Page 193 - Reading Between the Sign Intercultural Communication for Sign Language Interpreters
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178   Reading Between the Signs


                              ing American culture. So too is the status reflected in being a pro-
                              fessional, earning money, and achieving recognition through de-
                              grees and certificates.
                                 Deaf culture, in contrast, places more emphasis on contribut-
                              ing to the group than on individual achievement. Approval of some-
                              thing or someone is achieved through an informal word-of-mouth
                              process. The current NAD test retains several features of the early
                              RID test: “candidates are rated locally,” the “evaluators work as a
                              group,” and the face-to-face format makes possible “intuitive as-
                              sessment of mood, attitude, relationship to community” (Moore
                              1997, 15–17).
                                 Power—let’s face it—is also an underlying issue here. Who
                              will have the right and ability to decide these questions? Currently,
                              there are different opinions regarding how to involve Deaf people
                              in positions of power in RID. There are probably a few who would
                              advocate letting the Deaf control their organization, NAD, while
                              we, the hearing interpreters, chart the course of our profession
                              into the twenty-first century. Even putting aside the point that the
                              number of Deaf relay interpreters is increasing, I suspect that most
                              of us would not share that separatist sentiment. It is our challenge
                              to find a way to include both cultural vantage points. Wouldn’t a
                              test designed to include the elements valued by each culture, tech-
                              nical skill as well as personal attitude and rapport, benefit all par-
                              ties? Although it might make our deliberations longer and our
                              testing system more complicated, in the end we would all be en-
                              riched by the experience.
                                 As Lane has eloquently put it,
                                     The truest friends of deaf people…will work together
                                     with deaf individuals and organizations to forge a hear-
                                     ing and deaf partnership…. For that partnership to be
                                     forged, both parties must bring their cultural frames
                                     into consciousness, construct a mutual understanding
                                     of those frames and make an empathetic leap, trying
                                     to position themselves at each other’s “center.” (200)



                                            Taking Responsibility for
                                               Cultural Adjustment

                              Thus far in this chapter we have established that rather than mod-
                              eling ourselves on another profession, we must decide the pa-







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