Woosah...

Well, I'm late again in writing for Friday. I will backtrack and make a slight amendment to my previous blog. Okay, so, interpreting two hours should be doable by yourself. But, I still think you should be able to rely on your team if they're there for that purpose. And, I still think most interpreters do need to keep practicing and working on their receptives as well as their expressives. After a ton of discussion, I was glad to see that I wasn't the only one who was disturbed by the lack of respect shown by other people. I think that was the hardest thing for us all to handle. I was never saying the interpretation was perfect or that there couldn't have been improvements but I still hold that there should be some respect shown for the job that was done, especially by students who are going into the profession and will be in those shoes one day. That was just the one thing that really struck me from the other night.

And as far as the presentation being relevant, I think anything that has to do with the Deaf culture and community is relevant to our interpreting and our learning. We need to get as much knowledge as possible about our clients so we can best serve and represent them. If we don't understand anything about the culture, there's really no way that we can appropriately portray their thoughts and ideas to other people. We'll probably always be exposed to new and diverse things about the Deaf culture and it's important for our jobs. I don't always agree with everything but at least we're being put in situations where we can learn the differences and at least see where people are coming from.

As for our recipe assignment.....again, I think my internal noise got the best of me. It is so true that when you have a thousand things running through your mind, it is that much harder to concentrate and really be able to interpret accurately. So many little things kept going wrong while I was trying to do the assignment that when I finally got it done, I just stopped and thought, geez, I wish I could do that again. But, the assignment was supposed to be pretty much based on the fact that we haven't heard the information before and are not supposed to re-do the interpretation. And so I ended up turning in a, less that satisfactory for me, assignment this time. I hope I can do better next time around and can learn more ways to not let the internal stuff affect my interpreting. There's always going to be things going on and I need to learn how to put all that really aside enough to do the assignment and then worry about it again later.