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From: Fran.O'gorman@f94.n272.z1.fidonet.org (Fran O'gorman)
Newsgroups: misc.handicap
Subject: Re: Sign films
Message-ID: <15586@handicap.news>
Date: 14 May 91 13:51:06 GMT
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[This is from the Silent Talk Conference]

 RD> From: richard@syma.sussex.ac.uk (Richard Dallaway)
 RD> Message-ID: <15279@handicap.news>
 RD> Index Number: 15279

 RD> Anyway, what I guess I really want to know is this: is it common
 RD> for a hearing person to echo back (talk) what a Deaf person has
 RD> just signed to them?  (As happens in films like LINS and COALG).
 RD> It seems unlikely to me, and that's why I'm complaining about it.
 RD> My theory is (see the previous messages) that film producers
 RD> haven't quite grasped the fact that Sign is a foreign
 RD> language---so they don't subtitle, but use a naff communication
 RD> mechanism that I've been calling the Lassie factor. But maybe I'm
 RD> wrong...

Hello Richard,
     I haven't seen Love is Never Silent, but if it's the one
based on a book I was reading about in the NY Times by a hearie
daughter of a deaf couple, which sounded like it had more to with
HER difficulties with their deafness than theirs' I had a negative
feeling about that one to begin with, so it's possible it was done
in poor taste, I really don't know.  And I think your point was
well taken (on after thought) about the need for subtitles for any
of these movies when, as I found out here, that most deaf people
had to wait til COALG came out in video format in order to enjoy
the film and here it had to do with deafness!  But the put-down
that the term 'lassie-factor' (while clever) implies, I think was
not intended--at least with COALG (don't know about the other
one).  In fact to answer the question--do hearies echo a signer --
I would answer yes, when there's a 3rd person in the room who
doesn't know sign, if the conversation is among all 3, and in a
way the audience could've constituted the 3rd party, otherwise of
course, no.  But captioning or subtitling would have accomplished
this and would certainly have been (and still is) the preferred
way to go...gee, I wish some of the moguls of Hollywood were
listening :-)

On a different topic, I see you're from UK and my understanding
was that the British used an entirely different (2 handed)
alphabet which (I imagined) would make most other signs quite
different from ASL as well.  Do English people know ASL in
addition to the English system?  I know that when Gallaudet
visited England signing was very much frowned upon and so he moved
on to France where ASL got its roots, so my assumption was that
ASL pre-dated other manual systems, but then the English one could
have existed and been in use, even though not officially accepted.

--Fran

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