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Signing for the Boss
By David J. Craig
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Laurie Shaffer, coordinator of interpreter services for the deaf and hard of hearing at BU’s Office of Disability Services interpreted in sign language Bruce Springsteen’s September 6 Fenway Park show for Colin Paget. Photo by Vernon Doucette |
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As the lights dimmed to signal the start of Bruce Springsteen’s
September 6 concert at Fenway Park, few of the 36,000 Boss fans in attendance
had Laurie Shaffer’s butterflies. Like the E Street Band, she too
had rehearsed for the performance.
The coordinator of interpreter services for the deaf and hard of hearing
at BU’s Office of Disability Services, Shaffer had been hired through
a private agency to sign Springsteen’s lyrics for Colin Paget,
a 44-year-old Ipswich man. Like many people who are legally deaf, Paget
can hear music slightly with hearing aids. For two weeks prior to the
concert, Shaffer practiced about a dozen of Springsteen’s most
popular songs, considering how to interpret tricky phrases and communicate
their poetry.
Shaffer frequently interprets theater and concert events for the deaf
and hard of hearing. A rock concert, she says, poses unique challenges
because of intangibles: will the singer articulate the lyrics? Will the
sound guy get the vocals loud enough in the mix? What songs will the
band play? While interpreters at a play can familiarize themselves with
each part, at concerts they have to let their hair down and riff a bit.
And so Shaffer did early in the show when Springsteen pulled out “Janey
Don’t You Lose Heart,” an obscure tune whose vague lyrics
gave her little to work with. “Inevitably a concert isn’t
going to be an interpreter’s best work in terms of linguistic output,
because you have to do a lot of things on the fly and the lyrics are
hard to make out,” she says. “The main thing is to give the
deaf person at least a sense of what’s going on in a song, and
if you get stumped, just keep your energy up and keep the concert’s
spirit alive. Deaf people, like everybody, are there first and foremost
to have a rockin’ good time.”
Even in ideal interpreting situations, such as a one-on-one conversation,
translating between English and American Sign Language (ASL) is a challenging
and imperfect art. A common misconception is that ASL is an iconic, or
pictographic, language, but in fact most of its signs are as arbitrary
as words in any spoken language. Its complex syntax and grammar are distinct
from English as well, and most closely resemble French, with adjectives
following nouns and pronouns incorporated into verbs.
“Simply capturing the meaning of what’s being said is difficult
because you’re literally going from one language to another,” says
Shaffer, who studied French, Latin, and Spanish before becoming a licensed
ASL interpreter 15 years ago. “There are many phrases and terms
that don’t translate, so you’re constantly reconfiguring
what’s been said and making decisions about what aspects of a person’s
message to keep intact.”
Because Shaffer prepared for the Springsteen show in advance, she had
fun with many lyrics that might have stumped her if she had been translating
them cold, such as those containing idioms and other abstract or cultural-specific
phrases. For instance, to capture the dark romanticism of the opening
verse of “Born to Run” -- “In the day we sweat it out
in the streets/of a runaway American dream/at night we ride through mansions
of glory/in suicide machines” -- Shaffer translated loosely, creating
images of rough-and-tumble suburban street life that she knew would be
arresting
in ASL.
“If I translated directly ‘suicide machine,’ it would
have made no sense in ASL,” she says. “So I went with visual
images that made an equivalent poetic statement in ASL: testosterone–jacked
up Jersey boys with cigarettes rolled up in their T-shirt sleeves, racing
cars on a Saturday night after drinking too much, and chasing their own
version of the American dream, which isn’t about apple pie so much
as getting a girl in a short skirt.”
Similarly, if Springsteen played a song with a repetitive refrain, Shaffer
used hand, arm, and body movements and facial expressions to add color
to the lyrics, in a way that mirrored the song’s dramatic arc. “Songs
that repeat the same line over and over become so boring to a person
who’s deaf or hard of hearing,” she says, “because
they can’t pick up the little things Springsteen might be doing
with his voice to make it sound different each time.”
So during “Into the Fire,” which exalts the sacrifice of
rescue workers who died in the September 11 World Trade Center attack,
Shaffer spiced up the chorus: “May your strength give us strength
. . . May your love give us love.” During the first chorus, she
described the people Springsteen’s addressing as a handful of people,
and subsequently as a city of people, a nation, and finally, a world. “That’s
one I thought I really nailed,” she says.
That’s not to suggest that Paget, a father of two who works as
an administrative assistant at the Massachusetts Commission for the Deaf
and Hard of Hearing, wouldn’t have enjoyed the show otherwise.
It was awesome, he says, for things that didn’t need interpreting,
like Clarence Clemens’ tenor sax solos, whose high frequencies
he hears particularly well. And as is common among deaf people, Paget
loves the tactile sensations at a loud concert -- a trick he enjoys sharing
with other audience members is pointing the open end of a plastic cup
toward the speakers to feel the pulses of rhythm instruments.
“I’ve danced with deaf people, I’ve listened to music
with them, and I share a common language with them, but I’m really
not sure how they experience music because I can’t crawl inside
their head,” says Shaffer, who notes that there is little correlation
between the severity of hearing loss and how much someone enjoys music. “It’s
got to be different somehow. The Springsteen concert was so loud you
could feel it in your sternum, which I found a little disturbing. But
Colin sure loved it.”
17
October 2003
Boston University
Office of University Relations