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When I was a Gallaudet student I heard a lot about
"bilingualism." Gallaudet, in an effort to comply with MSCHE's accreditation
standards, is in the process of making the university “bilingual.” To do this, they’ve begun providing ASL
interpretations of many of the written announcements on the website, such as
the website for the new SLCC building.
It doesn’t bother me that they are providing both ASL and
English interpretations of information.
What concerns me is the manner in which they’re doing it. The university has stated that they are
including videos of signed information to aid people in understanding the
material. THAT ISN’T BEING
BILINGUAL. That’s saying, “Oh, you can’t
read English? All right, we’ll interpret
it for you.” Call it was it is-
translating. It’s not bilingualism.
The same could apply to virtually any language. People say America is becoming a bilingual
country because we have so many Spanish speakers. Um… no.
Having two distinct groups of people who speak two different languages
isn’t bilingualism. If all children were
raised speaking Spanish AND English, we could call it bilingualism. Instead, there’s a big push for English
speakers to take Spanish courses in order to better communicate with
Spanish-speaking immigrants. That makes
a lot of native English speakers bilingual (myself included), but doesn’t make
the COUNTRY bilingual.
This rant came to me while at work. Several months ago a coworker (who was raised
in America
by Mexican immigrant parents) expressed shock that our boss didn’t know
Spanish, despite having worked at Panera for three years. When I pointed out that several of our
non-English speaking employees had been at the store just as long, she didn’t
understand my point. “They don’t speak
English… So? Why doesn’t he learn
Spanish?”
Why the double standard?
I always use the example of myself travelling (or moving to) another
country; if I wanted to move to France
for an extended period of time (several years of more), I would learn
French. Maybe not fluently, but enough
to get by on a day to day basis. I’d
want to for my own comfort, knowing that I could go into a restaurant and order
my own meal.
Day after day I encounter non-English speaking customers who
approach me and order in their native language.
I’ve had MANY people get angry with me because I could not understand
what they were saying to me, and been cussed out for it on several occasions. If we want to call ourselves bilingual, let’s
actually make people bilingual. Not SOME
people learning two languages to communicate with those who don’t know the
majority language.
Same applies to Gallaudet.
We can be a bilingual university, but only if we stop babying deaf
people who can’t use English properly.
Teachers (and students) are afraid to criticize those who write English
poorly for fear of being portrayed as “audist” or “oppressive” (the two most
over-used words at Gallaudet). Last I
checked, a professor’s job included teaching, not simply waving along
students.
Rant over.
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