Christopher, a Service Bridges Inc. ASL interpreter, signs during Lara Downes’ conversation with John McWhorter Tuesday in the Amphitheater.
CODY ENGLANDER
Staff Writer
Preceding his time at Chautauqua, Jason Goldstein, founder of Service Bridges, Inc., reflected on the importance of his interpreting agency coming to the Institution.
“For the Chautauqua area, (having interpreters) is important to a great number of deaf individuals,” Goldstein signed.
Service Bridges, Inc. is a deaf-owned and deaf-led language interpreting services agency that works across the entire United States.
“I was born deaf,” Goldstein signed. “I have a deaf mother and a deafblind father, so they naturally use American Sign Language. Now, for my dad, a deaf-blind individual, it was more tactile communication with him. Really, with [my parents], in their time, they never had interpreting services, not until their late 70(s). Now, when I was born and being raised, I didn’t have interpreting services. Really, not until the 90s, and that changed pretty drastically at that time.”
In 1990, the Americans with Disabilities Act was passed, which prohibited discrimination against deaf individuals. This week at Chautauqua, sign language interpreters have been attending events to give hard of hearing and deaf Chautauquans the opportunity to have fulfilling experiences on the grounds. Goldstein highlighted the importance of visual accessibility for these Chautauquans.
“Something about Chautauqua is that, sometimes, people don’t know that we can offer these services,” Interim Associate Director of Belonging and Community Relations at Chautauqua Institution Makayla Santiago-Froebel said. “We’ve only ever worked with Service Bridges prior (to this week) for one other concert because, if someone asks for it and it is a need, we will make sure that it is available.”
Before signing at an event, Service Bridges interpreters will often devote hours of research to gather a deeper understanding of the topic before attending, especially with a musical performance. This can sometimes take tens of hours of research, depending on the interpreter’s prior knowledge.
“Songs can also be really in-depth, and that takes quite some time to work on,” Goldstein signed. “A lot of analysis goes into music. A lot more analysis goes into music because it is quite complicated, so it isn’t for a deaf person to see English (like with) subtitles. It isn’t the same thing because those English words may not really fit with what the meaning is …”
For Goldstein, the human hand is an important part of the sign language process. Having real people behind the signs allows for a different level of nuance, which Goldstein noted artificial intelligence isn’t ready for.
“AI, for American Sign Language interpreting, it is not ready yet,” Goldstein signed. “There’s so much involved, and so the machine model is quite undeveloped, still. Then you look at Wi-Fi services and whatnot that we still don’t have everywhere now. Service Bridges mostly supports in-person interpreting because we know the people in the region, we know the communities here, we know how individuals prefer to communicate, including the Indigenous communities here. So we don’t have just one deaf community. There’s a lot of different communities that are involved. Imagine, if in the languages that you hear around here, there are different sign languages for all of that. Any that are in English, American Sign Language interpreters can typically do. We do have a national American Sign Language, but there is regional sign language that varies from area to area, and so AI is not quite there to be able to recognize and understand all of that.”
While there is more accessibility today than in his parents’ era, Goldstein believes there are still not enough interpreters given the U.S.’s deaf population. He hopes this can change.
“There’s a big deaf community in the country, all over the United States, and in the era of social media, people are becoming more aware that this is a thing than any time before, and that accessibility has become very important all around,” Goldstein signed. “And so, the same has grown before the deaf community, which means that it’s raising awareness, it’s raising the bar, it’s raising availability, and so we have the interpreter training programs to start providing interpreters for that kind of access.”
