Cologne – Most television viewers don’t pay any attention to them, or even think they are annoying. But among the deaf, they are the stars: the interpreters who translate a program into sign language for people with hearing impairments.
When the readers of the evening news programs for Germany’s two national public tv networks, ARD and ZDF, present the latest news, it is the interpreters whom the deaf watch in the little picture in the corner of their television screens.
These interpreters are indispensable for the some 80,000 deaf persons and the two million with hearing impairments in Germany.
Seven interpreters, all of them women, work for the network Phoenix which carries both the ARD and ZDF news programs with accompanying sign language for the deaf. They have been on the air for almost six years and are the first and only to be seen in German televison.
Each evening, the sign-language interpreters are thrown into unknown territory, so to speak, not knowing ahead of time what the news will be.
“We don’t know the spoken texts beforehand. Like home viewers, we are hearing them for the first time,” says Asta Limbach, one of the interpreters.
She says that in order not to be completely unprepared for their on-camera appearance, she and her colleagues spend the day reading newspapers and listening to radio news.
“Then we at least know in general what to expect,” Limbach says.
Translating for the deaf is comparable to the work of other simultaneous interpreters. But Limbach says that “sign language is incomparably more complex”, coming closest to Mandarin Chinese with its groups of symbols. As in Mandarin, the sign language for the deaf has signs which stand for an entire block of words.
“Translations aren’t done verbatim anyway. That would be impossible,” says Marion Jokisch. “We describe terms and seek to convey the content.”
But many terms have no certain translation in sign language and are scarcely to be conveyed no matter how many gestures are made.
Jokisch says that the best example is the German term “Gemuetlichkeit” (roughly comparable in English to “coziness”) “is a word which can drive any interpreter crazy”.
A further problem is the presentation of proper names. Normally these are spelled out in sign language, but this can turn into torture especially with long and sometimes hyphenated double names.
For those names of important people who are in the news every day, there are singular gestures. For example, Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder is denoted by the gesture of the plucking of the right eyebrow because, as Limbach notes, the “bushy pointed eyebrow is his special trademark”.
Russian President Vladimir Putin is designated by the movement of the hand diagonally from the chin downwards, Limbach says. “This is because Putin has a very sharply-contoured facial form.”
The paths toward to becoming an interpreter for the deaf are many, but as Jokisch notes, “each of us has had some sort of relationship to a deaf person. Sometimes, one of the parents was deaf.”
Four German universities provide course work leading to a degree as a sign language interpreter, but the courses are each limited to just 20 students per semester.
“There are many advantages to knowing the sign language of the deaf. You can present yourself with greater self-assurance and you can also express yourself better with words,” Jokisch believes.
The interpreters are dissatisfied with conditions for the deaf in Germany.
“As sad as it sounds, Germany is still a developing country with regard to people with handicaps,” Jokisch says. She also criticises the first German TV network ARD for not providing deaf sign language synchronised translation of its programs.
“They claim that this disrupts the visual aesthetics,” she said about ARD’s reasoning. Other countries are more open. In the United States, there is no political event, no important public appearance in which translation for the deaf is not provided.
