Vance

As some of AD'ers may already know that Nas and I were gone for Japan (I will create a topic about it later). Nas often interpreted for me at virtually anywhere with tiny or no problem (with or without my requests). However in Japan, things are different. Seem to me that it is harder for Nas to interpreting from japanese dialogues into ASL. She often fumbled through the translation of japanese dialogues into ASL. None of her relatives in Japan can speak english and Nas tried her best as much as she can. I just found it interesting that it is harder for her to do that... even though she is able to speak or write in Japanese without any problem but she don't have any experience with translating the japanese dialogues into ASL until our trip. I told her few times that she don't have to do that for me since I was fine without her interpretations because one of her relatives is a professional artist, he have lot of works in his homemade books which took me many hours to look through.

I wonder if have any of you ever experience in that kind of situation? If so, is it harder than interpreting english disalogues into ASL? And why?

Deafness

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Vance

Err, I think I need to clear up a bit... I was wondering if do any of you ever have experience in this kind of situation with any kind of languages. Not only japanese but any like.. mexican?

gnarlydorkette

I did use to interpret for a deaf Mexican boyfriend with her Spanish-speaking grandparents.. ME, A DEAF, INTERPRETING!! They do have HSL (Home Sign Langauge) but that day just struck when my boyfriend needed to tell grandparents something importnat that there isn't a HSL sign... He doesn't know Spanish as well while grandparents don't know English at all so I acted as his medium since I did take Spanish classes for two years and I was rather fluent (enough to interpret, apparently!)

It was HARD because I had to translate Spanish to Engligh in my mind then sign out in ASL (the boyfriend only knows ASL, not english)...then when he signs, then I have to put it into English so I can translate word for word into Spanish... LONG time to filter and process the information in my little poor mind!

And the grandparents WROTE in spanish, not spoke to me in Spanish.. I couldn't lipread Spanish. So it is not exactly intrepreting but rather a method of translating...
if you get the idea. [shrug]

I don't know if it applies to my mom as well-- she only knows PSE but she also has a short attention span so she will interp for me in Finland then stops in mid-sentence and starts to talk back or whatnot-- which was an ANNOYING thing because I was left out of the conversation. I hated my mom for that.

Reba

I have not had that experience. When my hubby (hearing signer) went to Ukraine with a Deaf friend they used serial interpreting. A Deaf Ukranian signed to a hearing Ukranian terp. The terp voiced the Ukranian to a hearing translator. The translator voiced the English. My hubby signed the English to Deaf friend. And then the whole process went in the reverse. Kind of slow communication.

Interpretrator

How fluent is your girlfriend in Japanese? If it's a language she's not fluent in or used to speaking, that could explain the problems. Or perhaps she's just used to making certain linguistic conversions from English to ASL and back, and since Japanese structure is SO different from English it could be an unfamiliar kind of interpreting.

I have occasionally interpreted French into ASL and back, but French and English are so similar grammatically that it wasn't TOO difficult, except that I am not nearly as fluent in French as in English.

kuifje75

I have had to interpret French or German into ASL for some of my friends if we watched a foreign language film. Its not easy when the film goes so fast. Im amazed at how interpreters can keep up. Im the kind of person who likes to think about accurate translations rather than transliterating word for word.

My boyfriend is Vietnamese, and his family speaks Vietnamese at home. Sometimes Kim will translate from spoken Vietnamese to ASL for me, or have them write to me in either English or Vietnamese. I have written a bit Vietnamese with them, but not fluent enough to hold conversations.

Reba

This is certainly a good topic for research. I know that even RID has confronted some controversy over Spanish interpreting at its conferences. That is, suppose there was an English-speaking presenter, and the audience includes Deaf Spanish signers. That requires interpreting English speech into Spanish signs. Most English-speaking terps would interpret into ASL. Most Spanish-speaking terps would interpret into a Spanish sign language. A terp that can interpret directly from English speech into Spanish signs; does that require an additional mental step of interpreting from English speech to Spanish speech, and then to the Spanish signs? My head is beginning to spin....

Reba

At the time, were you conscious of a change in your interpreting process? Or did it just "flow" naturally? In other words, did you interpret (mentally) directly from French into ASL, or did go from French, to English, to ASL?

Vance

Heheh... HSL? That's new to me. I am curious about that one. Yeah, that's what Nas said. She said she have to think harder to translate unlike usual interpreting.

That is usual serial interpretation in certain courts. Imagine, Nas was a "serial-interpreting" person at that time. She fumbled several times.

She is completely fluent in Japanese because of her parents who wanted her to speak & write in japanese to keep the culture 'alive' in her. btw, her father is a japanese. Also Nas is a CCJI (Court-certified Japanese Interpreter). According to Nas, Japanese has the extensive grammatical system for formality and other things (example: -sama, -san, -dono, sempai, etc). What more is that Japanese has quite lot of vocabulary words which made it harder for her to translate the japanese dialogues into ASL. Plus to these, the Japanese have three different writing systems (Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji [imported from China]). She virtually have no zero experience in that case but now she knows some... Nas also mentioned to me that she wants to rent several movies (or animes) that come with japanese language for her to practice translating/interpreting from japanese dialogues into ASL for me. She already got one movie today for us to watch. She plan to set up the position. Example: She is planning to sit across from me face-to-face and look away from TV which we will turn the english subtitle on. I will tell her if she get it right or wrong when she is translating/interpreting from what the movie says based on the subtitles. We will visit her relatives again this summer right after my internship. So she insists to practice more. hehe...

*nods* I heard that french and english have similar grammatical systems.

Vance

Now you made my head spinning with that post too...

Definitely about researching!

Banjo

Yes and no. Both French and English languages are dramatically different in many ways, but similar in a few ways like some words being spelled almost the same.

However when you write something in French, it's quite different from English, period. For example, you put the adjectives after the nouns when you write in French.

Example -

English - Thee blue car
French - L'auto bleu

signer16

I have had the experience of hearing Spanish and being asked to translate it into ASL, I am not an interpreter, but I have deaf friends and spanish-speaking friends so... For me, it was really hard, because I am not fluent in either language. Intepreting, I did okay; but, when I tried speaking spanish and signing at the same time..whew! I was sooooooo slow. I could think in one language or the other, definitely not both.
I do know some people though, hearies learning ASL straight from Spanish, and as they associate the Spanish word with the sign, have no problem using both, it is the English they have problems with. The only difference with Spanish speakers vs. English speakers using ASL is the fingerspelled words.

Interpretrator

Directly from French to ASL. The only time English got involved is when I couldn't remember a particular French word and had to seek the English for it. I learned French an an immersion setting so I can switch my head from English-brain to French-brain pretty well...something I WISH I could do better with ASL!

Which makes it even easier to interpret into ASL because you do the same thing. French also uses the structure "Ma soeur, elle est belle" ("My sister, she is pretty") which is more similar to ASL than English. In any case, both French and English are Latin-based (French more so than English of course) so overall yes, their structures are FAR more similar than that of English and Japanese...to quote Magatsu:

Yes, I had a close friend in college who was from Japan and spoke English well, but had tremendous difficulty writing academic essays because it's not just the grammatical structure that is so different but the whole approach to expressing meaning. As an example, ASL users tend to tell an entire detailed story to get one point across, whereas English users "cut to the chase." This can make it hard for interpreters who sometimes need to make that cultural intervention so neither deaf nor hearing client is going "what is wrong with this person??" As I understand it, there is the same difficulty between Japanese and English.

This is definitely a fascinating topic. I would like to have the opportunity to interpret in a French class one day and maybe things will become more clear.

tegumi

I have been speaking Japanese on almost a daily basis for about 6 years now... I am not fluent, but I can get by extremely well, and can say almost anything that isnt too extremely off the wall. I have been studying ASL now for about almost 4 months, and I became interested in ASL because I have a coworker that is Deaf. Anyway, I do the same thing in regards to attempting to translate from Japanese to ASL. I am far from perfect in ASL, but know many signs, especially those used mostly in daily conversations. When my professor teaches us ASL and about ASL, she stresses how important it is to get out of the English "thinking box". So, when I switch my brain over to ASL, I completely throw English out the window, and do everything in ASL word order. But, when my Deaf friend asks me what the Japanese people just said, and I try and interpret from Japanese to ASL, there is really no "thinking box" to get out of, because Japanese and ASL sentence structures are nearly identical. That is what I think throws me off, because when I hear the Japanese, my mind is already part way in ASL mode, and it confuses me and makes me think I am doing something wrong when I try to switch over. I hope you can get what I am asking.

Is this the same problem your girlfriend has? Or am I just wierd. LoL

tegumi

Oops... I think I phrased that wrong... I meant to say that I get confused when going from Japanese word order to English word order (Reversed) to ASL word order (Reversed again...) Alot of switching goes on in your head when you are attempting to translate from a language that you arent a native speaker of, to your native language, and then to ASL...

kuifje75

Isn't it "la voiture bleue"?

Besides, ASL evolved from LSF, so ASL follows more of French grammar order rather than that of English. Maybe that is what Interpretator meant, finding the ease of interpreting from spoken French into ASL for that reason. (I just read up again and overlooked Interpretator's post, oops, sorry!)

kuifje75

This is what we have been explaining to our ASL students and students in the ITP. Sometimes they tell us about something, then I am like ummm, tell me more! I explain to them all the time about deaf people being rather detailed with their stories and so on. One student was going to make a video assignment about buying a house, and she thought it was not important to describe the house itself, but rather to summary by saying "a cute house." I asked her why it was cute, and made her add more to her story, even though it had nothing to do with the scamming real estate agent she wanted to talk about.

Interpretrator

I saw a beautiful example of this by the interpreter educator Betty Colonomos, illustrating a Deaf person arriving late for a meeting and the 5-minute explanation of how this old woman fell down in the street and everyone rushed to help and then the ambulance came -- in full ASL storytelling mode. And then the hearing version: "Sorry I was late. Traffic." And how can you interpret the Deaf person's story without boring the non-deaf-acculturated hearing people and giving the impression that the Deaf person is such a blabbermouth; and how can you interpret the hearing person's story without making the non-hearing-acculturated Deaf people think "How rude, he didn't even give us the whole story!"

It really hit home for me. And if anyone STILL thinks there's no such thing as Deaf culture...

Interpretrator

Well, not quite. For me it wasn't about the relation of ASL to French. It was more like the processes that occur in my head when interpreting ASL-English work the same way in my head because French's grammar and other features are very familiar to me and similar to English.

Reba

Oh, yes, I can relate to that!