THINGS YOU ONLY KNOW IF YOU’RE AN Auslan interpreter
Julie Judd Chair of the Australian Sign Language Interpreters’ Association and Auslan interpreter for 34 years
There is no such thing as a typical day.
“[I interpret] everything from conferences to court, police interviews, counselling, medical appointments and the births of babies. The only thing I haven’t done is a bar mitzvah.”
The National Disability Insurance Scheme has changed deaf people’s lives in a big way.
“With the advent of the NDIS deaf people now are able to receive funding to participate in things that they wouldn’t have been able to in the past. If they have a goal such as they might want to learn sewing or have a hobby that they’ve always wanted to participate in, they can now have funding in their package to have an interpreter go with them.”
TV stations sometimes don’t broadcast vision of an interpreter in an emergency.
“We negotiated with broadcasters to stop cutting the interpreter out of the screen. [They] don’t like it, but we negotiated with the industry body for free to air and pay TV bodies to agree not to when there’s an emergency.”
Not every deaf person can read English.
“People think that if we put captions on the screen then deaf people are going to understand. But that’s a fallacy, because not all deaf people are fluent in English [when] you can’t hear it. It’s a bit like me saying to you, ‘OK, I’m going to cover your ears. You go to Japan and you learn Japanese.’”
Signing is sometimes faster than speaking, but not always.
In English [you] would say, ‘How are you today?’ That’s four words. In Auslan there is one sign for that. But for example, there are a lot of parts to say ‘photosynthesis’. I could fingerspell the word, but if the deaf person didn’t know what that was then I might have to unpack that.”
Countries that share a spoken language might have totally different sign language.
“The sign language is completely different in Australia and America, because of the history of sign language [ASL] being brought to America from France and [Auslan] being brought to Australia from Britain. They’re totally different systems.”