When Hearing Fails, Listen with Your Eyes

The complex art of interpreting theatre for deaf audiences

Photo by Peter Mumford

It’s a Sunday afternoon performance at the Seattle Repertory Theatre. The play is The Three Musketeers, so the audience swarms with families. People mill around the lobby, reading over their playbills, or talk quietly. The noisiest section in the theatre is the front left corner.

In this corner about twenty deaf audience members laugh loudly and gesture broadly to each other. Their signing and noise quiets down a bit when a man and woman, dressed from head to toe in black, take their places directly in front of the stage.

Paul Bert is a tan, compact man with short-cropped hair who spends his weekdays working as Interpreter Coordinator for the Tacoma School District. He stands next to an engaging young woman named Ginevra Deianni, a Seattle-based member of the ASL Interpreter Network. They seem relaxed — accustomed to being stared at. They’re interpreters for the deaf, and the twenty deaf audience members will be reading their human subtitles for the next couple of hours.

Interpreting seems like a poor description of what these folks do, because the language they’re turning English into includes complex hand motions, torso twists and contorted faces. While spoken language interpreters neutrally convert words from one language to another, interpreters for the deaf must also translate feeling and emotion. Particularly in the context of a theatre, they must accomplish the complex job of turning a speaker’s tone of voice into visual cues a deaf audience can understand.

Before they get in front of a live audience, interpreters do an astonishing amount of preparation (see sidebar). They must know the script inside out, and then understand the specific visions of actors and directors. “We are not actors,” emphasizes Ginevra. “We work hard not to put our own spin on anything. We are there to interpret only.”

For The Three Musketeers, Paul and Ginevra also met with a sign coach assigned to the show, Gerardo Di Pietro, who helped them split up the parts and work through the more complex sections. Gerardo is fully deaf, so he also helps provide a reality check for the interpreters. He feeds their interpretations back to them to make sure they’re all understanding things the same way.

Gerardo is particularly suited for the role of sign coach, because he has a deep passion for American Sign Language (ASL), not as a coping mechanism in a hearing world, but as a stand-alone language. He speaks ASL boisterously, with windmilling arms and a wildly expressive face.

“ASL is a fully developed language. It has its own grammar. Unlike English, it’s not just punctuation and sentence structure,” he signs. “ASL has more obvious subtleties. If a person is angry, that anger is communicated with a bold, strong sign. If it’s a straightforward message, like ‘gimme a candy,’ the sign is much more subdued.”

When asked why theatres use live interpreters instead of supertitles, as foreign-language operas do, Gerardo shakes his head and waves his arms. “No, no, no!” he signs. “It’s not the same thing at all! In opera, the supertitles only tell you the words of the story. That’s all you need because as a hearing person, you can hear the singers’ voices go up and down. With ASL, the deaf interpretation has to go up and down as well. Words are only a small part of the picture.”

Words are only a small part. It turns out this statement is more than just Gerardo’s opinion. Perhaps you’ve heard people say, “90 percent of language is body languge.”

That’s not too far off from the truth. In 1971, UCLA professor Albert Mehrabian created a guideline for language now known as the “7 percent – 38 percent – 55 percent rule.” The rule — now widely accepted as fact — states that only 7 percent of communication comes from words, while 38 percent is transmitted through tone of voice and 55 percent from body language. Mehrabian abbreviated the three parts of language into the Three Vs: Verbal, Vocal and Visual. The written English language relies wholly on the Verbal, while ASL relies wholly on the Visual.

According to Mehrabian’s rule, the visual aspect of language is vastly more efficient. If you follow this logic you might end up asking: Could ASL be a superior language to English?

Paul Bert isn’t willing to go that far. “Is ASL more clearly understood? I don’t think so. People can misunderstand just as easily in ASL. ASL doesn’t eliminate personal baggage. We have to work to understand each other in any language.”

The question is also a bit of a VHS/Beta issue: It doesn’t matter which one is better, because we are a hearing-oriented society. And deaf people are still very much a minority, with a minority of services available to them. Even supportive theatres like the Rep tend to book most deaf-interpreted shows on weekend afternoons. “What if you’re deaf and you want to take a date to see a play in the evening?” asks Gerardo. “In most cases, you’re out of luck.”

The Bilingual Path to Steady Work

“I blame it all on my deaf neighbors,” explains Paul, when asked how he ended up as an interpreter for the deaf. “There were deaf kids in my school. Deaf culture was all around me, but as a hearing kid, I couldn’t access it. It was exotic. It was different. I wanted in.”

Paul, who grew up in Amherst, Massachusetts, took his first ASL class in high school. “The entire class consisted of a deaf kid, an interpreter who was hearing and two of us hearing kids.” Paul explains that like most hearing students, he wanted to learn how to sign, but he didn’t initially realize that half of learning a language is learning the receptive side.

“Most hearing kids who learn ASL in school do so because they want to learn to sign, but they rarely develop receptive skills. If they meet a deaf person on the street, they wouldn’t be able to understand them. That was me, at first.”
Then Paul went to college and took a very different kind of ASL class. The teacher was a deaf man — Stanley Patrie, a pioneer in ASL version of instructing — and he taught the class “immersion style.” ASL was the only language spoken in the room. “It really forced you to pay attention,” recalls Paul. “If you couldn’t make sense of it, you’d fail.”

Paul’s near-constant body language is evidence of the way he lives in both worlds at once. He tells stories in a kind of English/ASL version of Spanglish, speaking the words, but inadvertently signing some of them as well. When he says “pay attention,” he unconsciously makes a sign — cupping his hand next to his eye. When asked what it means, he explains it this way. “It’s identical to the sign for ‘listen,’ but that sign is done next to the ear. For a deaf person, the sign is held next to the eye, so it literally means ‘listen with your eyes.’”

While attending college, Paul worked with deaf kids at camp, a job he loved. “Somebody told me, ‘You know, people do this sort of thing for a living.’” He looked around for training and the best available ASL interpretation program was at nearby Northeastern University in Boston. That was in 1985, and the program lasted all of ten weeks.

“That was state-of-the-art at the time. Now it’s a four-year, degreed program.” He completed the program and has been interpreting ever since, with no regrets.

Paul takes the assignment of interpreting seriously. “There is no editing. I don’t correct language. I don’t correct discrimination. All the dirty jokes stay in.” Paul recalls one of his first jobs as a freelance interpreter, helping a deaf girl in a hearing school have a heart-to-heart conversation with a home economics teacher she was struggling with. “The first two sentences the deaf girl signed to me were, ‘I hate this f***ing school’ and ‘You don’t give a sh**.’ I passed them on verbatim. The teacher looked at me with this shocked look on her face, as if to say, ‘How can you say those words?’ I thought then and I think now: I’m not saying them. I’m just re-forming them so you can hear them, just as they’re intended.”

Before working for the Tacoma School District, Paul ran a video relay service which he describes as “a call center with video monitors. Deaf people would appear on
a video screen and sign their message to you. We would relay the message to hearing people on the other end of a phone. The calls were anything you could imagine. A friendly conversation with someone’s mother, an order for pizza, hookup calls, phone sex, drug-seeking behavior. You name it.”

And of course there are the plays. Paul interprets about a dozen a year and guesses he is one of about twenty active deaf interpreters working with theatres in the Puget Sound region. He does local productions, touring shows, musicals, even a little stand-up comedy, including Chris Rock’s most current jog through town. How do jokes work through interpretation? “Depends on the comedian,” says Paul. “Chris Rock was a lot of fun, because his style is so observational that it works in any language. Someone like [the late] George Carlin, who is more about words, is much harder.”

In stand-up comedy and in plays, hearing jokes often fall flat for the deaf. “Sometimes you’ll spend thirty seconds explaining why hearing people think a three-second joke is funny. The deaf audience members will just shrug.” Paul shrugs, too. Some things just don’t translate."

Interpreting a Play for the Deaf in Six Easy Steps

Interpreter Paul Bert explains the elaborate process of signing a hearing play for a deaf audience.

1. “First I get the script and read it. I get to know the basic plot, the characters and how the characters relate to each other.”

2. “Once I have a solid understanding of the play, I meet with the other interpreter and an ASL coach and decide how to split up the parts. The male interpreter typically takes the male leads and the female typically takes the female parts. For example, in the [Seattle Children’s Theatre’s] recent production of The Wizard of Oz, interpreter Bobbie McGee is always Dorothy, always Glinda and always the Wicked Witch. I’m always the Lion, the Scarecrow and the Wizard.”

3. “Then I see the show live. I watch how the characters relate to each other through stage action, noting any complicated conversations or jokes that may have to be explained. I pay attention to how the actors and the director interpret the script and try to make sure we’re in line with those interpretations.”

4. “The other interpreter and I meet again — usually more than once — to talk through any gray areas. We interpret for the core meaning — not word for word, so there’s always some room for discussion.”

5. “We both attend another production together and interpret the play backstage, to make sure our character pairings make sense.”

6. “Finally, we interpret it live. We try to become transparent, so that deaf viewers can look through us and focus on the action.”

More information on upcoming interpreted performances are available through TADA (Theaters, Allies, and Deaf Audiences): tadanw.org.