If it hurts to laugh, this video is painful to watch:

[capri0mni]

Made with extra-normal's movie maker site, with generates computer voices and computer animation from text, which is why the voices are so stilted.

It is closed captioned, but there is no full transcript. The scene depicts a thirty-something woman (the sign language interpreter) and a middle-aged man (the college biology professor) in a classroom.

There are three points in the video when the dialog goes silent. During these periods, there are a sequence of random dance moves and flailing hands, which is a clueless Hearing person's attempt to imitate ASL.

Comments

[jesse_the_k]

Here's the sad thing: it's really not over the top AT ALL. I never did that much educational-based interpreting; my area was more computers and medicine. The ridiculous things the docs would say .... well, we know the crap they say to our faces, right. Why should it be any different when it's being interpreted.

"Is she retarded?"
I'm not qualified to make the judgement. I am here to facilitate communication
"How would you judge her cognitive level"
I'm not qualified to make the judgement. I am here to facilitate communication
"Do you think she needs to know about birth control?"
I'm not qualified to make the judgement. I am here to facilitate communication

But it made me appreciate just how frightening it is to rely on another person's ethics* for one's health care.

* That would be the interpreter. Because there were certainly folks who felt they had been called to Serve the Deaf, and that meant making better decisions for them. The instructors worked really hard to squelch that sort of attitude, but it's part and parcel of the "special needs" ideology.

[capri0mni]

*nod*

Somewhere, the maker of this video (forget whether it was the "info" section or comments, in this or another video) said that she didn't make this stuff up -- that she couldn't make this stuff up... and this was just all the things she and fellow interpreters wish they could say out loud, but had to bite their tongues for professionalism's sake.