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had a reputation in Athens for being a meticulous interpreter. When I was at a job, I tried to stop thinking and become a conduit, a bridge that let conversation flow between deaf and hearing cultures. If I wasn’t focused, getting it exactly right could be tricky, especially since not all deaf people use ASL. Some rely on finger spelling or signed English or their own invented system of home signs or combinations of all these things. To complicate matters, ASL is not at all structured like English. In fact, a hearing person given a flat word-for-word interpretation would probably think the deaf speaker was uneducated. Literal translations are about as user-friendly as those instruction manuals that come with some Japanese electronics, because ASL isn’t a way to speak English. It’s a separate language with its own structure and idiom, a whole-body language that relies as much on physical nuance as it does on signs. Interpreting ASL comes very naturally to me, because it is my native language as surely as English is. It’s the language I learned first, signing with my mother months before I said an intelligible word to anyone else.
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