Linda Prouse’s neat and nimble hands have told some stories in their time.
Week in, week out, they flutter expressively about events from the spectrum of human existence: funerals, trade union meetings, church services, antenatal classes, court cases, visits to the doctor and lawyer.
Linda Prouse — a bright, briskly efficient woman of 38 — is one of three full-time interpreters for the deaf in New Zealand (the others are in Wellington and Dunedin) who work five days a week and some weekends helping deaf people to communicate with the hearing world.
The interpreters were trained in a one-off course held by the New Zealand Association of the Deaf in 1985, and they became some of the first hearing people ever to communicate with deaf New Zealanders in their own unofficial sign language.
No BooksUntil recently, deaf children were discouraged from using sign language by their teachers, who felt that they should concentrate on lip reading.
The sign language continued to flourish, but deaf people became reluctant to use it around the hearing. Consequently, few hearing people knew much of the language at all. There were no books on it and the eight students on the 1985 course had to rely on deaf people to teach them the signs.
Linda Prouse remembers: “We’d get these people in, and they would tell us that they didn’t sign … they had been taught that it was not the thing to do … maybe they had been laughed at.”
Less Rigid
“It took quite a while for them to trust us, to accept that we were proud of their signing.”
“It was a big thing for them to give up their language.”
The New Zealand sign language that was pieced together through that course — and is now being put into textbook form — is different from the Australasian sign language, which is the one most often learnt by hearing people and now taught to deaf children.
Unlike the Australasian system, it is not based on the English language with one sign for each word.
Switching
Instead it uses a combination of signs, lip reading, and body language. It also has a less rigid sentence structure. When they are signing, deaf people often put the noun first in a sentence, saying for example: “Shops I am going.”
After a year as an interpreter, Linda Prouse can gesticulate fluently through even the most complicated communications, like religious and legal discussions.
She finds one of the most difficult parts of the job is the constant role-switching. One day, for example, she interpreted at a funeral for a deaf woman whose son had died — then went straight on to hospital, where she interpreted antenatal instructions to a deaf woman who was giving birth.
“All the way out to the hospital I was bawling my eyes out. You often just do not have time to catch up with your feelings in this job — by the end of the day you’ve had it because you’ve changed your personality so many times.”
On the job, Linda Prouse must act as a tool for the deaf person. Her own feelings are put aside until later. She concentrates her whole self on conveying the message as given to her.
Impartiality
“If someone is really angry and annoyed and they’re saying that for example, then I have to make sure I get that across.”
Impartiality is a vital part of the rules for the deaf. Linda Prouse keeps their confidences, sympathises with their communication problems — but on the job she plays it straight down the line.
If a deaf person says something she knows is inaccurate — or is a lie — she puts it across as given.
“A lot of Linda Prouse’s work is confidential. Even if she is not in a public court case — she refuses to pass on information she has picked up as an interpreter.
“Privacy is important to deaf people,” she says. “That’s something that we as interpreters can give them.”
Ironically, Linda Prouse’s own privacy is eroded by the demands of being the only fulltime interpreter for the deaf in the Auckland region.
Erratic
If a deaf person is picked up for drunk driving late on a weekend night, and someone feels an interpreter is needed, Linda Prouse changes into plain clothing (patterns and flashy jewellery distract from her signs), gets into her maroon Honda City car, and goes wherever she has to go.
Her children from her first marriage — Mark, 13, and Leigh, 10 — have learned to compensate for her erratic schedule. Fiance Norm Anderson has learned to cook and babysit.
To Linda Prouse there is no doubt that it is all worth it. Although she trained as an accountant, she had dreamed of working as an interpreter for years, even since she started part-time classes in signing at the Kelston School for the Deaf.
She inquired about courses overseas, wrote to the Minister of Education suggesting he start one here — and was in like a shot when she heard about the four-month New Zealand Association of the Deaf course.
Hectic Day
“It was something I was always interested in — communication is very important to me, and I just thought it would be lovely to be able to talk with your hands.”
Today signing is such a big part of her life that it can take 30 minutes or more to switch it off when she leaves work.
After one hectic day of signing on the course she remembers meeting her fiance for dinner — and finding herself totally unable to stop moving her hands as she talked.
“I guess it got annoying … after a while he just looked at me and said ‘Sit on them, will you.’”
