Interpreting for the Live Stage

When you interpret a musical drama or a live stage event for the Deaf, you have a tremendous responsibility to be clear and precise while honoring the originating spirit of the base text.

Too often on the live stage, you will see interpreters who are ill-prepared for even a rehearsed performance.

Instead of interpreting the meaning — by taking the original English and then translating it to American Sign Language — most interpreters just do a Pidgin Signed English translation and that satisfies nobody because it is not English and it is not ASL.  PSE is merely a meme to an anxious end.

The challenge every interpreter must take on when agreeing to interpret the live performance of a script is to re-imagine the writing in the context of the Deaf Community and then to re-birth that original intention into ASL. 

That is not an easy task.  If a song lyric rhymes in English, an ASL equivalent must be found — or the interpreter is not doing a proper job. 

It is never good enough or barely acceptable enough to do a straight PSE
translation of any text in performance for a Deaf audience but, unfortunately today, the first withering in a stressed and compressing world is doing things the right way as the easier route takes precedence — even at the expense of true meaning and a wholesome and fulfilling understanding of the performance in context.