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http://www.fortwayne.com/mld/fortwayne/news/local/11711562.htm
Gary Middaugh can’t hear, can’t speak aloud and doesn’t read lips.
But through the furious motions of his hands – and the furrowed expression on his face – he offers a story that illustrates how difficult it can be to get a sign language interpreter in Fort Wayne.
Several months ago, he had a doctor’s appointment, he relays through wife Melani, who is almost entirely deaf but signs, reads lips and talks.
Gary tried to arrange to have an interpreter meet him at the physician’s office, but for reasons not entirely clear, an interpreter never showed.
“Frustration,” Melani says, “is the key word.”
“Too long,” Gary says. “For too long.”
There are varying accounts of what happened that day with the doctor’s appointment, but in Gary Middaugh’s mind the outcome underscores an overriding problem: a shortage of interpreters in northeast Indiana.
It is a problem that is shared by other deaf and hearing-impaired people across the country.
There are an estimated 26,548 people who are deaf or have partial hearing in Allen County, according to officials at AWS, which oversees the agency DeafLink.
The agency has roughly 30 freelance interpreters to serve that population as well as deaf people in 14 other counties, and only eight to 10 of those interpreters are available regularly, said Julie Pater, AWS vice president.
In the United States, there are 5,502 nationally certified interpreters for the estimated 28 million people who are deaf and hearing impaired, according to the Registry of Interpreters for the Deaf.
“Everybody’s facing the issue of a shortage of interpreters,” Pater says.
“We work to fill every assignment,” DeafLink Director Marsha Kunach says. “I mean, I sweat bullets when I can’t do it. I live and breathe and die every day. But I know (deaf people) are frustrated. I know the frustrations of the deaf community.”
What Kunach and other advocates don’t know is how to solve the problem – other than encouraging people to take up the profession and providing ample training opportunities.
Ask experts for answers and they sometimes reply with questions.
“What is the solution?” national registry spokeswoman Kelly Gerald asks. “How do you get interpreters back into the community?
“I don’t know,” she says. “What’s the attraction? What’s the draw?”
Deaf adults bear burden
Kunach, Pater and Lynne Gilmore, another AWS vice president, say the shortage most acutely affects deaf adults.
They say DeafLink loses interpreters to elementary and secondary schools and to video-relay services, all of which often guarantee full-time work and, in some cases, benefits.
The pay isn’t necessarily better at those places. It’s just that the interpreters are offered steady daytime employment Monday through Friday.
DeafLink, Gilmore says, pays its interpreters an average of $20 an hour to serve roughly 80 businesses and governments that have signed contracts with the agency, as well as organizations that seek interpreters on an on-call basis.
Fort Wayne Community Schools, which has 17 interpreters serving 50 students, pays $10 to $15 an hour, FWCS spokeswoman Debbie Morgan said. The school system’s interpreters also get paid sick time.
School system interpreters are available throughout the day to students. But depending on the demand and the time of day or night, DeafLink sometimes has problems finding one of its contract interpreters to fill a need, especially if the assignment requires travel to an outlying area.
“If you have three companies calling,” Pater says, “and they’re all at the same time, accommodating those multiple requests is very difficult, and sometimes we can do it and sometimes we can’t.”
Compounding the shortage, deaf advocates say, is the difficulty in finding appropriate matches between a deaf person and an interpreter.
Kunach and the Middaughs say there are a variety of interpretation methods, sundry communication skill levels for interpreters and deaf people, and certain interpreting situations requiring special knowledge, such as legal and medical discussions, college classroom work or public safety emergencies.
Further, there is no uniform certification for interpreters.
An interpreter can be nationally certified or certified by a state or both. And in each state, there are certifications for educational work and community interpretation.
An interpreter’s particular certification, deaf advocates say, might not be appropriate for every situation.
The Middaughs say their differing communication skills are prime examples of how each deaf person is unique, how each deaf person requires a careful match with an interpreter’s skills.
And one of Gary Middaugh’s greatest communication needs is an interpreter who can keep up with his rapid-fire signing.
“There’s maybe one or two people I can fluently talk to,” he says.
He acknowledges that in the absence of having an interpreter he can resort to the time-consuming practice of writing notes back and forth with a hearing person.
But that, he says, probably wouldn’t have helped much the day he had the doctor’s appointment. He has a problem many people seem to have with physicians.
“My family doc and I write back and forth,” he says, “but sometimes I can’t read the handwriting.”
More problems loom
For her part, Kunach, who is on call 24 hours a day, tries to expand the pool of interpreters by offering training.
The state provides workshops each year to improve interpreters’ skills and participates on a statewide task force that works to get people interested in the profession, says Anita Risdon, spokeswoman for the Indiana Family and Social Services Administration.
And Trent Netherton, pastor to the deaf at Fort Wayne’s First Assembly of God, teaches sign language to 35 hearing parishioners at the church and to five hearing students at Bishop Dwenger High School.
He teaches mostly for altruistic reasons.
“You have the freedom to walk down the mall and talk to anybody,” he says. “A deaf person is limited in who they can communicate with. My goal is to have everybody be able to communicate.”
But Netherton also realizes that by teaching people to sign he might be cultivating a new crop of interpreters.
He says people historically haven’t viewed interpreting as a possible profession for a number of reasons. Among them: Deafness is often an unseen disability or people assume family members of deaf people always do the interpreting.
“It’s one of those jobs you don’t see at a job fair,” he says. “Now that I’m at Dwenger, the kids are going, ‘Wow, you can learn sign language.’ ”
Still, even with the efforts of the state and people such as Kunach and Netherton, the shortage of interpreters in the adult deaf community won’t be eased if the new recruits choose full-time institutional settings for their careers, deaf advocates say.
Stricter requirements
A new threat is on the horizon.
Certification requirements are growing stricter on the national and state levels, and advocates say that might discourage people from entering the field.
Moreover, the requirements will likely tax the finances of school systems and agencies such as DeafLink because administrators anticipate they’ll have to pay interpreters more.
“I think we’re all a little frightened of that fact,” said Linda Andringa, FWCS hearing-impaired resource teacher and supervisor of the system’s interpreters.
Gerald, of the national registry, says raising the bar on certification is a necessary evil.
“If we’re going to assert ourselves as a profession,” she says, “we’re going to have to have standards. It’s almost a no-way-to-win situation, but we’re always struggling to push forward and meet a higher goal.”
Gary Middaugh is all for having qualified interpreters. But just as important, he’s interested in having interpreters, period.
He asks this question: Why do people who speak foreign languages who relocate to northeast Indiana seem to have little problem finding interpreters while deaf adults struggle for services?
“The people from other countries that move here,” he says, hands flying, “they seem to have interpreters.”
Gary Middaugh can’t hear, can’t speak aloud and doesn’t read lips.
But through the furious motions of his hands – and the furrowed expression on his face – he offers a story that illustrates how difficult it can be to get a sign language interpreter in Fort Wayne.
Several months ago, he had a doctor’s appointment, he relays through wife Melani, who is almost entirely deaf but signs, reads lips and talks.
Gary tried to arrange to have an interpreter meet him at the physician’s office, but for reasons not entirely clear, an interpreter never showed.
“Frustration,” Melani says, “is the key word.”
“Too long,” Gary says. “For too long.”
There are varying accounts of what happened that day with the doctor’s appointment, but in Gary Middaugh’s mind the outcome underscores an overriding problem: a shortage of interpreters in northeast Indiana.
It is a problem that is shared by other deaf and hearing-impaired people across the country.
There are an estimated 26,548 people who are deaf or have partial hearing in Allen County, according to officials at AWS, which oversees the agency DeafLink.
The agency has roughly 30 freelance interpreters to serve that population as well as deaf people in 14 other counties, and only eight to 10 of those interpreters are available regularly, said Julie Pater, AWS vice president.
In the United States, there are 5,502 nationally certified interpreters for the estimated 28 million people who are deaf and hearing impaired, according to the Registry of Interpreters for the Deaf.
“Everybody’s facing the issue of a shortage of interpreters,” Pater says.
“We work to fill every assignment,” DeafLink Director Marsha Kunach says. “I mean, I sweat bullets when I can’t do it. I live and breathe and die every day. But I know (deaf people) are frustrated. I know the frustrations of the deaf community.”
What Kunach and other advocates don’t know is how to solve the problem – other than encouraging people to take up the profession and providing ample training opportunities.
Ask experts for answers and they sometimes reply with questions.
“What is the solution?” national registry spokeswoman Kelly Gerald asks. “How do you get interpreters back into the community?
“I don’t know,” she says. “What’s the attraction? What’s the draw?”
Deaf adults bear burden
Kunach, Pater and Lynne Gilmore, another AWS vice president, say the shortage most acutely affects deaf adults.
They say DeafLink loses interpreters to elementary and secondary schools and to video-relay services, all of which often guarantee full-time work and, in some cases, benefits.
The pay isn’t necessarily better at those places. It’s just that the interpreters are offered steady daytime employment Monday through Friday.
DeafLink, Gilmore says, pays its interpreters an average of $20 an hour to serve roughly 80 businesses and governments that have signed contracts with the agency, as well as organizations that seek interpreters on an on-call basis.
Fort Wayne Community Schools, which has 17 interpreters serving 50 students, pays $10 to $15 an hour, FWCS spokeswoman Debbie Morgan said. The school system’s interpreters also get paid sick time.
School system interpreters are available throughout the day to students. But depending on the demand and the time of day or night, DeafLink sometimes has problems finding one of its contract interpreters to fill a need, especially if the assignment requires travel to an outlying area.
“If you have three companies calling,” Pater says, “and they’re all at the same time, accommodating those multiple requests is very difficult, and sometimes we can do it and sometimes we can’t.”
Compounding the shortage, deaf advocates say, is the difficulty in finding appropriate matches between a deaf person and an interpreter.
Kunach and the Middaughs say there are a variety of interpretation methods, sundry communication skill levels for interpreters and deaf people, and certain interpreting situations requiring special knowledge, such as legal and medical discussions, college classroom work or public safety emergencies.
Further, there is no uniform certification for interpreters.
An interpreter can be nationally certified or certified by a state or both. And in each state, there are certifications for educational work and community interpretation.
An interpreter’s particular certification, deaf advocates say, might not be appropriate for every situation.
The Middaughs say their differing communication skills are prime examples of how each deaf person is unique, how each deaf person requires a careful match with an interpreter’s skills.
And one of Gary Middaugh’s greatest communication needs is an interpreter who can keep up with his rapid-fire signing.
“There’s maybe one or two people I can fluently talk to,” he says.
He acknowledges that in the absence of having an interpreter he can resort to the time-consuming practice of writing notes back and forth with a hearing person.
But that, he says, probably wouldn’t have helped much the day he had the doctor’s appointment. He has a problem many people seem to have with physicians.
“My family doc and I write back and forth,” he says, “but sometimes I can’t read the handwriting.”
More problems loom
For her part, Kunach, who is on call 24 hours a day, tries to expand the pool of interpreters by offering training.
The state provides workshops each year to improve interpreters’ skills and participates on a statewide task force that works to get people interested in the profession, says Anita Risdon, spokeswoman for the Indiana Family and Social Services Administration.
And Trent Netherton, pastor to the deaf at Fort Wayne’s First Assembly of God, teaches sign language to 35 hearing parishioners at the church and to five hearing students at Bishop Dwenger High School.
He teaches mostly for altruistic reasons.
“You have the freedom to walk down the mall and talk to anybody,” he says. “A deaf person is limited in who they can communicate with. My goal is to have everybody be able to communicate.”
But Netherton also realizes that by teaching people to sign he might be cultivating a new crop of interpreters.
He says people historically haven’t viewed interpreting as a possible profession for a number of reasons. Among them: Deafness is often an unseen disability or people assume family members of deaf people always do the interpreting.
“It’s one of those jobs you don’t see at a job fair,” he says. “Now that I’m at Dwenger, the kids are going, ‘Wow, you can learn sign language.’ ”
Still, even with the efforts of the state and people such as Kunach and Netherton, the shortage of interpreters in the adult deaf community won’t be eased if the new recruits choose full-time institutional settings for their careers, deaf advocates say.
Stricter requirements
A new threat is on the horizon.
Certification requirements are growing stricter on the national and state levels, and advocates say that might discourage people from entering the field.
Moreover, the requirements will likely tax the finances of school systems and agencies such as DeafLink because administrators anticipate they’ll have to pay interpreters more.
“I think we’re all a little frightened of that fact,” said Linda Andringa, FWCS hearing-impaired resource teacher and supervisor of the system’s interpreters.
Gerald, of the national registry, says raising the bar on certification is a necessary evil.
“If we’re going to assert ourselves as a profession,” she says, “we’re going to have to have standards. It’s almost a no-way-to-win situation, but we’re always struggling to push forward and meet a higher goal.”
Gary Middaugh is all for having qualified interpreters. But just as important, he’s interested in having interpreters, period.
He asks this question: Why do people who speak foreign languages who relocate to northeast Indiana seem to have little problem finding interpreters while deaf adults struggle for services?
“The people from other countries that move here,” he says, hands flying, “they seem to have interpreters.”
