Dissatisfied

Remember last year when I went all Discourse Analysis all over everything and explained about how expressive Josh Castille's face is and how much I love his depiction of Eliza having hearts in her eyes? Well, I do. I watch that video all the fuckin time. (Lindsay said she was going to show it to a class to talk about constructed dialogue until she realized that her students couldn't keep track of two characters in a single timeline with no narrator, so she didn't. But anyone who is teaching advanced ASL students and/or linguistics should consider it.)

Now there's a new and improved one




There are a tiny number of places where I liked the first version more- notably, the scene of Angelica introducing Hamilton to Eliza, and then soon after that the line "what might have been if I hadn't sized him up so quickly". But overall this is a really, really skilled  translation that is even more beautiful than the original one. It is extremely fun to watch, with or without the sound on. And I am still in awe of Joshua Castille's role-switching virtuosity.

NB1: in addition I love his suit.

NB2: Alexander is a lot taller in this version. I'm curious about that change!

NB3: This video is a great example for talking about the difference between translation and interpretation, and also a great example of a deaf person making an excellent translation of a song. Hearing people love to get all worked up and enthusiastic about the "signers" doing songs at concerts and on YouTube and whatnot, but those people are nearly always interpreters (not translators) and nearly always hearing. This means that they are converting English to ASL in real time (so a time lag is inevitable) and they are far more focused on meaning than form. (the primary goal is accurate transmission of what the lyrics say, not of whatever rhyming or assonance or other poetic stuff might be going on.)



Translators, on the other hand, get the material and work with it slowly. They take the lyrics (or the poem or whatever) and think hard about how to best respresent the meaning and have the ASL be poetic instead of prosaic. This process takes a long time and a lot of practice and revision, and a deep love and understanding of ASL, and the willingness and skill to create poetry. The result is ASL that is as fun to watch as the English input was fun to listen to.



Most hearing people (even hearing people who know ASL, and know and respect deaf people and their culture, and even many interpreters) and many deaf people, do not, deep down, think of ASL as a real language. One of the ways I know this is how many conversations I've had about translation choices for songs and poems. They are so removed from the English! Why are they doing it this way? The ones on YouTube that hearing signers make, sign-for-word, are so much easier!



But imagine that you know another spoken language (or maybe you don't have to imagine it! I salute you, my friend.). Contemplate the ability to communicate fluently, and/or interpret in real-time, in that language, and compare it to the ability to come up with a quality translation of an English song or poem. Obviously you won't be able to just switch out the English words- that's not how languages work. And some of the idioms and metaphors will need to be replaced. But most crucially, the form will get all messed up. The rhymes won't rhyme, and you won't have the same number of feet per line, and you'll have to build up everything else that makes a poem poetic, from scratch (for songs, while also making it match the rhyme and rhythm of the English version.)

(This is why "translate a song into ASL" is a terrible, awful, very bad idea for ASL teachers to assign as a student project. The students will all do a very bad job, for one thing, but also it further enshrines the idea that translating something into ASL involves word-for-word or line-for-line substitution of English, rather than intense creative work.)



I personally think translating poetry is a nearly worthless enterprise (or I guess I just don't think it makes sense to call the result a translation. It is a new English poem based on whatever starting material.) but my point is that it requires a very high level of skill, and translating songs adds even more difficulty because now you have to match the music, and so it is really impressive when people do it so well like all these videos I linked, and really dispiriting when other different people flood the internet with word-for-word versions by hearing signers instead of these amazing productions by deaf artists.

So. The struggle to get society (including many deaf people) to internalize the idea that ASL is a language, and not a code for expressing English, is not over.

NB4 Yes I do know that NB3 was basically the whole blog post. You're not the boss of me, shut up.