The BEST thing you can do as an intepreting student and interpreter is NOT take anything personally. Especially in an interpreting program, you will have people constantly criticizing your work, trying to make it better. It doesn't make you a less valuable or worthwhile person, this is about a specialized field, and one that is extremely difficult. All beginning interpreters suck, you can only get better by doing. So, if you can accept that, it will help you a lot.
When I'm in interpreting classes or workshops, the majority of the time I will intepret something and then right after think about it and go, "That sucked." Then I briefly analyze what could be done better, either with or without feedback from other people, and then I LET IT GO. You can't go back and change it, life happens, lol.
Some times, probaly a lot of the time, it is SO much better if you can keep the two separate. I personally don't like interpreting for my friends. I mean, if it's something informal with other friends and family it's fine, but if it is a class or something professional, you are playing with and crossing way too many ethical boundaries.
Keeping those two areas separate can be very difficult though, especially if you are very involved with the deaf community. Kudos to Reba for being able to do it, it's something I find very hard to do.
I think it's fair to say that 90% of the clients you work with will not have any real understanding of how difficult interpreting is, and what you are really there to do. ASL/English interpreting is almost always simultaneous, meaning you are spitting out message A, while translating message B, and receiving message C....then D-Z and beyond come in the picture, and you have to try to make them all make sense, but only as much sense as the speaker is making...though I mean...ahhh that discussion could go on forever.
If a deaf consumer criticizes you, it may be completely legitimate and something you can control or simply improve. It may be something totally out of your hands. You may be interpreting for a bad speaker, and the deaf client may look badly on you. Just like in conversation, a deaf person may correct you on vocabulary...sometimes it is a legitmate correction, sometimes it is just their preference.
Also, sometimes you do know more than deaf clients about deaf culture, or deaf/interpreting related things.
I was discussing an hoh girl with CP who signed "gibberish" (one in every 10 signs was coherent, the rest was just hands moving, the girl tended speak and not sign) with a deaf coworker of mine, and my coworker said, "Right, she does that, that's called Cued Speech." I knew that was not what cued speech was, and I said (roughly translated), "Oh, I thought cued speech was when people used their faces to show sounds, to help them lipread and understand speak better" and she said, "Nope, Cued Speech is when kids sign gibberish and only a little real sign and you can barely understand them." I said okay and let it go. Now, that wasn't an interpreting situation, but things like that will come up while you interpret. If you are SURE that you know something and your client is wrong, you can suggest the right answer, but if they don't accept it, let it go. Don't correct a deaf person on deaf related things, they won't appreciate it.
) is that while those may be some extreme situations, there are also difficult situations that will happen more often. The ones I'm mostly thinking of are prejudice and misunderstanding, on both sides but, really, largely on the hearing side. I've heard people talk about "prejudice by proxy" and that is something that can be common, especially outside educational settings where people are often (not always) more tolerant of differences.
