RUNNING HEAD: INTEGRATION PAPER !

Oppression, Power and Interpreters: An Evolving Personal Philosophy

Bree Quan

Douglas College
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Oppression, Power and Interpreters: An Evolving Personal Philosophy

The first time a person told me to look into becoming an interpreter, I did not

picture myself to be in a program like this. I was thinking you needed to have a masters

degree for that and school was never my strong point, especially when I was growing

up. After researching the different programs across Canada, I realized it looked like a

promising career because it involved so many things that interested me such as working

with people, my hands, having culture involved and freelance work. Before this all

began, I was travelling a lot and when I came back from travelling in Africa, I took a job

at an agency that had a day program for people with disabilities. There was a group of

deaf and hard of hearing people that emigrated from the country Bhutan but had lived in

a refugee camp in Nepal for eighteen years. This was not only my first exposure with

cultural mediated challenges and forms of oppression to people with disabilities, but

also working under a code of ethics and practicing confidentiality. I was learning

American Sign Language (ASL) on my own while teaching it to the new residents of

Canada. From there, I started interacting with the Deaf community in Lethbridge and

then decided to put my travel addiction on hold, move to Vancouver and pursue this

career.

After I dropped out of college in 2008 I had no idea what I wanted to do. I visited

career counsellors and was told very generic jobs, for example, nurse, teacher and

police officer. Those careers do have all of the things I am interested in, but I also feel

like they were gender influenced. No trade jobs came up and I feel that was because I

am female. That did not help me at all so I decided to work two different jobs and save

money. In 2009 I took off to Australia and South East Asia by myself for ten months.
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That trip changed my life completely. After living in Lethbridge for twenty-one years I

found the world to be much different than I perceived it and that is where my desire to

learn more about the world started.

Thirteen out of the twenty-one countries I have been to are considered to be

developing countries and the culture shock for me was beyond extraordinary. One

culture shocking story that impacted me immensely was in Cambodia. I was at a night

market and a man with no arms or legs was sitting and selling books from a basket. He

greeted me and asked if I would like to buy a book. At that time I had a few books on the

go so I did not need one, so I politely refused. Inside I was squirming so much because

I was imagining how difficult his life may be. He smiled and told me to have a nice night

and to enjoy the market. After about an hour of walking around, I watched this man be

ignored and looked at with disgust. That is when I truly started thinking about my own

privilege and how able bodied I am. After we finished at the market I went up to the man

and gave him some money. He told me he was not trying to plead for money. I told him

that he inspired me with his demeanour and courage to do what he is doing. There were

many other moments in my travel experiences that were similar, but that particular one

impacted me tremendously. Interpreters can do freelance work and that was what

attracted me to the career more, because of the ability to leave and travel for a longer

period of time instead of the two-week holiday period that typical Monday to Friday jobs

give to their long-term staff.

I believe this exposure helped me prepare for the interpreting world because

travel taught me to open my mind about differences in culture. Being in Lethbridge does

not favour much of that learning. There is not much diversity there and I find the people
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there to be close-minded. In Anna Mindesss book Reading Between the Signs (2014)

she mentions the three stages of acculturation. The first stage is confusion, second

stage is delayed understanding and the third stage is prediction. I absolutely agree with

her. The parallels are the same in Deaf culture. As interpreters, it is up to us to predict

what the possibilities in an interpreting assignment are. We already went through the

first two stages, but as interpreters, it is really important to continue our learning so our

predictions can be accurate and we become more comfortable with the decisions we

make working within the culture.

Growing up in Lethbridge was okay, until I realized the rest of the world was

much better. I grew up Catholic and went to church every weekend and I did not enjoy it

at all. I had this deep dark secret that I was so ashamed of and could not tell anybody

with the risk of my family and friends finding out. That deep dark secret is not a secret

anymore. I am gay and I did not acknowledge that until I was travelling in Australia. I felt

that the people I had just met from all around world gave me more respect compared to

people from home that I had known for years. I have also noticed that there are a lot of

interpreters that are a part of the LGBTQ community. I find that really interesting and I

hypothetically think it is because we share a similar experience in oppression and can

relate.

Although I was internally oppressing myself, my childhood was not terrible. I was

always involved with sports and that kept me busy all the time. I have great parents and

an awesome partner who are all very supportive of me. The foundational values I

learned as a child were not bad, but they were not exactly great either. Lethbridge is a

very Caucasian and Christian dominant city. I did not recognize the oppression that
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went on until I had left for travelling, was forced into new cultures by experiencing being

the outsider and not abiding by particular habits in a culture. For example, I went to a

number of different temples in South East Asia and the first few I went to, I noticed I got

some frowns and looks of disgust and I had no idea why. I was not aware of the need to

cover up my knees and shoulders once inside a temple. When I was informed I was so

embarrassed. Also having to communicate with someone who did not know any English

was another step out of my comfort zone. That also got me thinking about North

America and English. I think they are both selfish when it comes to second languages.

The amount of people that know a second language here in North America compared to

Scandinavian countries is astronomical. In my opinion, I think ASL should be

implemented in schools as an option to take. That would open up more job opportunities

for Deaf people and also give people a chance to open up their minds a little more when

it comes to second languages and communicating with Deaf people. When I came back

from my first trip of ten months and eleven countries, I realized how close-minded I was

before I left and looking back at the things I learned and experienced, I thought that you

cannot get education like that in an institution nor could you put a price on it. I hope to

travel more and possibly go to a country that uses ASL and utilize my ASL skills to

volunteer at a school or anywhere I could be needed. I am also open to learning another

sign language in order to achieve this goal.

I picked up ASL so quickly because I am a kinaesthetic learner and I believe I got

that from being involved with sports all my life and my sport of choice today is volleyball.

If I kinetically learn a sport, I tend to catch on much quicker than reading the rules in a

book. The same happened for when I started learning ASL. I only needed to see a sign
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once, do it and it stuck. Compared to a spoken language, I needed to hear the word

numerous times and it still was not a guarantee that I would remember it. Interpreting is

a much different challenge, but the more practice there is, the more improvement will

hopefully continue.

Working at the agency in Lethbridge really impacted me by the awareness of

power dynamics and boundaries when working with people who are vulnerable. Also,

acknowledging privilege in many different ways, such as hearing and able bodied

privilege. There was a code of ethics to abide by and it was quite similar to the code of

ethics that Canadian interpreters use. For example, the very first rule in the code of

ethics from the Association of Visual Language Interpreters of Canada (AVLIC) is

confidentiality (2000). I experienced a lot of cultural mediated challenges with the group

of people I worked with. I would go to their house often and was always given food. I

tried to politely decline the first couple times but it seemed that I was offending them by

not taking the food that was offered. This was very helpful with adjusting into Deaf

culture and interpreting. As interpreters, we are going to encounter situations that

conflict with our personal values and we are bound to make mistakes, but the early

exposure of those challenges have already benefited me to understanding a culture I

was not brought up in but want to be a part of. I think it is important as interpreters to

acknowledge the privilege we have as hearing people when working with Deaf people.

Mindess also states

It is not the interpreters role to even out the power imbalance but be aware of its

presence. The Deaf person may benefit from the presence of an advocate, who
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would work to achieve a greater balance of power between the participants

(2014).

One dilemma that really moved me while I was working at that agency that I still

think about today, is the autonomy of one of the clients I worked with. Part of their

culture is the families function in a collectivist way. The family consisted of the mother,

father, two sons, the sons spouses and their kids. Altogether there were nine people

living in one house. I worked with one brother while the other brother was the guardian.

My client had a job that he was paid for every two weeks but was not given his actual

pay cheque because his brother handled the finances for the entire family. My client

was given an allowance every week but not the money he worked for. My client

repeatedly requested for me to talk to his brother about getting his money because he

would not give it to him. I tried to explain to him that the money goes to supporting his

family, but I also understood that he wanted to have the money that he specifically

worked for. I was not sure what to do with the situation. I did not want to tell his brother

how to run his finances but I wanted my client to be independent by getting the money

he worked hard for. In the end everything worked out and looking back at that

experience while I am learning as an interpreting student, I am grateful because I know

I will encounter more conflicting situations and I hope to handle them the way I did with

the Bhutanese family.

My upbringing, travelling, and cultural mediated challenges have heavily

influenced me to who I am today. I only hope to continue my learning and become an

interpreter that Deaf people can look at and have positive thoughts come to their mind. I

feel very fortunate that I had the opportunity to travel to all the countries I have been to,
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having great supportive people in my life, and the many things I learned from my old job

and the Deaf community. So far, what I have accomplished while being in this program,

makes me feel privileged because I am learning from people who are big game-

changers in Canadian interpreting and I hope to acquire the skills that it takes to

become an interpreter.
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References

Mindess, A (2014). Reading Between the Signs. Boston. Intercultural Press.

N.A (2000). AVLIC Code of Ethics and Guidelines for Professional Conduct.