- William G. Vicars, EdD
You may read in your ASL book or be informed by your ASL teacher that "titles of
books and movies are fingerspelled."
The problem with that statement is that, well, quite often they are not.
The right way to sign "brand names, titles, and movies" (regardless of whether
you are in a classroom or boardroom) is to sign them how they are signed by the
majority of native Deaf adult skilled ASL signers who are active in the Deaf
Community.
If a book or teacher disagrees with that then the book or teacher is wrong.
Teachers and books that express views and opinions which are counter to how ASL
is actually and commonly used by the majority of the Deaf core of the Deaf
Community -- are not teaching ASL -- they are teaching ASL myths.
Some are teaching a subset of ASL without adding a disclaimer to the
effect of, "Oh by the way, in real life we don't usually sign it like this. It is
just in my opinion of the ideal way we should do it -- ya know -- to be proper and all because I
read it in a book once or my ASL 1 - 4 teachers (who apparently didn't actually
spend much time in the Deaf community) told me it was that way."
A significant number of ASL resources contain errors or myths. I watched a
popular ASL Linguistics book go
through multiple editions and each new edition included changes to the old
information -- up to and including ripping out whole chapters.
Wrap your mind around the idea that your ASL teacher might be wrong occasionally or at
least myopic (not seeing / representing the big picture). How do I know? Thirty+
years of working in the ASL teaching field and participating in the spreading of
"teacher talk" (signing) and popular myths because it seemed my real world
experience must be wrong if so many books and "experts" were prescribing a
different way.
These days I'm fairly rabid about eschewing (deliberately avoiding
using and/or abstaining from) the "prescriptive" approach and instead embracing the "descriptive"
approach.
This "mistake making" stuff applies to me as well (dang-it) -- but fortunately
less these days (I hope) since it is so easy to go online and research how
things are really being signed.
I'm actually quite happy any time someone brings up a legit adjustment that
needs to be made to Lifeprint (dot) com to make it more reflective of current
ASL usage. (A challenge though is that just because something is signed a
certain way in your state or area doesn't mean it is signed that way
nation-wide).
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This comment is starting to reach a state of TLDR so I'll wrap it up by adding a
fun little example of a common title that involves a hybrid signed /
fingerspelled approach:
"Star Wars" is often signed doing a compact version of STAR followed by spelling
the word "wars."
"STAR fs-WARS"
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*Footnote:
Oh sure, of course I'm aware that often academic interpreters will best serve
their Deaf clients (who are students) by spelling out brand names, titles, and
proper nouns -- since the client (student) might very well see that concept in
written form later on during an English-based written test.
Mixed language circumstances (such as an ASL signer participating in
English-based academia) require more work. Thus terps often end up doing both:
spelling things out *and* signing them in ways that are common to the Deaf
Community. Feel free to do a search on "translanguaging."
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Definition:
Translanguaging is the act performed by bilinguals of accessing different
linguistic features or various modes of what are described as autonomous
languages, in order to maximize communicative potential.**
Reference:
https: // ealjournal (dot) org/2016/07/26/what-is-translanguaging/
Who were in turn quoting from:
García, Ofelia (2009). Education, multilingualism and translanguaging in the
21st century. p. 140.
Also see: "The Myth of Store I Go"
Also see:
The
Myth that Titles and Proper Names are Always Spelled in ASL