South Africa tries to address the country's need for professional sign language interpreters

From The Daily Dispatch in South Africa:

The Premier’s Office has just launched a forum of Sign Language interpreters that Deaf people can call on for help with things that hearing people take for granted – job interviews, doctors’ appointments, business with the bank. Appearing in court, making a will. (Yes, nasty shock that there is no such body, isn’t it?)

The Eastern Cape is the one province in the country where there are no professional Sign Language interpreters working at community level, as opposed to conference level. Now the Premier’s Office is moving to put that right.

“Sign Language is a language in its own right, with its own structure and syntax, so signing in English, or Xhosa or whatever, is like a Fanakalo to South African Sign Language (SASL), it’s that crude and inexact,” Dr Kim Wallmach (pictured) tells me over coffee. Part of her job here is to correct the signing “dialects” and “slang” of the hearing people who’ve been helping the Eastern Cape’s Deaf people, and replace that with the grace, power and graphic directness of proper SASL.

She gives me an example of how expressive and condensed SASL is that I can never forget. “In English you would sign: ‘The – cup – is – on – the – table’,” (and her fingers flicker incomprehensibly in the air). “But in SASL you just say: ‘Cup …. (her right hand is cupped in her flattened left palm) … table’ (the hand-cup swoops down to the table surface, her eyes are fixed intently on mine and her shoulders somehow tell the dramatic story of the cup’s journey). Anyone in South Africa – black, white, green, purple – understands it. Well, anyone who’ s Deaf. SASL is their mother tongue, just as in Mauritius if you’re Deaf your mother tongue is MSL, or in America it’s ASL.”

Wow. A language that transcends language. Wow.

Wallmach takes me to a classroom where 11 students are finishing an intensive week of training. It’s the third and last of such weeks over a three-month period, and some are quite shattered at the feedback they’re getting from their practical exam. They watch footage of themselves interpreting for a Deaf person in a job interview, and are told what they did right – and wrong. The interviewers on the panel were their teachers, but the applicant really is Deaf. His feedback follows the teachers’. And with some, he felt they’d lost him the job.

Perhaps they were too self-conscious, or too assertive. Some failed to put everyone at ease by explaining their role and how things would work. Others even forgot all about the job applicant and launched into their own private conversation with the interviewers.

Clearly, just being able to hear and sign does not make you an interpreter. Forming a professional body means the interpreters must draw up a code of ethics to work by – and this is where it gets interesting.

“It’s a strange combination,” says Wallmach. “At the beginning of the encounter you have to be assertive because you have to manage people’s awkwardness. They don’t know where to look, who to talk to. But then you have to step back, right back. Sometimes the temptation is very great to insert your own views, or tell one of the parties what you think they should hear instead of what was really said. The potential for abuse is huge, including bribery.”

Some excruciating stories emerge as participants admit to times when they crossed that line in the past. Most have learnt to sign because a loved one is Deaf, so the intention is usually good, but this course has made them realise like never before the sacredness of that trust.

“A line has been drawn. I am born again,” vows one participant, who blushingly confessed how she had “coached” Deaf people when their ward councillor visited their failed housing project: “Look angry. Look sad now, as though you might cry if you don’t get your house,” she’d signed to them.

I discover fascinating things that one would never think of but are so obvious once you’ve been told: Dress code is important for professional interpreters – patterned clothes, distracting scarves and jewellery are out, of course, as is chewing gum, and even more interesting: if you’re black, wear light clothes; if you’re white, wear dark clothes so your hands stand out against the background. “Otherwise it’s like mumbling,” says Wallmach.

With Wallmach’s colleague Thelma Kotze to interpret, I chat to Mfundo Lebaka, the man who role- played as the job applicant. In the beginning I just stand there, with no clue about where to start.

He has a beautiful, delicate face; warm, intelligent eyes. I want to connect, but how?

“Do you work for the Premier’s Office,” I ask eventually. After a pause during which his hands fly, shoulders and face and head saying “no” before the words come, I hear a voice behind me and just to my right: “No, I work in a cosmetics factory in East London.”

“What do you do there?”

“I study the CCTV footage, examining it for staff theft.”

“Oh, so your so-called disability gives you a special advantage?”

A smile of incredible beauty flickers but the shoulders-face- hands ballet is saying something serious and intense. Here it comes.

“Yes! Deaf people are very visual beings, because from very young we have to notice so many tiny details about everything, just to get by. It soon becomes a habit, and it makes me very good at my job.”

Once I’ve got used to the new pace – the delays that my deaf eyes can’t decipher – I enjoy the conversation. It’s a bit of a strain, but no worse than Skype really. The hardest, saddest thing is the feeling that I’m being cut off, left out. It’s because he can’t meet my eyes. They are fixed just behind my shoulder on what links us – the interpreter.

After the course, the students applaud Lebaka – in his own language. Deaf people don’t clap their hands, why would they? They raise their open hands, palms forward, to shoulder level and twinkle their fingers, with big smiles.

Later, I tap Lebaka on the shoulder, put my notebook and pen in from of him. I point to his name, tap my cellphone. He smiles – and now our eyes meet – nods, writes quickly, hands the notebook back. Next to his number he’s written: (SMS ONLY). I knew that. Thumbs up, hug, laugh, wave.

There are so many alternatives to the spoken word.