The Amsterdam Manifest

[Adam Schembri]

>How was the WFD congress in Brisbane?  Were there enough and competent
>SL-to-SL interpreters?  Were there official SLs?  Were the interpreters all
>paid by the congress for interpretation, transportation, and lodging?

At the XIII World Congress of the WFD in Brisbane last year, the Australian
Association of the Deaf (AAD) as hosts paid for 10 Auslan (Australian Sign
Language)/English interpreters and 10 International Sign (IS)/English
interpreters. The official conference languages were Auslan, English and IS.

Every spoken presentation was interpreted into both Auslan and IS, and every
signed presentation was interpreted into English. Presentations were also
captioned live.

In addition, there were around 50 interpreters from various other countries.
This included a large team of Japanese/English interpreters who interpreted
the spoken English into Japanese for the Japanese SL/Japanese interpreters
(none of whom could work from English into Japanese SL).

I believe the team of interpreters from Japan and the SL interpreters from
all other countries were paid for by their respective national associations
of deaf people. None were paid for by the host organisation (AAD), as this
would have bankrupted the conference organisers, or resulted in ridiculously
high registration fees.

So in many respects, this was not very different from the way in which TISLR
7 was organised, aside from the addition of IS as an official language. I
believe the point of the Amsterdam manifesto is to follow this model and to
suggest that ASL (and perhaps BSL) ought to be offered by conference
organisers rather than IS, as IS is "only" a "pidgin" sign language and
perhaps thus not appropriate for interpreting academic discourse. Certainly
ASL is used as a lingua franca by educated deaf people in some parts of the
world, and the form of IS used at WFD in Brisbane was heavily influenced by
ASL. This is less true of BSL as far as I can tell, but I suspect the
sizable presence of British delegates at TISLR 7 may have been part of the
reason it was included in the manifesto.

It is worth noting that there were still deaf people at WFD from many
countries who did not have an interpreter working into their national sign
language, and that many countries only had one interpreter who worked all
day (a highly undesirable situation). It is also worth noting that IS did
not prove accessible to all.

Adam Schembri


__________________________________________________

Adam Schembri
Renwick College
Private Bag 29
Parramatta NSW
2124 AUSTRALIA
Ph (voice/TTY): (61 2) 9872 0303
Fax: (61 2) 9873 1614



_________________________________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com.

Share information about yourself, create your own public profile at
http://profiles.msn.com.