“It would help if everyone attended deaf culture training or spent more time with the deaf person to understand their communication needs. There’s still a long way to go.”
It's a paid-for University of Queensland puff-piece, but nevertheless - Yay Dan Jarvis.
“There is no doubt in my mind that human diversity is what colours our world. We know from experience that labels can’t hold us back. We can change the world one person at a time simply by being our true selves.”
Listen to Darren Townsend-Hanscomb on Saturday Live this morning discussing the Gambia Interpreting Project. Starts at 41m approximately.
From the lovely Darren Townsend-Handscomb:
Supporting Deaf Gambians to access family, education and employment by training and paying salaries of Gambian Sign Language (GSL) Interpreters. Four interpreters isn't enough, so we're raising £26,000 to train more.
The Gambia Interpreter Project
This project combines financial support (travel and salaries) with practical support (providing interpreter training, laptops and video cameras), working with interpreters to develop strategies to grow, professionalise and sustain interpreting services. We’re raising additional funds to grow the number of interpreters. We aim to:
• Support the GSL teachers to develop their GSL resources, curricula and assessment.
• Select people with potential to become interpreters.
• Provide them with four weeks GSL training.
• Three weeks Introduction to Interpreting training.
• Six weeks opportunity to shadow the existing interpreters.
• Two weeks practical interpreter training and assessment.
The project will then pay the salaries of the trainee interpreters for a specified period or until they gain employment, as well as provide previously mentioned necessary equipment.
Please click the ‘Donate now’ button to see what your donation will provide. Any amount, big or small, helps. Thank you.
The Gambia Deaf Children Support Project process our donations. They have charitable status for tax purposes and are registered for Gift Aid (Ref: XT21686)
by Thomas K. Holcomb and David H. Smith, Editors
Yep - This looks very exciting.
As the ASL-English interpreting field has become professionalized, there is a growing disconnect between interpreters and the Deaf consumers they serve. Whereas interpreting used to be a community-based practice, the field is growing into a research-based profession that begins in a classroom rather than in the Deaf community. Despite the many gains being made in the interpreting services profession, with an emphasis on the accuracy of the interpreted work, the perspectives of Deaf individuals are rarely documented in the literature. Opportunities for enhanced participation and full inclusion need to be considered in order for Deaf people to best represent themselves to the hearing, nonsigning public as competent and intelligent individuals.
The Cornell Daily Sun reports:
The Student Assembly unanimously voted to call upon the University to expand course offerings on American Sign Language and allow students to place out of their foreign language requirements using ASL proficiency in a Thursday meeting.
If approved by President Martha E. Pollack, the resolution will “allow for American Sign Language to fulfil a foreign language requirement” by expanding ASL course offerings and hiring the faculty necessary to evaluate ASL proficiency of students seeking to opt out of their language requirement.
Eighty-two percent of the student body said that ASL should “satisfy the foreign language requirement at Cornell” in a 2016 S.A. referendum, while a 2016 poll conducted by Cornell University Deaf Awareness Project indicated that 57 percent of the respondents would want to take an ASL course according to the resolution addendum.
Whatever happens next, it's brilliant to see that big a vote in favour.
Sign Language Week, Day 5. Ian Sanborn again... I could have put up something from Dorothy Miles. She was so important to the genesis of BSL poetry. But.... It doesn't speak to me in the way it very probably does for deaf people. This is "Caterpillar". Ian has published a newer performance of this poem, but I really like this one. The use of black and white, speed, and his flat expression all really add to it.