Going Beyond Trust: Protecting My Integrity as a Deaf Academic
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Trust . . . This is what Deaf professionals are often told when it comes to working with interpreters who translate their signed presentations into spoken English. In most cases, and like many of my Deaf colleagues, I am not able to monitor the work of my interpreters because their spoken words are inaccessible to me. When discussing this challenge with people in the interpreting community and my Deaf colleagues, the most frequent advice given to me was to have trust in the interpreters and let them do their work the best they can. For me, this is not acceptable as there is too much at stake. As a Deaf academic who uses ASL, I have interpreters assigned to my classrooms to provide non-signers access to my signed lectures. Because of this, students ’ mastery of content and subsequently their test scores may depend on the quality of interpreters. On a different level, the effectiveness of my work, the results of my course evaluations, and my ability to move up in academic rank also depend on the effectiveness of the interpreters’ work. Furthermore, my ability to participate effectively in college functions such as faculty meetings or college committees is affected by the quality of interpreters assigned to do each of these assignments. And finally, as part of my professional obligations, I’m expected to make presentations at conferences. Again, my professional reputation depends on the ability of the interpreters to project my message as accurately as possible. Yet, however much my Deaf colleagues and I must trust, we also rely on various strategies to check on the interpreters’ work.3 Many of these strategies are passive and reactive.
En: Holcomb, T. y Smith, D. (eds.): Deaf Eyes on Interpreting.