Page 192 - Reading Between the Sign Intercultural Communication for Sign Language Interpreters

The Interpreter’s Role and Responsibilities 177

times going so far as to state that they were “only consumers.”
The balance of the evaluation teams was then reversed to three
hearing and two Deaf. Some of the Deaf people who had been
involved in the founding of RID began to feel unwelcome and left.
Some of the hearing interpreters from Deaf families felt they were
being attacked because they hadn’t gone through a training pro-
gram. They were also accused of not being professional enough,
and it was said that their volunteering would undermine the pro-
fessionalism of the organization. Mud was slung back and forth.
At the height of the debate, according to Kirchner, a patronizing
analogy aimed at the Deaf was “Patients don’t certify their doc-
tors, other doctors do”—implying that the issue of certification
was better left to the interpreters.
The testing system was revamped in the 1980s in an effort to
increase its objectivity, reliability, and validity. There are now writ-
ten questions that test prospective interpreters’ knowledge of the
history of the field as well as its ethics and culture. In the perfor-
mance section of the test, candidates are no longer evaluated by
people in the same room with them but are videotaped instead.
These videotapes are then sent to three independent evaluators
for critique, one Deaf and two hearing—one of whom is an inter-
preter. To ensure objectivity, candidates are identified only by so-
cial security number.
During a two-year period in the mid-1980s when RID had
placed a hold on testing so they could develop their improved
instrument, some Deaf-run agencies experienced a lack of certi-
fied interpreters and developed their own interpreter evaluations
to fill the gap. This may have also been in some measure a reac-
tion to their perceived exclusion from the RID testing process.
Members of RID criticized some of these tests for not being ad-
equately rigorous. Hard feelings remained, with each side claim-
ing that the other had refused to understand its point of view.
At present, there may be hope. At the time of this writing, a
task force composed of members of both NAD and RID is attempt-
ing to collaborate on developing a combined testing system. It is
too early to tell if this collaboration will bear fruit.
From an intercultural perspective, I wonder if the conflicts
between various segments of RID and the Deaf community about
testing and certification may, in essence, boil down to different
cultural outlooks. An emphasis on scientific validity, objective cri-
teria, statistics, and proof through numbers is the hallmark of hear-

07 MINDESS PMKR 177 10/18/04, 12:02 PM