A Conference Encounter

I once attended an interesting presentation at the National Collegiate Honors Conference. At the session, I sat with my friends and watched as people from other schools filed in to the not-so-large room. One of them was a young man followed by two women who sat in the front row. After a moment, the session proctor stood to introduce the presenters. At that moment, I realized that something different was happening in the room; one of the women I had noticed with the young man began to sign what the proctor said. It was obvious whom her audience was—she did not stand for the entire room to see, no introduction was made nor explanation given—she was there solely for the young man she was accompanying. I sat there watching with unabashed interest as the woman spelled out each presenters name and mouthed the words of the proctor silently to the young man whose face I could barely see from behind and to the side. Then, it was the first girl’s turn to speak and the whole thing continued.

For each word, a sign was given or spelled out and I actually caught a few with the woman’s sometimes exaggerated facial expressions or mouthing. It was like watching some sort of interpretive dance being given about the presentation. Watching her gave me something else to focus on than the speaker sitting placidly behind the desk. Her gestures were tight, controlled and did not attract much attention, but they easily conveyed the points she wanted. Sometimes, when an idea was too abstract to be easily conveyed by one sign, I would see her tilt her head and sign to the young man that she wanted to say something like what she was literally signing. The young man would nod in understanding and then the woman would move on to catch up with the speaker. On some rare occasions the signer even asked the speaker to repeat a phrase or two so that she could understand what had been said. Meanwhile, I watched as the name “Othello”—the topic of the first presentation—was shortened down to the simple sign for “O” to save time and other names were cut as well. I caught subtle changes between what the speaker would say and what the interpreter would sign because of what the woman mouthed to go with it. When the first presenter was done, the woman stepped down, and the other woman took her place.

The second interpreter was much less animated than the first and, to me, seemed to be the less experienced of the two. She was slower and at the same time required even less space than the first woman. Luckily for her, the second presenter’s character names were short and so they did not need to be abbreviated. Also, the topic was more concrete without as many abstracts to cause confusion. After a moment, I found my eyes wandering around the room and watching the speaker this time out of boredom. I wondered for one fleeting moment if the young man felt the same way, but realized that unlike me, he did not have the option of casually glancing about the room without drawing the woman’s attention to it. Soon though, it was time for the third speaker and the women traded places again.

During this entire process, I found myself wondering if anyone else in the room was as drawn to watching the women sign during the presentation as I was. Did it strike them as odd that this group walked around and translated wherever they went? What the presenters think of the women signing near the front of the room? Did they resent having the groups attention possibly diverted elsewhere? Then, the less complicated questions: What school are they from? Is he giving a presentation? Are they always together? Do they try to pick sessions that would translate well? Who gets to pick which sessions? I wanted to know what I could about all of them, but I was too afraid to ask. I was scared that my staring during the presentation would offend them, but then I realized that it was something that these women were trained to deal with. After all, what is the point of signing is no one is there to see it?

At one point during the session, a friend of mine leaned over and whispered something like, “How cool! I know some sign language too!” She then proceeded to try out a few letters of the alphabet and other random signs. I asked her to stop and she asked me why I thought she should. I gave her three reasons. For one, the women could see us and might think that she was mocking them and she did not want to be rude. The second was that they might think that she was trying to communicate with them. The third was that even if the women paid her no attention whatsoever they did need to concentrate and that would be easier without some odd girl toward the middle of the room signing random things in their line of sight. For my part, I was mostly concerned with the thought that the women might assume that we were mocking them; I did not want to seem rude. Even though I could not help but watch the women as they signed, I almost felt that that was alright somehow. It was as though since they were alright, staring was alright also.

When I left the session, it struck me that I had seen the young man walking around and never noticed anything different about him; he blended in with the other hundreds of people. I asked myself if maybe that was what he wanted. Granted, there was nothing low-key about being signed to during a session, but there was something anonymous about his disability the rest of the time. Today, I wish that I had spoken to the young man to ask him my questions, but I know that I would not have found a polite way to phrase them without seeming nosey or rude. My curiosity was my own and he was, and is, another human being that does not need to hear or answer every question I have about him. In the end, all I could do was wonder and watch and hope I caught on along the way.