Page 102 - Reading Between the Sign Intercultural Communication for Sign Language Interpreters

American Deaf Culture 87

We will return to the interpreter’s special relationship to the
Deaf community in the last chapter of this book. Let us now go on
to describe some of the elements of Deaf culture, keeping in mind
that each deaf person may be at a different stage of cultural aware-
ness (see Holcomb). It would be a mistake to assume that the
following elements of Deaf culture are fully embraced by all deaf
people. The information presented below describes the core of
Deaf culture and the characteristics of many Deaf people who are
actively involved in the Deaf community. As deaf people become
more and more enculturated into the Deaf way of life, these val-
ues will emerge as being more central to their lives.

Communication and Information Sharing

Deaf people do not wish to be Hearing. Rather than
mourning the “loss” of hearing, or wishing they were
like the majority, they are frustrated at the lack of ac-
cess and opportunity. The Deaf fantasy is not that they
could hear, but that the world would be Deaf. (Smith
1996, 80).
Being deaf is a communication handicap only when deaf people
are around hearing people. As it happens, the world is full of hear-
ing people, so deaf people are compelled to communicate with
nonsigners on a daily basis. In the hearing world, communication
and gaining access to information is often a struggle, which at its
worst can lead to loneliness and isolation. This may be true even
at home, where, if their relatives do not sign well or at all, deaf
people may miss out on everything from dinner table gossip to a
feeling of being truly understood and accepted by their family.
Those few deaf people born into Deaf families are lucky enough
to have full and easy communication at home, but they still face
many situations daily where communication will be slow, awk-
ward, and frustrating, and one is never sure if one has understood
completely. With nonsigners, deaf people need to resort to lip-
reading (which is a challenge even to the most skilled lipreaders),
to writing (requiring the use of English, which is difficult for many
deaf people for a complex set of reasons examined in Harlan Lane’s
The Mask of Benevolence 1992), to gesturing (with a limited reper-
toire of iconic signs), to using interpreters (who are not always
available or well trained).

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