How We Do Our Work - (Part 3) Movement

Movement is our third parameter and it is closely related to location because movements occur BETWEEN locations.  Some of the movements are for making a sign and the rest of the movements are epenthetic movements that get our hand from the end of one sign to the beginning of the next sign.  So some of the movements are meaningful because they are part of the sign.  Other movements are not meaningful because they happen between signs.

Regardless of whether the movement has meaning or not, movements should not be so rapid that they require airbrakes to stop them.  If your signing space is TOO LARGE than there is a good chance that your are also moving too rapidly, using quick starts and quick stops to move your hand from location to location to location.  At NTID we call this BALLISTIC SIGNING and it is one of the most obvious things to diagnose.  If on your video recording you see your hand REBOUND either at a contact point or in mid-air, then that movement was too forceful and you are spending extra effort to GENERATE that movement, then even more effort to STOP that movement.  If your CONTACTS in your sign production make a sharp noise, then you are being too forceful.  If you make quiet brushing sounds at your contact points then your movements are not too forceful.  If you make ZERO noise at your contact points then you might be over-restraining yourself... stopping before you actually make contact.  If the sign is supposed to make contact, then make contact because PROXIMAL distance is contrastive to CONTACTS... so make the contacts but don't use so much muscle power that you leave a mark.

If you are a ballistic signer then I have a self-improvement tip that I ask you to be careful with.  The method is to practice overly-fluid signs that run one into the other.  This gets you to break your ballistic (START and STOP) habits, but like using methodone to help a heroine addict, this solution has potential problems.  Signs do need to have distinct starting and ending points.  So my solution is what I call SIGN-CHI.  I take instrumental music (without words) and I describe a visually vivid scene, usually with a character moving through the scene and/or interacting with it.  For example with a slow piece I might describe a wooded scene with snow at sunset and a cabin in the distance as I walk or cross-country ski, rhythmically to the music, toward it... enter, warm myself by the fire, etc.  For a more rapid piece of music I might describe doing a triathalon or skydiving or some other extreme sport.  The requirement in SIGN-CHI is to maintain fluid movement with distinction.  I am not interpreting anyone else's words so I can emphasize any element of my message at any time.

To get a better idea of this, visit my website, go to the RESOURCES section and find the SIGN-CHI video.  I find the activity to be more entertaining when done as a group of several people as a warm-up activity or at the conclusion of an assignment.

Just remember that normal signing needs to use direct movements between distinct locations and that there are times when the hands are moving and moments when they should not be moving.  That's the next topic.

How We Do Our Work - (Part 4) Holds

Part of the Liddell and Johnson transcription system was a division of signs into MOVEMENTS and HOLDS.  Stokoe had theorized that signs were simultaneous bursts of Handshape, Location and Movement; but Liddell and Johnson recognized that movements occurred between locations and that sometimes hands on videotape were blurred and sometimes they were not, meaning that signs had parts and the parts occurred in specific sequences.  One of their working definitions for distinguishing movements and holds was if a video image showed three consecutive frames without blurring then it was a HOLD.  In the non-videotape world that means that if your hand is still for one tenth of a second you have generated a HOLD.  One tenth of one second is sufficient distinction.  One tenth of one second.

When we interpret, we have a very strong tendency to let our non-dominant hand linger in signing space until we need it again.  This is a matter of convenience and it seems to be the way to save our energy.  This is an INCORRECT PERCEPTION.  First, there is no linguistic reason to keep our non-dominant hands hanging in our signing space.  Second, it actually requires continued muscle strain to keep a non-moving hand suspended in signing space.  The more distal it is, the more effort is required.  If you don't believe me, put your hands out in front of you and hold them still for five seconds.  Start at EXTENDED distance... then DISTAL...  then MEDIAL... then PROXIMAL... and finally in CONTACT with your CHest or ABdomen.  Even holding it in contact with your body still requires muscular effort.

This is called STATIC LOADING.  It occurs every microsecond that we use muscles to HOLD a posture.  It takes energy to do it.  It will exhaust your muscles.  STATIC LOADING is BAD.  Remember that the linguistic value of a HOLD is completed in one tenth of one second... all the rest of the time you keep your hands in space is that NASTY Static Loading.

Now let your hand drop to your lap, or to your side.  Release it entirely... stop spending muscular effort to maintain its posture.  This is a true RESTING STATE and it is something we rarely allow ourselves to do during our work.

There are countless examples of Deaf people on video recordings that show them NOT resting their non-dominant hand.  Pat Graybill and MJ Bienvenu leave their non-dominant hands right where they last used them until they need them again.  That is normal conversational behavior.  But you are not a normal conversationalist.. you are an INTERPRETER and you are very BUSY... both in body and in mind.  So you need to let your body reduce its muscular strain as much as possible while you are working so that the blood can properly flow and repair any minor damage that occurs during our work.

How We Do Our Work - (Part 5) Microbreaks

OK?  Are you with me on the non-dominant hand?  Guess what?  Now we need to work on the dominant hand.  This may be the hardest thing you train yourself to do.  It took me a full year of deliberately resting my dominant hand during my work before it felt natural and I still don't make as much use of resting behavior as I actually have time for.  Here is the task: when there are short moments... as short as one second... where you are not signing anything put both hands ALL THE WAY DOWN.  Not clasped onto one-another, not one grabbing the wrist of the other... BOTH hands fully down to your sides hanging without any muscular strain at all from your shoulders.

Everyone stand up please.  The only way you are going to work this into your life is to physically experience this so please, stand up and let your arms hang to your sides.  I promise you, you do NOT look stupid doing this.  Keep your hands down... balance your weight on both feet equally, feet shoulder-width apart... arms down to the sides.  Bring your hands up and give me the generic INTERPRETING-ASL sign... now let both hands drop to your sides.  Breath in.  Breath out and raise your hands again... sign, sign sign... drop your hands and breath in.  We have just practiced EVERYTHING ELSE that I am going to talk about.

But before we move on, let me give you the label that we use at NTID for letting ourselves rest our arms.  We call this a MICRO-BREAK.  I know you are still resistant to the idea... you are thinking that you will use this only when the speaker stops to take a sip of water but otherwise it will not be important to you.  NO... I am telling you that you must generate at least one microbreak every fifteen SECONDS.  These are breaks BETWEEN your sentences.

So the first objection that you have to this is that you are too BUSY to take so many microbreaks.  Think about it... if you take a one-second microbreak every fifteen seconds that is only four seconds of resting per minute.  If the speaker is really busy, you would only get four total minutes of rest in a one-hour assignment... even Sorenson gives you more resting time each hour than that... so one microbreak every fifteen seconds is actually a minimum.

Here's the beauty of taking a microbreak... you just put your hands down, right.  Well there better be a darn good reason to bring them back up again.  This means that you might actually PROCESS the MEANING of the next sentence before you raise your hands.  That one-second microbreak might extend to three or five seconds because you are able to devote more mental effort into making a mental picture of the next concept... and BAM!  you don't need to use so many signs to represent it and you can take another microbreak...

And here is where the next objection comes up.  You tell me, "Brian, raising your hands into signing space is a way that people take turns in conversations and lowering them indicates the conclusion of a turn" and I say "Yes... that is ONE indicator, but the much stronger determiner of offering or taking turns in a signed conversation is EYE GAZE"  If my eye gaze is steadily directed at a single deaf consumer and my hands come down, then I am offering that deaf consumer a turn.  But if I am looking at the visual aids, the source-text speaker, or if I sweep my eye gaze across the audience then I am not granting a turn to anyone.

OK... sidebar... Let me tell you my own revelation from classroom interpreting this past year.  Every year I request the opportunity to work with a particular professor who teaches Data Analysis and over five years of working with her I have learned a lot about how she teaches her subject and how she manages her student's attention.  Only this last year... year five of working with her... have I finally figured out how to be equivalent to her in my representations of the questions she asks.  She asks two different kinds of questions... they both sound exactly the same except for the ending.  One version of the question sounds like this... "Is this data going to give us a MEAN or a PROPORTION?" and then she looks around the room for a raised hand.  The other version sounds like this... "Is this data going to give us a MEAN or a PROPORTION?" and then she looks around the room and LOCKS HER GAZE ON ONE STUDENT, calls out the student's name and then ignores anybody else's attempt to answer the question.

For years I have confused my Deaf students by continuing to look around the room and often they attempt to answer the question, only to be frustrated when the instructor won't call on them.  I now know that I must look to see how she is asking the question and I MUST ALSO LOOK AT THE SAME STUDENT (even though they are hearing) because the eye gaze tells EVERY OTHER student (Deaf AND hearing) that they are NOT the recipient of the turn being offered.

So if you are concerned that bringing both hands to rest in the middle of a paragraph might tempt your Deaf student to try to take a turn, then you need to pay attention to your eye gaze, but while you are working on your eye gaze, get both of those hands down.

How We Do Our Work - (Part 6) Body Posture & Breathing

And while your hands are down... take a deliberate, intentional, deep breath.  Our brain requires oxygenated blood to function properly  When we are working we very likely get into a habit of taking shallow breaths which allows a certain amount of carbon dioxide to linger in our lungs.  Microbreaks are the perfect time to refresh our lungs' access to oxygen so use them as a reminder to take a full breath.

While you are taking your full breath and your arms are fully resting by your sides you can check your posture.  Are you balanced?  Do you have one leg crossed over the other?  Are you leaning to one side or another?  Crossing your legs might actually be a polite posture, depending on the clothing you are wearing.  Balance out they way you are contorting your body by crossing them the other way.  If you don't need to cross your legs, teach yourself to be comfortable without crossing them.  Stand or sit with equal weight to each side of your body so that when you need to lean or step to one side for linguistic reasons, you can return to neutral or to the opposite contrastive side with ease.

Now, here's another tip.  This one comes from Dr. Clayton Valli, ASL Poet and former Gallaudet professor.  He told me the story about how he would use leg posture to help him quickly decide the quality of the interpreters at Gallaudet.

Years ago Gallaudet had what we called "Dual Services"... I don't know that the practice is still going on, but back in the day that meant that we had INTERPRETING on one side of the stage and TRANSLITERATING on the other.  When Dr. Valli joined the faculty he initially sat with all of the DEAF POWER Deaf members near the INTERPRETING side.  But he would check out the other interpretation at the other end of the stage and found that sometimes that message was easier to understand.  Eventually he started sitting in the middle of the auditorium and when the interpreting teams changed he would spend a few moments looking at each one until he decided which one was more clear.  Once he made that decision he stuck with it until the next change of interpreters and he would make his comparisons again.  Eventually Dr. Valli noticed one consistent behavioral feature that had significant predictive power.  He noticed the interpreters' feet, or rather the distance between the feet, provided enough information that he no longer needed to compare the signing to decide which interpreter was more clear.  If the feet were together, then the interpreter would be unable to use contrastive signing space.  If the feet were shoulder-width apart then the interpreter WOULD be making use of contrastive signing space.  Regardless of what the interpreter thought they were doing - INTERPRETING or TRANSLITERATING - if they did it with their feet locked together, they were going to be useless to Dr. Valli.

So balance yourself, allow yourself to lean, or even STEP INTO contrastive signing space, and breathe.

How We Do Our Work - (Part 7) Processing Depth

And if we are able to do ALL of that, then maybe we have some energy left over to devote to the mental processing that is the great mystery of interpreting.  Pick your favorite model of interpreting - whether it is Cokely or Colonomos, or Kirchhoff - and you will see three mandatory requirements.  All models of interpreting (that are worth anything) have these three things:

SOMETHING IN

SOMETHING DONE

SOMETHING OUT

We work between source texts and target texts.  Those can be easily documented, dissected and analyzed.  It's the step in between that is the mystery of the work that we do... the SOMETHING DONE part of interpreting... because it happens in our head and it is hard to document, dissect or analyze.  There isn't much that I can tell you to make your processing easier, faster, or better.  That's the lifelong challenge for every interpreter.  It's the basis for my favorite Marina McIntire quote.  I remember her saying several years ago in Long Beach, California "Interpreting is Impossible.... so Get Better!"

So in the mystery of how we get better, I just want to emphasize that mental stress can result in physical stress.  When we are processing a message that we are struggling to understand our body reveals the truth of the situation and our shoulders raise, our signing space gets higher, our facial expression reveals our mental stress.  So here is my overall surefire solution for beating mental stress.  When the speaker is talking TOO FAST, start SIGNING SLOWER!  Yup... another counter-logical approach.  You can ask the speaker to slow down... I have yet to see a speaker who is asked to slow down STAY SLOWED DOWN for more than thirty seconds.  It's a losing battle.  Fight a different one.  Figure out how to represent their meanings rather than their words and you will find that you have plenty of time.  Keep using your microbreaks to reinforce your processing depth.

I want to emphasize that I refer to this as processing depth and not processing time.  Time really is not relevant.  If I am understanding a message well, I can probably generate it as fast or even faster than the speaker.  There are many times that I finish the sentence before they do.  I have learned to be careful because sometimes they don't finish because they want the students to finish for them (and I just told all the Deaf students the answer).  But most of the time when I am understanding the message and I catch up to the speaker I will go ahead and finish my ASL version of the sentence before they finish the English version and then I take a MACRO-BREAK to celebrate.

You can increase your processing depth by knowing the elements that surround the communication.  The more you know the TOPIC, the SPEAKER, the AUDIENCE, the ENVIRONMENT and the BACKGROUND KNOWLEGE shared between the participants, the more likely you will be able to process the communication deeply and generate a target text that is equivalent both in meaning and emotional impact to your target audience.  And then for the 90% of the time when we DONT have all of that information, use your microbreaks to think about the meaning in the source text so that you can generate ONE VERSION of it CLEANLY and CORRECTLY and take another microbreak before you do it all over again.

So let's document what we have learned today.  Get your cell phones out one more time and get set to video record each other.  We are going to finish the Malcolm Gladwell text.  I am going to shout out reminders to your to PUT YOUR ARMS DOWN, BREATH, BALANCE YOUR WEIGHT, and PROCESS.  I want your team members to watch for extraneous movement to DISTAL or EXTENDED locations and encourage you to sign in your normal signing space, or SIGNING ENVELOPE as we call it at NTID.  Alright you should be ready for this next segment by now.  So here we go:

Malcolm Gladwell: "At the end of that process, after doing it for months and months, he had a mountain of data about how the American people feel about spaghetti sauce.And then he analyzed the data. Now, did he look for the most popular brand variety of spaghetti sauce? No! Howard doesn't believe that there is such a thing. Instead, he looked at the data, and he said,let's see if we can group all these different data points into clusters. Let's see if they congregate around certain ideas. And sure enough, if you sit down, and you analyze all this data on spaghetti sauce, you realize that all Americans fall into one of three groups. There are people who like their spaghetti sauce plain, there are people who like their spaghetti sauce spicy and there are people who like it extra chunky.

And of those three facts, the third one was the most significant. Because at the time, in the early 1980s,if you went to a supermarket, you would not find extra-chunky spaghetti sauce. And Prego turned to Howard, and they said, "You telling me that one third of Americans crave extra-chunky spaghetti sauce and yet no one is servicing their needs?" And he said yes! (Laughter) And Prego then went back,and completely reformulated their spaghetti sauce,and came out with a line of extra chunky that immediately and completely took over the spaghetti sauce business in this country. And over the next 10 years, they made 600 million dollars off their line of extra-chunky sauces.

And everyone else in the industry looked at what Howard had done, and they said, "Oh my god! We've been thinking all wrong!" And that's when you started getting seven different kinds of vinegar,and 14 different kinds of mustard, and 71 different kinds of olive oil -- and then eventually even Ragu hired Howard, and Howard did the exact same thing for Ragu that he did for Prego. And today, if you go to the supermarket, a really good one, and you look at how many Ragus there are -- Do you know how many they are? 36! In six varieties: Cheese, Light, Robusto, Rich & Hearty, Old World Traditional, Extra-Chunky Garden. (Laughter) That's Howard's doing. That is Howard's gift to the American people.

Now why is that important? It is, in fact, enormously important. I'll explain to you why. What Howard did is he fundamentally changed the way the food industry thinks about making you happy.Assumption number one in the food industry used to be that the way to find out what people want to eat -- what will make people happy -- is to ask them.And for years and years and years and years, Ragu and Prego would have focus groups, and they would sit all you people down, and they would say,"What do you want in a spaghetti sauce? Tell us what you want in a spaghetti sauce." And for all those years -- 20, 30 years -- through all those focus group sessions, no one ever said they wanted extra-chunky. Even though at least a third of them, deep in their hearts, actually did. (Laughter)

People don't know what they want! Right? As Howard loves to say, "The mind knows not what the tongue wants." It's a mystery! And a critically important step in understanding our own desiresand tastes is to realize that we cannot always explain what we want deep down. If I asked all of you, for example, in this room, what you want in a coffee, you know what you'd say? Every one of you would say "I want a dark, rich, hearty roast." It's what people always say when you ask them what they want in a coffee. What do you like? Dark, rich, hearty roast! What percentage of you actually like a dark, rich, hearty roast? According to Howard, somewhere between 25 and 27 percent of you.Most of you like milky, weak coffee. But you will never, ever say to someone who asks you what you want -- that "I want a milky, weak coffee." (Laughter)

So that's number one thing that Howard did.Number two thing that Howard did is he made us realize -- it's another very critical point -- he made us realize in the importance of what he likes to call horizontal segmentation. Why is this critical? It's critical because this is the way the food industry thought before Howard. Right? What were they obsessed with in the early '80s? They were obsessed with mustard. In particular, they were obsessed with the story of Grey Poupon. Right?Used to be, there were two mustards. French's and Gulden's. What were they? Yellow mustard. What's in yellow mustard? Yellow mustard seeds, turmeric, and paprika. That was mustard. Grey Poupon came along, with a Dijon. Right? Much more volatile brown mustard seed, some white wine, a nose hit,much more delicate aromatics. And what do they do? They put it in a little tiny glass jar, with a wonderful enameled label on it, made it look French, even though it's made in Oxnard, California.And instead of charging a dollar-fifty for the eight-ounce bottle, the way the French's and Gulden's did, they decided to charge four dollars. And then they had those ads, right? With the guy in the Rolls Royce, and he's eating the Grey Poupon, the other Rolls Royce pulls up, and he says, do you have any Grey Poupon? And the whole thing, after they did that, Grey Poupon takes off! Takes over the mustard business!

And everyone's take-home lesson from that wasthat the way to get to make people happy is to give them something that is more expensive, something to aspire to. Right? It's to make them turn their back on what they think they like now, and reach out for something higher up the mustard hierarchy. A better mustard! A more expensive mustard! A mustard of more sophistication and culture and meaning. And Howard looked to that and said, that's wrong!Mustard does not exist on a hierarchy. Mustard exists, just like tomato sauce, on a horizontal plane.There is no good mustard, or bad mustard. There is no perfect mustard, or imperfect mustard. There are only different kinds of mustards that suit different kinds of people. He fundamentally democratized the way we think about taste. And for that, as well, we owe Howard Moskowitz a huge vote of thanks."

 OK... switch roles... you should have figured out how to use the video camera functions by now so you might actually get a recording this time...  here we go:

Malcolm Gladwell: "Third thing that Howard did, and perhaps the most important, is Howard confronted the notion of the Platonic dish. (Laughter) What do I mean by that?For the longest time in the food industry, there was a sense that there was one way, a perfect way, to make a dish. You go to Chez Panisse, they give you the red-tail sashimi with roasted pumpkin seeds in a something something reduction. They don't give you five options on the reduction, right? They don't say, do you want the extra-chunky reduction, or do you want the -- no! You just get the reduction. Why? Because the chef at Chez Panisse has a Platonic notion about red-tail sashimi. This is the way it ought to be. And she serves it that way time and time again, and if you quarrel with her, she will say,"You know what? You're wrong! This is the best way it ought to be in this restaurant."

Now that same idea fueled the commercial food industry as well. They had a notion, a Platonic notion, of what tomato sauce was. And where did that come from? It came from Italy. Italian tomato sauce is what? It's blended, it's thin. The culture of tomato sauce was thin. When we talked about authentic tomato sauce in the 1970s, we talked about Italian tomato sauce. We talked about the earliest ragus. Which had no visible solids, right?Which were thin, and you just put a little bit over itand it sunk down to the bottom of the pasta. That's what it was. And why were we attached to that?Because we thought that what it took to make people happy was to provide them with the most culturally authentic tomato sauce, A, and B, we thought that if we gave them the culturally authentic tomato sauce, then they would embrace it. And that's what would please the maximum number of people.

And the reason we thought that -- in other words,people in the cooking world were looking for cooking universals. They were looking for one way to treat all of us. And it's good reason for them to be obsessed with the idea of universals, because all of science, through the 19th century and much of the 20th, was obsessed with universals. Psychologists, medical scientists, economists were all interested in finding out the rules that govern the way all of us behave. But that changed, right? What is the great revolution in science of the last 10, 15 years? It is the movement from the search for universals to the understanding of variability. Now in medical science, we don't want to know how necessarily --just how cancer works, we want to know how your cancer is different from my cancer. I guess my cancer different from your cancer. Genetics has opened the door to the study of human variability.What Howard Moskowitz was doing was saying this same revolution needs to happen in the world of tomato sauce. And for that, we owe him a great vote of thanks.

I'll give you one last illustration of variability, and that is -- oh, I'm sorry. Howard not only believed that, but he took it a second step, which was to say that when we pursue universal principles in food,we aren't just making an error, we are actually doing ourselves a massive disservice. And the example he used was coffee. And coffee is something he did a lot of work with, with Nescafe. If I were to ask all of you to try and come up with a brand of coffee -- a type of coffee, a brew -- that made all of you happy, and then I asked you to rate that coffee, the average score in this room for coffee would be about 60 on a scale of 0 to 100. If, however, you allowed me to break you into coffee clusters, maybe three or four coffee clusters, and I could make coffee just for each of those individual clusters, your scores would go from 60 to 75 or 78.The difference between coffee at 60 and coffee at 78 is a difference between coffee that makes you wince, and coffee that makes you deliriously happy.

That is the final, and I think most beautiful lesson, of Howard Moskowitz. That in embracing the diversity of human beings, we will find a surer way to true happiness. Thank you."

Now, first of all I want you to recognize that you probably interpreted differently this second time as compared to the first time and maybe you didn't even panic about how to talk about "Mustard" or how to spell "Grey Poupon"... maybe, if you remembered my instructions earlier, you didn't even try to spell "Grey Poupon" because I told you that we were NOT interpreting for a balanced bilingual but rather for a Deaf person completely fluent in ASL but only marginally fluent in English.  Your consumers will have real needs one way or another, so whatever advice of mine you incorporate into your work, be sure that your work is still USEFUL to your consumers.

At some point I want you to compare your video recordings... compare these two versions of yourself and see which version of you YOU like better.  Which version of you makes more sense?  Which version of you is easier on the eyes?  Which version of you do you want to reinforce?  Which version of you hurts less?  Maybe I've wasted your time today... but I think for most of you, I might have helped you to do your work better, more efficiently so that you can stay in the field as long as you want to.  I'd appreciate your feedback over the next year.  Please visit the HandAndMindPublishing Blog on Blogger.com to give me those comments.  You can link to it from my website - www.handandmind.org