. Deaf people constitute the only minority group in the world forced to rely solely on interpreters from outside their culture. By taking part in this equation, how could I help but perpetuate this inequity?


  By the time I moved to Brooklyn, I had been stewing over these dilemmas for weeks. My head was swimming. The apartment I had found, a basement studio on Prospect Place, was miserably cold (two of the windowpanes had been replaced with loose-fitting cardboard) and itchy (the previous tenant’s cats left a legacy of ridiculously hardy fleas), and I was extremely anxious to secure employment. I decided to table the whole interpreting issue for a while and concentrate instead on getting a job.

  There ensued the proverbial endless days of circling ads in the classifieds, placing telephone calls, mailing résumés. The whole time it rained, and I sat on the floor of my chilly apartment and scratched at flea bites and fretted. After a few weeks of this, when a friend told me he had heard of a place in Manhattan that screened noncertified interpreters and referred them for jobs, I was just desperate enough to call.

  A certified interpreter is someone who meets the national standards established by RID, which administers an exam that includes both a written and a practical component. The latter tests voice-to-ASL and ASL-to-voice interpretation; it also tests separately for transliteration between spoken English and signed English. This part of the test is recorded on videotape and distributed nationally to RID raters, who may then award a partial or comprehensive certificate, depending on the candidate’s performance. Many interpreters work and study for years before taking this exam; I knew I was a long way from being ready to attempt it.

  Because of the national dearth of certified interpreters, agencies in several cities and states have established their own less rigorous screening procedures. People who pass the screenings may work through these agencies. They are paid less than RID-certified interpreters and are restricted from certain kinds of jobs, such as legal interpreting. Often they work for social service organizations. New York Society for the Deaf (NYSD), the place my friend mentioned, is the main agency in New York City that screens and refers noncertified interpreters. I made an appointment to have my skills evaluated; at least I could obtain some sense of how far off I was.

  My screening was scheduled for a Friday. Thursday night I was something of a wreck and decided I ought to practice. I switched on the radio, stood in front of the bathroom mirror, and tried to interpret news broadcasts. It was devastating. I could not keep up with all the densely packed sound bites. My fingers cramped as I improvised frantic spellings for all the names of foreign countries and their rulers. The announcer’s deep male voice prattled on assuredly. My hands went limp. I locked disgusted gazes with myself over the sink. This was a farce.

  But when I rose the next morning, I mustered my will, put on a plain navy blue sweater (interpreters are supposed to wear tops that provide a clean contrast with the color of their skin), pulled my hair back, put on minimal earrings, and, because I had read that female interpreters should wear lip color to provide better definition for lip reading, applied lipstick, which I promptly proceeded to chew off. Still, dressing for the part helped me summon courage. At NTID I had witnessed interpreters changing for work in the bathrooms, donning their dark solid blouses, shedding dangling bracelets and distracting rings, fixing their hair and makeup just like actors preparing for a performance. It had always seemed a little bit thrilling. I set off to keep my appointment with a kind of fatalistic resolve.

  NYSD’s test paralleled RID’s, coming in two parts, written and practical. The written portion asked what interpreter training program I had attended. Feeling rather bleak, I wrote down “none.” But I gained confidence as I moved along, answering questions to do with the structure and history of ASL as well as RID’s code of ethics. Although I had never actually seen a copy of the interpreting code of ethics, I had enough awareness to answer with common sense. “If someone curses, is it acceptable to clean up their language in the interpretation?” Of course not; the interpreter may never edit or otherwise distort meaning. “If someone asks the interpreter a question about the client, is it all right to respond?” No, that question, like everything else, should be interpreted exactly as uttered. “May the interpreter ever discuss, with anyone, the specifics of a job or particular client?” No, the need for an interpreter must never compromise a client’s right to confidentiality. “If a client requests, may the interpreter give personal opinions or advice?” No, the interpreter’s job is to interpret, period.

  When I had finished the written test, I was shown a videotape of a deaf man at a doctor’s office. I was to sign everything the doctor said and voice everything the patient signed, just as if I were the interpreter present. An evaluator sat in the room with me and made notes as she listened and watched.

  It was not atrocious. The doctor didn’t speak at the breakneck speed of the radio announcer the night before. The patient signed fairly short, simple phrases, and they were all in response to the doctor’s questions, so I had a sense of what to expect. I didn’t feel very smooth or professional, and I missed some of what the patient said (his fingerspelled address, for instance), but neither did I make a fool of myself, and when I had finished and the evaluator asked me to wait outside, I did so with a certain satisfied relief. I was sure I had failed the screening, but at least I hadn’t been a total disgrace.

  The evaluator called me back into the room a few minutes later. I sat opposite her with a small contrite smile and waited for the critique. She launched into a short list of what I had missed, showed me a better way to sign “up till now,” told me that my voicing had a nice quality but I should try to project more, and said I could start working on Monday.

  We sat through a short silence.

  “You mean as an interpreter?”

  “That’s what you’re here for, isn’t it?”

  I worked at vocational schools, sheltered workshops, mental health facilities, social security offices, outpatient programs. There were filthy buildings and poorly heated buildings and buildings with rats. The clients were young people learning mechanical trades, elderly people going for physical exams, immigrants attending clerical school, parents trying to collect unemployment benefits. I collided with each of them briefly, tried to be true to their words, then left them and went on to other jobs, cloaked in the disturbing ether of anonymity.

  I cringe now to think of my early clients, of how inexperienced and muddling my efforts with them must have been. One of the first rules of interpreting is that you can’t interpret what you don’t understand. I learned that lesson well on one of my first jobs, interpreting an instructional filmstrip in a class on refrigerator repair. I sat leaning into the ambient light of the projector and fumbling over possible ways to sign “induction coil” and “condensing unit.” Not knowing what these things were and therefore at a loss to interpret for meaning, I was reduced to a harried transliteration, fingerspelling nearly half the words and making, I am sure, very little sense.

  Gauging the degree of cultural mediation implicit in the role of interpreter could be daunting as well. Certain things were obvious. In hearing culture, if someone is looking away and you want her attention, you call her by name. In deaf culture, a perfectly appropriate way to interpret this is by tapping the person’s arm; I had no qualms about this. But I was utterly lost when a deaf patient sobbed in his therapist’s office while the therapist made sympathetic clucks and murmured, “I know . . . I’m sorry . . . I know.” The man shuddered, damply oblivious, his face sunk into his hands. Should I pat him, in order to convey the therapist’s consoling words tactilely? I sat, unable to make up my mind, hands cupped uselessly in my lap.

  The intimacy with which I entered people’s lives seemed at odds with the professional nature of the work, the detached way I had to glide out again at the end of the job. I remember an old woman going for her first mammogram, the sight of her, so soft and vulnerable as she stood naked with her breast pressed between the plates of the x-ray machine. I remember a middle-aged man in a day-care center for the emotionally disturbed, who sat eating cake and ice cream and doughnuts all afternoon, reminiscing sadly about a visit to a farm. I remember a
young man in a sheltered workshop who told me conversationally that he had raped his former girlfriend. And because my role as interpreter made me an invisible, silent vessel, I carried their images and stories home with me each night, and each day felt myself absorbing more, growing swollen with glimpses of private lives I could never share.

  After two months of this, I was asked to apply for a full-time position as a staff interpreter at the Program for Deaf Adults at La Guardia Community College, part of the City University of New York, in Queens. The structure of the job interview took me by surprise: the department’s six staff members (two hearing and four deaf) took turns quizzing me about my skills and experience. The actual questions mattered less than the way they were posed. Each of the staff members adopted a different mode of communication—pure ASL; signs in English word order, nonvoiced; straight signed English with voice; words mouthed with neither signs nor voice; and other variations or blends. I was to respond by matching the style of the individual questioner. The interview reflected the nature of the job requirements; interpreters must be prepared to work along a continuum. I thought the structure of the interview made a fine game and thoroughly enjoyed myself.

  A few days later, when I was offered the job, I readily accepted. I would meet other interpreters, would have colleagues. Colleagues—the word was deliciously appealing. The loneliness of freelancing had been difficult, but in truth it had also come to have a qualified appeal. It served to heighten perception. The cross-sections of all those lives, the daily interlacing of foreign and familiar, the play between intimacy and detachment—these things were in some way stimulating.