Deaf academics say a lack of ASL interpreters specialized in STEM is holding them back
CBC
Read audio transcript
Without the right interpreter, following along in a meeting or at an event can be a "puzzle" for Kathryn Woodcock.
The Toronto Metropolitan University professor, who is Deaf and communicates in both American Sign Language (ASL) and spoken English, works with interpreters who sign the spoken parts of conversations.
She typically relies on a designated interpreter — someone familiar with her specialization in amusement park ride engineering — but often, she'll work with a secondary interpreter with less experience in the field, which can leave things lost in interpretation, she says.
She points to sweeps, a structural element of a roller-coaster, as an example.
"If somebody doesn't even know anything about the terminology of the ride, they might think we're talking about sweeping — like, you know, janitorial sweeping," Woodcock, a professor of occupational health and safety and digital media, told The Current's Matt Galloway.
"ASL is a language with its own grammar," she said. "If you sign signs in English word order, it just creates a huge amount of cognitive workload for me to understand it."
Deaf professors and researchers working in STEM want more opportunities for ASL interpreters to develop their language skills in specialized fields, allowing for better collaboration between colleagues. Meanwhile, individual efforts to build a STEM-specific ASL lexicon are helping to reduce barriers for those working in academia.
"Right now, often we're left to fingerspell different vocabulary," said Jamie Finley, a research assistant studying natural health products at the British Columbia Institute of Technology. Fingerspelling is a common approach for words that don't have designated signs, but can slow down a conversation and hamper sharing work with fellow academics, he says.
"Some scientists have never met [a] deaf scientist," Finley told Galloway. "And so they're nervous, they don't know how to communicate with [deaf scientists], and how to go through an interpreter and what that looks like."
Canadian college diploma programs teaching ASL to English interpretation run between two and four years of training. Meanwhile, spoken word translators typically require at least a bachelor's-level degree.
Linda Campbell, a professor of aquatic ecosystem health at Saint Mary's University in Halifax, says there are gaps in that training.
Two years "is seen as, well, that's good enough, and so that's a disparity," she told Galloway. "This is a systematic barrier."
Students in interpretation programs are often learning interpretation skills while also honing general ASL proficiency, according to emailed comments from the Canadian Association of Sign Language Interpreters (CASLI), a non-profit professional association for interpreters.