About Those Sign Language Interpreters
it's not about Wokeness
Important Note on Terminology: In this essay, I will use the standard conventions among people who cannot hear and say “deaf” when I am referring to people with an audiological hearing loss and “Deaf” when I am referring to deaf people (and a few hearing children of Deaf parents) for whom ASL is their primary language. I use d/Deaf when I mean to include both groups. As a person with a serious audiological hearing loss who knows ASL, but for whom it is not my primary language, I am deaf but not Deaf.
In the last month, I’ve come across four or five Twitter discussions questioning why American Sign Language (ASL) interpreters are used in press conferences held by government officials. These commenters often dismiss ASL interpretation as unnecessary, Woke, or even “stupid.”
This essay explains why such critiques are misguided. ASL interpreters play an essential role in providing critical information to a group of Americans who are not just citizens but members of an American linguistic minority.
American Sign LANGUAGE
ASL is a full and independent language with grammar radically different from English. It’s actually closer to Mandarin in structure than to English.
For example, consider the act of going to the store. Depending on the context, an English speaker might say:
I will go to the store.
I am going to the store.
I am at the store.
I went to the store.
I was going to the store.
I had gone to the store.
I said I was going to the store earlier, but I didn’t.
I might be going to the store.
In ASL, as in Mandarin, meaning is conveyed through context, facial expressions, and other visual/tone elements. Most of the above sentences would be signed as “STORE I GO,” with qualifiers like “STORE I GO PAST” for “I went to the store.” The signer’s context and expressions clarify the nuances. In ASL, words alone do not carry the same weight as in English.
“Just Read The Captions!”
People who oppose the use of ASL signers sometimes insist that d/Deaf people should just use the captions. This seems logical, but is based in ignorance.
Nearly all captions are auto-generated, and they are terrible. To demonstrate this, I clicked on the first YouTube video in my recommendations to get some examples.
It’s a musical performance video of the Doxology, which happens to be one of my favorite hymns. The Doxology was written in the 1670s, so it’s not like the AI system that YouTube uses to create the captions hasn’t got centuries of written material to work with to get this right.
Here’s another example from my recommendations. It’s a short commentary video about the Pete Hegseth confirmation hearings.
Who is Pete Hegf? Why are Republicans using a Korean unit of measurement in talking to this Mr. Hegf?
I like watching math lectures on YouTube when I am working on a problem, and those are worse — “fifty” vs “fifteen” is an obvious example, but you wouldn’t believe what the AI comes up with for words like “trigonometric,” “secant,” and “antiderivative.”
As you can see, the auto-generated captions are abominably bad. And auto-generated captioning is a service that happens after the fact, not live, the way most press conferences are covered. Auto-generated captions are not even close to reliable, and even minor errors can render crucial information incomprehensible.
Even Perfect Captions Aren’t Enough
There is a subset of deaf people for whom perfect captions would solve all communication problems — a subset that includes me. I am not sure when my hearing problem got really bad, since I didn’t attend public elementary school and missed the standard vision, hearing, and scoliosis checks that public school kids get, but it was at some point after I had developed a high level of literacy in English.
I spent my childhood in books and scored PHS (post high school) on an achievement test when I was ten or eleven — the tests that school kids get where a score of 6.3 indicates “sixth grade, third month” and 7.7 indicates “seventh grade, seventh month”.
So I read quickly and well, and I have some limited hearing in some frequencies. With my hearing aids and terrible captions, I can usually understand things by piecing together what I think I hear and what I’m reading.
Without my hearing aids and with terrible captions, “usually” gets downgraded to “often,” but I get by, for the most part.
But some deaf people, and nearly all Deaf people, never get the chance to develop real English language literacy.
People who are deaf since birth, or who lose their hearing at an age before they develop a high level of English language literacy, are very lucky if they ever get to a third or fourth grade reading level in English.
First or second grade level is much more typical. Why?
Language Deprivation
Many deaf children grow up without early access to a full, natural language, either because their families do not know ASL or because they are placed in environments that prioritize spoken language (oralism) over signed language. This can delay language acquisition in any form, including English. It is very typical for Deaf children to not have language of any kind until they get to a school that teaches them signing.
If Deaf children do not acquire a strong first language (e.g., ASL) during the critical period for language development (birth to about age 5), it becomes exponentially harder for them to achieve fluency in any language, including English.
There is no reliable data on this that I can find, but anecdotally, most deaf children born to hearing families face an early childhood without language acquisition because their parents don’t learn to sign. I watched a video at some point — I don’t remember when, and I can’t find it online, but if I remember later I’ll update this — by a Christian evangelist to the d/Deaf. He had a d/Deaf daughter with whom he struggled to communicate until she went to a state boarding school at age five. When she came home signing, he immediately started taking lessons in order to be able to connect with her.
In the course of getting involved in d/Deaf community, he learned how many d/Deaf kids have no meaningful family relationships, due to lack of communication. He told the story of taking her to college at Gallaudet, the university for the Deaf, and having staff members burst into tears watching him. Fathers who learned to sign were so rare that seeing one moved other Deaf people to tears. As he described what he learned during his efforts, mothers don’t always learn to sign, but fathers almost never do. He had made it his mission to help the d/Deaf find Christian community, both to spread his faith and because so many d/Deaf lack community with anyone but other d/Deaf people, including their families.
The Cochlear Implant Debate
Many children born deaf today receive cochlear implants, but not all of them. While the debate surrounding cochlear implants is far more complex than I can address here, it’s important to note that these devices are not a magical cure. Cochlear implants involve brain surgery, followed by extensive and ongoing therapy to train the brain to process sounds electronically. This process requires consistent speech therapy, regular follow-up appointments, and a supportive learning environment to help the child adapt and develop communication skills. Not every family has the time, energy, or financial resources to undertake this intensive commitment. Not everyone is eager to go through this with their young child, and nobody should be forced to.
Hearing parents of deaf kids have a lot to consider in that complex and personal parenting decision, but more than enough Americans have ASL as a primary language — somewhere around half a million, with many more like me who use it as one of multiple communication methods — that the cochlear implant debate doesn’t negate the need for ASL interpreters.
We can argue about the reasons for this ongoing state of affairs. We can discuss whether public education needs a massive overhaul in order to spend a metric ton more money making sure that every d/Deaf kid gets assigned the army of specialists it would take to fix the state of d/Deaf people’s English literacy. Perhaps we should. But a very low level of English language fluency among the Deaf is the reality, and it’s not going to change anytime soon.
If we could figure out, and fund, the magic solution today, it would still take a couple of generations before everyone for whom ASL is a primary language was made fully bilingual in English.
And there would also have to be some way of getting, and mandating, perfect captions.
The Best Analogy
Imagine that you find yourself living in China. You do your best, but it’s extremely difficult. Mandarin is just so radically different from English. The way your brain understands grammar is the English way, and it’s very hard. You have, at best, a first grade grasp of Mandarin.
A major news event — the kind of thing where government officials need to communicate important information — comes up.
Deaf Americans need an ASL interpreter for the same reason that you would really, really want an English interpreter to tell you where to evacuate, and when, who to call to get medical information, what roads were closed, when the hurricane would hit, what the new executive orders mean, who just got assassinated, etc.
This one is not about wokeness. And if you find it annoying, I would suggest looking up some ASL videos to your favorite songs online (try to find ones by native signers, not hearing ASL students doing homework for ASL 101) and gaining an appreciation for the beauty of this fully American creation, which is a primary language for a small yet entirely deserving group of your fellow Americans.
If you still find it annoying, I would suggest growing up.
Life is full of small annoyances, and if your life is so wonderful and problem-free that this is worth complaining about, an exercise in blessing-counting is in order.
Ha! I always wondered why sign language interpreters make such extreme and often rather unpleasant expressions while they are signing. I admit to being annoyed by it, due to my ignorance of the reason for it. As so often happens, I learned something important by reading your substack. Thanks!
Great insights and explanations. I was not aware of the language differences between English and ASL until I started reading some of your posts as I remember you mentioning this before. Fascinating.
I wholeheartedly agree that closed captions are often terrible, sometimes useless and are not sufficient for either deaf or Deaf people. My wife is very hard of hearing, even with hearing aids, so we have CC enabled by default, and experience this situation daily. The differences are bewildering, annoying and sometimes hilarious (my own hearing loss and tinnitus make things occasionally difficult, but not bad). Perhaps advances in AI and speech recognition will help some, but I decline to bet on that.
One thing that has always bothered me is if anyone bothers to brief the ASL interpreter on the speech beforehand. Before I deployed to Afghanistan, one of the things we were trained to do was to brief our interpreters, and if time permitted to rehearse with them, before any big event. It appears to me that this does not happen often enough, as the interpreters sometimes look surprised or bewildered by speeches and sometimes have a hard time keeping up. Any interpreter is a communications tool and you have to know how to utilize them effectively.