Hands says it all

“I feel very much the same as some Maori: I am a member of a linguistic minority that feels suppressed.

“We as deaf people consider ourselves a community and cultural minority.”

Next week, Deaf Awareness Week, Wellington’s deaf community — and as many as 340,000 New Zealanders have hearing impairment — take their cause for recognition to the hearing community.

There will be displays, a poster competition, locally, and a plea for more deaf interpreters for the New Zealand sign language that Kevin uses.

Interpreters like Rob Chalk, recruited here from Devon, England, and one of only four interpreters in New Zealand.

Hands fly when Kevin and Rob are together, but it takes time to reach this kind of competence.

“It’s like learning any language,” they say, though most people can reach a reasonable level of conversation skills in a year.

Rob, who hears normally, learnt sign language as a child when he was brought up by grandparents, both profoundly deaf.

“More and more linguists throughout the world are recognising that sign language is a unique and separate language from English. I was raised to be bilingual.”

There is even, he says, a kiwi “accent” to sign language. But New Zealand, he adds, is short of interpreters.

Though 13 new ones, Kevin explains, are due to qualify from a full time course in Auckland next year, at least 100 are needed and even that, he indicates (through Rob), would barely suffice.

For a skilled interpreter, says Kevin, allows those like him full access to the hearing community.

“At lower levels of skill, where a person has not had much training, signing is that much slower.

“And lip reading requires a lot of energy. Reading someone’s lips is quite tiring and is not as successful as sign language as many words look the same on people’s lips.” Words, he explains, like thirsty, thirty, thirteen.