hello!!! i’m a HoH interpreting student and a Jew-in-progress with a really strong interest in the intersection between Judaism and the dDeaf community because i have had a really hard time finding that intersection. out of curiosity, how smoothly does interpreting at your shul tend to go? i’ve heard from others that interpretation of jewish services tends to rely on some very christian signs and that it can be very discordant.
interpreting at my shul specifically is on average great; it's overwhelmingly the same interpreting team at regular services and they are themselves jewish with familiarity with hebrew and the services (one of the interpreters is fully trilingual and knows hebrew well; the other is not completely trilingual but does know the liturgy well and also the culture.)
for events outside of regular services like classes or social things, it is not always the same team though and in those cases it's a bit more all-over-the-place.
we still do have a few favored other go-to interpreters to ask first in those cases and that pool is generally, while not all jewish themselves, folks who have been very conscientious to learn some culturally competent interpreting since they work with us regularly. if folks from that little pool of go-tos aren't available though then they will just get Whoever Is Available, whatever freelancers people can find or whoever an agency sends, and then it can be a real crapshoot in terms of how skilled they are at managing, how much they are considerate of jewishness at all, how much they are throwing hella xtian nonsense into the interpreting 😅
asl interpreting in the united states has in general been just deeply poisoned by a specifically xtian proselytizing history. where a lot of the roots of interpreting explicitly started out as a way to make sure us poor benighted ignoramuses could still Find Jesus. and while that's definitely not any longer why most people go into interpreting the "bring jesus to the suffering disableds" strain is still a significant minority enough to trickle into a loooot of interpreting whether or not the individual interpreter is aware of it -- like what signs they learn and language they're taught and don't bother to examine later.
so yeah it's definitely a Thing i have seen a lot! just thankfully folks on my shul's access team went out of the way to try and explicitly find jewish terps so its less frequent than it might have been. if im traveling and try to request interpretation at a different shul* its often very awkward linguistically.
*already hit or miss if i can even do this. maaaany shuls ive tried to ask have effectively been like. are you a member? no? then we dgaf if you have access.
