SASLgate

[muckefuck]

For some reason (probably that I'm not really actively studying one or reading any untranslated lit at the moment) it's been a while since I posted anything linguisticky. But my eyes perked up at the sign language controversy swirling around Madiba's memorial service. Partly it's just such a bizarre story: The sign language interpreter hired for the event was apparently a complete incompetent. Seeking to deflect blame, the government announced an investigation of the agency they used--only to find that it apparently doesn't exist. For his part, the soi-disant interpreter has tried to explain away his flailing as the results of a schizophrenic episode (revealing in the process that he's had violent episodes in the past and was due to be evaluated for re-hospitalisation on the day he was tapped to stand on a podium within swinging distance of a sitting US President).

From a language geek point-of-view, probably the most interesting aspect is how quick other sign-language speakers were to spot the fraud despite the fact that many of them did not speak SASL or another language belonging to the same family. This is one of the more constructive explanations, who major points I think are worth reproducing in full:

1. [H]e signed with relatively little facial expression. Brow raises and furrows, for example, are important visual correlates of rising and falling intonation in spoken languages, and such features are regularly used in sign languages to distinguish questions from statements, as well as group particular elements of a sentence together.
2. [T]here was a lack of mouth actions. Many sign languages use mouthing of spoken language words alongside some signs and/or mouth gestures (such as a slightly protruding tongue or pouting lips) with other signs.
3. [T]here were noticeably long pauses between his signed utterances, jerky transitions between signs, and too few signs to actually translate the full content of the memorial service speeches.
4. [T]here appeared to be random repetition of certain gestures, and no detectable regularities or matches to recurring spoken language words that could be their equivalents.
5. [T]he patterns of body and head movement as well as shifts in eye gaze did not appear to align, as would be expected, with elements of the sign language production.
6. [T]here was no use of fingerspelling at all in his signed production, even though South African Sign Language has such as a system of manual letters for spelling out the names of people and places mentioned in the service.
7. South African Sign Language has been influenced by a number of sign languages that I am familiar with, such as British Sign Language and Irish Sign Language (from which Auslan is derived), and yet I did not see any vocabulary items that I recognise from these languages.

It makes me wonder how easy it would be for the typical oral language-user to spot a similar fraud. Some of the points would seem to have clear analogues--for instance, the use of fingerspelling for proper names would correspond to the appearance of those names as phonetic loans in the translation. But names can undergo extensive deformation to fit the phonology of an unrelated language, making them indistinguishable from common words. ("George Bush", for instance, becomes in Mandarin "Qiáozhì Bùxī".)

At least having done some preliminary reading on SASL, I'm now better able to understand the Deputy Disability Minister's claim "There are as many as a hundred sign language dialects." Apparently, it's very much an emerging koiné at this stage. That is to say, schools for the Deaf there variously taught Irish Sign Language, American Sign Language (both ultimately derived from French Sign Language), or British Sign Language (which is not) depending on who founded them and when. So though SASL is now reckoned to the BSL family (which has itself come under increasing influence from ASL in recent years) it's not as closely tied to it as Auslan or NZSLm which are collectively referred to as "BANZSL". It's still a dismissive claim (implying as it does that the interpreter was using some legit dialect of sign language even if it wasn't one familiar to particular critics), but at least she wasn't characterising all signed languages as "dialects" in contrast to "real languages".

Unlike, say, the Rob Ford story, which I've been following just for the yuks, this is one that represents a confluence of several important issues: official promotion of sign languages (where South African policy is actually quite progressive); perceptions of mental health and its relationship to security considerations; vetting of foreign-language interpreters; the ongoing lack of formal certification in South African employment; and so forth. The level of reporting could be better. (Why, when reporters spoke to the interpreter on film, didn't they bring along someone with a sound knowledge of SASL who could put the man's expertise to the test?) But it doesn't seem to have yielded all of its secrets yet.