This experience should not happen to any Deaf-Blind patients like that. Policies need to make major changes in hospitals. Deaf-Blind patients should not experience severe oppression. We all should be allies to break the cycle of oppression and advocate Deaf-Blind patients more often.
Tag: Interpreters
VRI: Stop the Exploitation of Deaf Patients
Last Sunday, January 21, 2018: I experienced heart problems in the wee early morning. When I was brought into the emergency room, the VRI screen had brought before my face where I politely refused a service of my own decision, I asked for ASL interpreters immediately, the VRI was not even working and been delaying for 10 minutes and it has continued by the time ASL interpreter arrived on the premise from upstairs, VRI was still in struck mode when there is NO Wi-Fi in the ER.
I was actually gasping for some damn air! My mouth became dehydrated. Literally, I was! I want to thank that ASL interpreter for quick response! Bless the interpreters from Access Interpreting Inc. It was surreal and intense experience. I was in high risk situation as a heart attack survivor, the nurses then realizes that the VRI machine was still in trouble with no Wi-Fi, I signed to them through ASL interpreter, “That is exactly the problem right there that has been causing a great deal of stress for Deaf patients” and the nurses then said to me that they agreed with me. That is the message that we all need to see.
I thought it is extremely important that it is time for VRI (Video Remote Interpreting) companies to read this post:
Your Excellency,
Deaf patients who are in high risk situations do not need to face a life sentence and not be threatened a human security for expressing their rights to refuse VRI. I urge VRI companies to ensure the harassment of Deaf patients ends.
Deaf patients has braved years of VRI oppression in their own faces when they are standing up for their rights to refuse VRI. No Deaf patients should be evicted of their human rights.
Deaf patients continues their human activism, and it is time for VRI companies to overturn Deaf people’s life sentences so Deaf patients can continue to earn their pursuit of happiness and end all charges of being oppressed and release them immediately. Deaf patients have been intimidated by VRI companies for refusing their services. They have rights to ask for live interpreters on the site immediately.
The discussion of how oppression becomes invisible in Deaf community, then it requires a formal distinction between respect and disrespect as the two components of compassion. By compassion I mean any movement of people from that place to another place when Deaf patients are considered as outsiders.
By the ways of movement that put human understanding often to see and discuss about it, and when I look up a word in dictionary, it takes me a minute. When Deaf patients who are in high risk situations, for example, heart attack survivors, they do not need to deal with more stress, fueling their traumatic experiences, to share their stories.
Deaf patients in high-risk situations need to stand up and speak out more about their experiences dealing with VRI companies in hospitals, to reduce stress, the labor of VRI need to question themselves for their lack of compassion. By definition, getting rid of VRI companies and gives Deaf patients more power to seek for live interpreters is a human right.
Deaf patients have a moral duty to continue their rights of seeking live interpreters. As good example of this quote we all should follow: “Each has a right to the other’s attention and correction action.” Our duty is to stand up to stop VRI oppression for high risk Deaf patients in emergency rooms and the human right to rebuke VRI companies who do not have any compassion and undermine the ground rules of Deaf patients who experience language hegemony in the hospital settings.
We demand the changes that VRI companies be stopped for exploiting Deaf patients. We demand the changes that ASL interpreters be on hospital sites 24/7 with their own office.
Even with live interpreters became necessary to make a measurable effect, the less harm on Deaf patients. VRI companies and hospital administration are passed by politics primarily for reasons that are best understood in the context of disrespect and the appearance of Deaf patients is being exploited in hospitals and the crucible for the lack of discourses about compassion. The exploitation of Deaf patients is all about money and politics. This has to be stopped.
Finally, we need to stop allowing VRI companies to exploit Deaf patients and demand changes to have interpreters on site 24/7 and the studies of language hegemony for political pleasure and that shall lead Deaf patients to stand up and speak out more.
-JT
Copyright © 2018 Jason Tozier
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Interpreting Training Program: Is Bias Allowed?
Are Interpreters Also Part of Everyday Disempowerment?
The Change of Power Dynamics in Department of Interpreting at Gallaudet University
Interpreting American Sign Language (ASL) and its cultural history has always been a hallmark of Gallaudet University, the world’s only liberal arts university for the Deaf in Washington, DC. The importance of interpretation to the mission of the university has been demonstrates through the years, and the cadre of professors who articulate and facilitate between ASL and its spoken counterpart English today is an essential arm of higher learning.
Not too long time ago, ASL was added to the university bilingual mission statement. Our basic goals for Gallaudet University are to better understand ASL and to infuse this bilingual knowledge into various facets of higher education.
So it is quite appropriate for Gallaudet University to apply ASL to interpretation. It points to a new and growing partnership between the Deaf and interpreters and call for expanding this partnership beyond the university to the many public and private groups that interpret cultural history of the Deaf. This is crucial, because the challenges of a dynamic future of the Deaf will surely place greater demands on professional ASL interpreters. Increased knowledge about ASL-English interpretation.
There are some interpreting majors at Gallaudet who talks and signs known as SIM-COM (simultaneous communication) at the same time oppressing ASL—even talking without ASL in food courts, library, educational classrooms and the Department of Interpreting (DOI) needs to educate interpreting majors that oppressing ASL is the root of the language oppression. Faculty and students at Gallaudet University has offered the same diagnosis, and belated users of ASL themselves regularly assert that Gallaudet University administration has offended Deaf people’s dignity, pride, and honor. That is a branch of ignorance at Gallaudet.
What should we make of it? Can anyone point to a greater language hegemony whom interpreters refuse to learn the power dynamics of Audism where DOI needs to offer a full course about Audism? There is no policy about Audism in DOI. That is a fact. For a modern example of the kind of Deaf community that can be fashioned out of an exclusive reliance upon ASL, who are those people on the Gallaudet administration ostracizing Deaf people for using ASL?
Even though there is no shortage of brilliant minds in the Deaf community, Deaf people are simply oppressed by Gallaudet University—with the newly elected president, Roberta “Bobbi” Cordano that will hopefully make a huge change to reduce the human ignorance and make ASL a primary language all over Gallaudet University campus including interpreting majors or interpreters who should not talk and sign at the same time or talk without ASL is purely offensive for Deaf students on the campus.
-JT
Copyright © 2016 Jason Tozier
This text may be freely copied in its entirely only including this copyright message.
Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet’s Observation: The Department of Interpretation
Today is Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet’s birthday. Gallaudet University was named after his namesake and his visionary was very much clear to gain sufficient knowledge to make sure Deaf students would be committed to excellence in their education. I will not support hearing students in there because Gallaudet wanted this for Deaf students only—-some of hearing students, especially interpreting majors today there are the worst oppressors and do not excel themselves in the Deaf-world. It is not very much part of human nature to excel in what interpreting majors does not know and do not posses either.
Are Deaf students inclined toward their dualistic nature in which they are practicing binary thinking: good interpreter versus poor interpreter, Deaf versus hearing, and so forth. Is it part of the tidy formulas that no single set of rules that would lead to excellent ends for them? Deaf students who are in his or her field of study to reach their fullest potential to operate from “higher education” only if they master to know how to stand up and stop Audism there.
Gallaudet University—is it an ASL-friendly society that share certain attributes for Deaf students to be protected from Audists? For the next generation, Deaf students needs to strive how to act in the ways that they do not need to experience 1880 Milan Resolution in every respect.
Is it part of the administration’s cover-up that Deaf students are doomed to fall after they had been risen a while? Why set up Department of Interpretation (DOI) not to admit their mistakes and shut up Deaf students? What did Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, the American pioneer in the education of the Deaf, mean when he said, “Deaf people can learn” in the search of higher education to learn and strive their Deaf identity?
With interpreting majors in the cafeteria using their voices mocking Deaf students, let me remind you–those same interpreters who once interpreted for Deafhood Monologues, they are part of the same cycle: The 1880 Milan Resolution banning sign language in the cafeteria and that leads to a question: Is “listening and speak” an absolutely necessary to mock Deaf students under Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet’s mission vision?
The DOI has become not the glory, but the pride of oppressing Deaf students in cafeteria among all the halls on the campus and the failure of code of ethics at least equally oppressive in the Deaf community that Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet would not allow interpreting majors to disable Deaf students and rob their dignity.
Happy birthday, Thomas!
-JT
Copyright © Jason Tozier
This text may be freely copied in its entirely only, including this copyright message.
...And the Truth Shall Set You Free. 
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