Bridging the Gap!!

How do we get interpreters certified and how do we get people to recognize certification and how do we train people for certification? These are the questions that been plaguing the country for years and the deaf community is so fed up of the fight. They are hanging in there though for the distance and we do hope that the fight will soon turn into cooperative effort between Govt. and NGO’s to create the needed human resource for the deaf to be able to access life. The ASLI has taken a big step forward recently with the completion of the Interpreting ‘Bridge’ Course. The idea is to involve at the first level, the best of the signers in India and the ones who can actually communicate with the deaf being CODA’s or siblings of the deaf. The 10 day intensive full time course is aimed at giving these signers the knowledge of interpreting theory and coping strategies enabling them to do better as interpreters and avoid the trap of being in the helper mode which s rather common. The idea would be that at the end of the course they would be far more efficient as interpreters than they were before.

The course is being put up to the Rehabilitation Council of India for review and accreditation. The Course will be similar to the one we did way back in 1999 in Chennai as an Orientation course for interpreters. This one is far better and is actually going to be a fore runner of the longer 3 months certificate course that ASLI would like to develop.

The idea of using deaf community terps as trainers is unique and the ASLI trainers are even now seeking out deaf and hearing terps with family who are deaf or who have long time association with the deaf community.

the vision for indian interpreting!

It sometimes hard for me to grasp that the numbers are so low. And yet the numbers should be so high. given that there are lets say 10 million deaf people in india. lets remove half as being overstated. so 5 million then lets remove 80% as being rural and therefore limited language skills and mostly home sign users. thats 1 million and lets remove 80% as being semi lingual and orally trained and so are unable to speak or to sign. that leaves us 200,000 urban signers. Lets say half of these have not been able to influence any one in their family to sign though they sign themselves. then we have 100,000 deaf people who sign and have siblings who sign. That makes it 100,000 siblings who sign. and taking the last number of 200,000 signers assuming that these many deaf signers get married and have children who sign then we are talking about another 100,000 at least of CODAs. so we should have about 200,000 sign users in the country somewhere.

CAN YOU IMAGINE THAT??? 200,000 INTERPRETERS!!!!

That is what my target for ASLI is. 200,000 members. The number of Indian sign language interpreters whether they are active or not or whether they are formally trained or not, whether they are interested in signing as a profession or not..... they are out there.

All ASLI needs to do is get out there and find them. Just locate them and we are going to be up to our eyebrows in Interpreters and not a moment too soon. There is a whole army of deaf people waiting for services and resources and information and everything.

Can you imagine when we tell the govt they need to have one interpreter per school cuz Sarva Shiksha Abhiyaan, "education for all" cannot function otherwise? Thats 12 lakh Govt schools and about 50 lakh private schools. You are talking some serious numbers at only one per school. if it was two? or three? Its the highest growing profession in the country.

there is a lot to do. that is for sure.