IW 135: Interview Sharon N-Solow Part 2: 40 Years in the Wilderness and a Book is Born

WHAT?! I'm gob smacked!

There are moments when our whole perspective is changed. We usually remember those moments vividly.

Sharon Neumann Solow shares one such moment that stayed with her for a long time as she perfected and developed the concepts she realized at that time. It culminated in the publishing of her latest book, Powerful Interpreting: Build Your Skills in 5 Steps. Learn of that moment and more about the new book in this episode.

LINKS mentioned:

• IW Community
  • 10-50% OFF workshops, seminars, and more.
• Sharon's new book! (Use promo code IWCurry for 10% Discount.)
  • Give a note to ask for a signed copy!
• Stay tuned for upcoming workshops!

Transcript

IW 135: Interview Sharon Neumann Solow Part 2: 40 Years in the Wilderness and a Book is Born

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[ROCK INTRO MUSIC STARTS]

00:00:02 Tim

Good morning, good evening, good afternoon. Wherever you are, this is the Interpreter's Workshop podcast. I'm Tim Curry, your host. Here we talk everything sign language interpreting the ins, the outs, the ups, the downs, the sideways of interpreting. If you're a student, a new interpreter, experienced interpreter, this is the place for you. If you want to know more, go to interpretersworkshop.com.

00:00:28 Tim

Let's start talking... interpreting.

[ROCK INTRO MUSIC ENDS]

00:00:34 Tim

And now the quote of the day by Martin Cooper, American engineer known as the father of the first mobile cell phone.

00:00:45 Tim

“The best way to get people to think outside the box is not to create the box in the first place.”

00:00:52 Tim

Most of us think within our own experience our perspective on a certain thing and the more we talk about it, the more we learn about it. The more we teach about it, the more we bring to bear all of the evidence for that.

00:01:09 Tim

This is the right way.

00:01:10 Tim

This is the way it is.

00:01:12 Tim

We find evidence in our experiences in stories of colleagues. Evidence wherever it is that matches our perspective, we grab hold of.

00:01:24 Tim

And think of it as truth. But when we step out of that perception, when we take that lens off and see something new or from someone else's point of view, it can totally change our world.

00:01:39 Tim

And then we realized more and more that maybe we have too many lenses that we're holding onto.

00:01:46 Tim

Today, we continue our conversation with Sharon Neumann Solow and we talk about one of those particular moments that changed her world and that changed our world as well, with her new book.

00:02:01 Tim

Let's get started.

[SHORT TRANSITION MUSIC]

00:02:07 Tim

I do know that one of the exhibitors at CIT was the company interpreting consolidated with Marty Taylor, who happens to be your publisher, I believe, right?

00:02:20 Sharon

That is correct.

00:02:21 Tim

And you now have, well, you have one book that you published a while ago.

00:02:26 Tim

I would like to talk about that a little bit. Then we'll get to your new book as well.

00:02:31 Tim

But first, let's talk about the first book. Even though I'm so excited about the second one. So, the first book…

00:02:37 Tim

How did that come about?

00:02:40 Tim

And first what books did you use in the beginning when you were training and teaching?

00:02:46 Tim

What resources did you use and how did that influence, or did it influence you to make this first book?

00:02:56 Sharon

My, umm, the first book that I wrote, which was Sign Language Interpreting: A Basic Resource Book was the result of my master’s thesis.

00:03:07 Sharon

Actually, I've… my master’s was in adult education and for completion of the master’s you had to write a thesis, and I wrote the bones of this book Sign Language Interpreting: A Basic Resource Book.

00:03:25 Sharon

And that was actually…

00:03:29 Sharon

I mean, I formalized it in my thesis for my master's, but the way it got born is when I worked in the National Interpreter Training Consortium, which was a national program to try to get some interpreters trained because there was a great demand and not enough individuals which remains a problem. ..uh, not enough interpreters.

00:03:55 Sharon

But we would travel around teaching two-week workshops, and I am absolutely compulsive about note taking and I took…uh, I created these outlines...

00:04:09 Sharon

I'm, I, I'm very flexible when I teach.

00:04:13 Sharon

I think, you know, like I don't care if I hit all my points, but I have to have everything written down. And I, I did that which worked out very well for writing the book.

00:04:23 Sharon

I wrote all of the thoughts that we had and broke them down into categories like professionalism and ethics and skills and whatever.

00:04:32 Sharon

And I created this red binder that is currently residing in the archives that…ummm, … [chuckles when remembering]

00:04:43 Sharon

…Carolyn Ball has created on the history of interpreters and interpreter education because she's, she thought it was something worth keeping. [chuckling]

00:04:54 Sharon

It was my outlines and then on my outlines and I should say our outlines. But it's just that I was the one who was like, gotta write it all down. And then I would add notes every time we would teach some student would have some brilliant thought or a different approach or something?

00:05:14 Sharon

And I would write all that in.

00:05:15 Sharon

So, I had a very marked up outline of my teaching.

00:05:19 Sharon

We also used an early the only book I remember, which was kind of brown in color.

00:05:26 Sharon

It was a government printed book.

00:05:29 Sharon

Uh, called Interpreting for Deaf People, I think, or some Interpreting for the Deaf or something which was not…

00:05:37 Sharon

It wasn't very thorough. It wasn't…

00:05:39 Sharon

It didn't help a lot, but it was, you know, something?

00:05:42 Sharon

And so yes, we created our own training, and we created our own curriculum.

00:05:49 Sharon

But then, as I continued to teach from this red binder and continue to write notes and revise and all that, then I got my master's and I made it more formal into a thesis.

00:06:01 Sharon

And then I went to work, and my boss encouraged me to make it into a book, which I thank him for, and I did.

00:06:12 Sharon

And I actually offered my… the woman [Tim: mm-hmm] that I taught with, you know, to co-author if she wished it was like, yeah. No, thank you very much. No. [chuckles]

00:06:23 Sharon

Because I think she was simply not as compulsive as I was. [both chuckling]

00:06:28 Sharon

So, I wrote the book and published it my first time that I published it. I published it with the National Association of the Deaf’s publication arm.

00:06:39 Sharon

And then the revision of that book, which was 20 years later, I think that was in 1980 that I wrote the first one, and then, it was, or ‘81.

00:06:50 Sharon

And the second one was in 2000.

00:06:53 Tim

Hmm.

00:06:53 Sharon

And that second one I published through Sign Media Inc. [Tim: hmm]

00:06:59 Sharon

And in this new book is with Marty Taylor, which is interpreting consolidated.

00:07:06 Tim

So, when you were teaching using the red binder, these students, who were they?

00:07:12 Tim

How did you get these students?

00:07:14 Tim

I assume they already knew ASL.

00:07:17 Sharon

Yes, they were…

00:07:18 Sharon

They were already interpreters I would say. You know they...

00:07:22 Sharon

They were either casual interpreters or they were actually kind of working as interpreters.

00:07:30 Sharon

The career was not well developed in those days, but…

00:07:34 Sharon

You know, they were out there interpreting and…

00:07:39 Sharon

This grant that had us training them was aimed at making these casual interpreters into professional interpreters, I would say.

00:07:51 Sharon

Most of them…

00:07:53 Sharon

I'm looking at them in my mind right now and I'm thinking most of them were new ASL. [Tim: mm-hmm]

00:08:01 Sharon

Many of them were had deaf parents. Many of them were preachers. Teachers. Voc-Rehab, uh, vocational rehabilitation professionals, dorm counselors.

00:08:18 Sharon

Umm.

00:08:19 Sharon

They had sign language skills.

00:08:22 Sharon

But either natively or you know fluently but not native.

00:08:28 Sharon

And we were all just exploring what it meant to be an ASL/English interpreter. It was…

00:08:35 Sharon

It was a very exciting sort of… discovery.

00:08:42 Sharon

We were teaching, but in a way, we were exploring together because we didn't know all the answers.

00:08:50 Sharon

Of my favorite things that happened during that experience of running around the country teaching these workshops.

00:08:58 Sharon

My colleague had developed a, uh, we did role play [Tim: mm-hmm] that exercises where people would, you know, try out their ethical decision making.

00:09:08 Sharon

And my colleague had created this one scenario, and the scenario was: You're in a therapeutic environment in a circle discussion with a group of people who are sharing with their therapist.

00:09:23 Sharon

And the therapist asks everybody to please share their feelings about some topic.

00:09:32 Sharon

And the therapist does that, and then they start going around the circle and the turn comes to the interpreter, to you the interpreter.

00:09:43 Sharon

And you say what?

00:09:45 Sharon

And the answer is, oh, I'm here to interpret. I am not part of this group.

00:09:52 Sharon

And then once she created this scenario where one of the participants said, well, I'm not sharing my feelings if you're not sharing yours.

00:10:00 Sharon

And what do you do? So, then that was the source of the great discussion [Tim chuckling] and years later, years later, she called me and said, “Oh - my - gosh! It happened!”

00:10:13 Sharon

And I said, “What?”

00:10:14 Sharon

And she said, "I was interpreting in a group therapy situation and one of the participants said I'm not sharing my feelings unless you share yours.” [both laughing]

00:10:28 Sharon

I don't know if she manifested that or she was just prescient, or just a brilliant role play creator.

00:10:35 Sharon

I think all of the above.

00:10:37 Tim

Wow. So, what did she do?

00:10:40 Tim

Did she tell you?

00:10:41 Sharon

I know. I don't remember.

00:10:42 Tim

Oh!

00:10:43 Sharon

I just remember being shocked that it happened? Well, I think, I do remember.

00:10:48 Sharon

I don't think she told me what she did, but what she did tell me was it's not as easy when you're in the real situation. [both laughing]

00:10:56 Tim

Yes. Do you still have contact with any of those interpreters that you were training during those sessions?

00:11:05 Sharon

I think so.

00:11:06 Sharon

You know, they blend into the, the next iteration and the next iteration and the next iteration.

00:11:12 Sharon

What I know is that when you've been teaching, as long as I have, you know I've been teaching since I've been teaching interpreters since 1969 or ‘68. [Tim: mm-hmm]

00:11:26 Sharon

And so, 50… 50 plus years of teaching.

00:11:30 Sharon

It is not uncommon wherever I go and whoever I team with, even that somebody goes, oh, you are my teacher or you taught a workshop I took.

00:11:42 Sharon

And I often kind of remember their face or their even remember their name.

00:11:47 Sharon

And sometimes I remember them very, very well.

00:11:49 Sharon

But it's mixed, you know. [Tim: yeah]

00:11:50 Sharon

So, the answer is I do see them.

00:11:53 Sharon

I just can't remember if they're from that era or the next one or the next one.

00:11:58 Sharon

I'm not a very good “past looker”. [both laughing]

00:12:03 Sharon

I'm very much in the moment, I think.

00:12:08 Sharon

But it's funny when you ask these questions, it forces me to really look back. It's very helpful actually.

00:12:14 Tim

Well…

00:12:14 Tim

That's what therapy is for. [Sharon starts laughing loudly]

[ROCK TRANSITION MUSIC STARTS]

00:12:16 Tim

Tis the season for all of us to be generous.

00:12:20 Tim

Hmm. Check out the show.

00:12:21 Tim

There might be a link where you can give the gift of a coffee.

00:12:25 Tim

It will help me keep these episodes coming to spread the passion of our profession.

00:12:30 Tim

Thank you.

00:12:30 Tim

Now let's go back.

[ROCK TRANSITION MUSIC ENDS]

00:12:33 Tim

So, from the first book, what made you decide to make a second book?

00:12:40 Tim

Not the second edition of the first one, but this new book that you have coming out, where did that come from?

00:12:47 Sharon

Well, I, I was so fortunate because I was given the opportunity to teach interpreters in Europe.

00:13:00 Sharon

And that experience really broadened my understanding of the work and…

00:13:05 Sharon

It just was such a gift, but the early times when I taught, I was teaching principles, you know, professionalism, ethics, umm, that kind of thing.

00:13:17 Sharon

And then one day, my colleague in Italy called Elena Radutzky…

00:13:23 Sharon

She called and said she wanted me to come to Italy to teach skills workshops from spoken to signed language and from signed to spoken language.

00:13:38 Sharon

And I said, “Elena, I don't speak Italian. I don't know how to sign LIS (Italian Sign language).” and she said, “I know, but you'll figure it out.” [chuckles]

00:13:52 Sharon

And I wanted to go to Italy.

00:13:55 Sharon

So, I said OK, and she sat through all the trainings.

00:14:00 Sharon

She sat next to me with her sweet head on my shoulder and interpreted so that I would know what the language elements were.

00:14:08 Sharon

And she's an interpreter herself with tremendous skills, so, of different languages.

00:14:15 Sharon

And so, she was really the perfect assistant or person to help me do this job. And what happened was…

00:14:28 Sharon

It's my perspective that I had come from, in looking back, it's my perspective now that I had come out of a very heavily influenced period for the machine model where we were trying to be as invisible as possible, and the deaf people who were guiding our thinking were bilingual mostly in English and ASL.

00:14:56 Sharon

And they were highly educated, powerful people and they wanted every single word, and they were able to understand signed English. And anyway, that was sort of the, the population I was working with whether that was the biggest influence, as I believe it was or not.

00:15:18 Sharon

That was one huge influence on the community I was in. And so, I was accustomed to really being very picky about the form. You know how do people sign that? And was that the right sign?

00:15:35 Sharon

It was, I believe, the machine model led to some pretty black and white thinking, but I'm not sure.

00:15:43 Sharon

That's my theory about this, where I came from.

00:15:47 Sharon

And I was a big proponent of the machine model myself.

00:15:51 Sharon

Because we were on the pendulum swinging from the helper model and just here, let me help you, poor deaf person, and all that.

00:16:01 Sharon

And we went way over to I'm not, I'm not even here.

00:16:05 Sharon

And when I got to Italy and I started watching these people's work and listening to their work, I realized I couldn't give them any feedback really on the form.

00:16:17 Sharon

And they had to rely on their colleagues for that.

00:16:20

But what I noticed were these five significant things that influenced the outcome of their work, whether it was effective or not.

00:16:30 Sharon

And I just was, it was…

00:16:34 Sharon

I was gobsmacked.

00:16:36 Sharon

I…

00:16:36 Sharon

I was so surprised and delighted and enlightened by that and inspired by that, that it changed my entire way of teaching, to a, a bigger, broader view. And I often compare it to seeing the forest instead of the individual trees [chuckles] only. [Tim chuckles too]

00:17:00 Sharon

Being stuck, Gary Sanderson used to put his entire hand, arm and hand in front of his face, so that… in the American Sign Language the sign for tree it's, uh, your hand, your arm is straight up, and your hand is open like it's supposed to kind of look like a tree…

00:17:14 Sharon

…and he would put that sign directly in front of his face with his sort of list at his forehead covering his face. And he would say, what forest, what forest?

00:17:25 Sharon

Don't see a forest because the tree was right there in his eyes. [Tim chuckling]

00:17:30 Sharon

Umm and now I suddenly felt like I saw the forest.

00:17:34 Sharon

So, I started to teach workshops called 5 Things You Can Do Right Now to Improve Your Interpreting, which was the basis of this book, which is now we've, we've sort of, you know, played around with titles and the title of the new book is Powerful Interpreting Build Your Skills in Five Steps.

00:17:58 Sharon

But it is those five important things that we can do right now [Tim: mm-hmm] to be better at, at the work.

00:18:06 Tim

So, when was that trip in Italy?

00:18:09 Sharon

I think it was in 1984.

00:18:12 Tim

1984 ish in Italy and where was that?

00:18:16 Tim

Remember the town?

00:18:18 Sharon

I think this was we did trainings in a number of places, but I think it was in Perugia, at an amazing, uh…

00:18:27 Sharon

Where do nuns live?

00:18:29 Sharon

Convent! At a beautiful, beautiful convent.

00:18:33 Sharon

And they, they served our, you know, they, they served our food and taught me how to serve food with two spoons in one hand, was a skill I have been proud of ever since. [Tim: hmm]

00:18:46 Sharon

It was just an amazing experience.

00:18:49 Sharon

It's a little bit like chopsticks, but not. [both laugh]

[SHORT TRANSITION MUSIC]

00:18:59 Tim

This book had its seed planted in 1984, and it's been growing for a few years.

00:19:07 Tim

Why did it take so long?

00:19:09 Sharon

Well, [sighs] I don't know.

00:19:12 Sharon

I, I think, I think part of it is I was busy.

00:19:17 Sharon

You know, I mean, I had little kids, and I was.

00:19:22 Sharon

Traveling and teaching and interpreting and raising kids and you know, all those things take time and worthy time.

00:19:31 Sharon

But the other reason is because.

00:19:35 Sharon

I kept thinking.

00:19:37 Sharon

Well, it's not enough.

00:19:39 Sharon

It's not good. It's not good enough or it's not enough.

00:19:42 Sharon

I wrote it.

00:19:45 Sharon

I wrote versions of it over the years, but I never felt like it was worthy.

00:19:53 Sharon

And then… over time, I finally had some beautiful influences in my life who weren't like, really encouraging me to get - the – darn - thing - done.

00:20:07 Sharon

And one of those finally stuck.

00:20:12 Sharon

I've had several times where people tried to help me get it done, [chuckling] but…

00:20:17 Sharon

This time it got done. [Tim: yeah]

00:20:20 Sharon

And part of that was because colleagues that I respected, that I, I felt like I trusted their view were doing some preliminary reading of the chapters I was writing and they were feeling it was useful and good or whatever. And so, I was like, oh, well, that then that made me feel more confident.

00:20:46 Sharon

One of my colleagues I just was so appreciative.

00:20:49 Sharon

She, she would make notes in the track changes version, you know in comments in the reading of the chapters.

00:20:56 Sharon

And she would put things like, Oh, I wish I had this when I was teaching my interpreting students, and Oh, I never thought of it from this angle, thank you.

00:21:05 Sharon

And you know she was very warm and supportive things that helped me feel like it might be actually useful.

00:21:14 Sharon

So that got me motivated to get her done too.

[SHORT TRANSITION MUSIC]

00:21:21 Tim

Were there any challenging parts of the book?

00:21:26 Sharon

I think there, there were several challenges that come to mind.

00:21:29 Sharon

One of them is keeping the length not too long because I could just go…

00:21:36 Sharon

I don't know if you can tell this about me, but I could just go on and on and on about everything that I think about. [Tim chuckling] I have so many thoughts.

00:21:44 Sharon

So, trying to keep it contained in a way that allowed it to be digestible by other people and the other challenge was, eh, certain chapters had so much information. For example the processing chapter, the very first step, the very first thing is processing more deeply.

00:22:12 Sharon

And in that chapter not only do I attempt to explain why that's important and talk about how to do deeper processing, I also try to explain two processing models thoroughly and I touch on some others.

00:22:30 Sharon

So, that's a lot to try to cram into a single chapter, but it's all about processing. [Tim: mm-hmm]

00:22:36 Sharon

So, I do try to explain the, Dennis Cokely's Model of Interpretation, and Marty and I have, Marty Taylor and I have developed a model of Interactive Interpreting, and so I included that an explanation of that which has never been published, but we've taught it before we've presented.

00:22:58 Sharon

But I've never, we've never published it and we agreed to put it into this book. [chuckling]

00:23:02 Sharon

So that was a lot in the processing chapter, which is in itself a very deep and challenging topic to come to understand. 

00:23:11 Sharon

I also touch on Gile, Daniel Gile’s work and some other spoken language educators who have talked about models of interpretation.

00:23:23 Sharon

It's like, Oh, there's a lot to say about processing.

00:23:27 Sharon

And then certain chapters were probably much less complex because the area was narrower.

00:23:35 Sharon

So, the first and last chapters,… So, I should tell you what the five things are.

00:23:40 Sharon

That's no secret. They’re the five steps. The first is processing and the second one is memory, because in order to give ourselves enough time to process, we have to trust that we will remember.

00:23:53 Sharon

It's all about memory and developing memory and trusting memory.

00:23:57 Sharon

And then the third and fourth are cohesion, prosody, that kind of thing, pausing the things that help the language, to create language that makes sense and helps us understand language, the meaning behind things. Because if we don't know how one thought is connected to the other, it tends to throw us off.

00:24:21 Sharon

But if we do, it helps us understand.

00:24:24 Sharon

So, processing, memory, cohesion, prosody. All that. And then structuring space and ideas and for sign language interpreters structuring space is very important as we know.

00:24:37 Sharon

So, and using spatial references clearly and effectively, that's in that chapter, but also for all interpreters spoken or signed language interpreters, the rest of the chapter is about…

00:24:52 Sharon

Structuring ideas, organizing ideas, which is a part of what we do. Spoken languages also have some structuring of space issues related to note taking and that kind of thing as well.

00:25:05 Sharon

So that's that chapter, and then the fifth and final chapter is on confidence, self-esteem and poise. And the whole idea of expressing confidence and then hopefully feeling deep confidence.

00:25:21 Sharon

So that it's genuine as opposed to just for show. But I'm in favor of for show. If you can't do the real thing.

00:25:28 Sharon

So that's, so that last chapter confidence and the first chapter of processing are the two longest. I…

00:25:39 Sharon

I think those are the two longest chapters 'cause I have so freaking much to say about those two topics, especially confidence. I think confidence was cut way back by my publisher, and I joke that in the book I talk about the fact that, you know, if you think about the power of the thumb, you know your thumb, your opposable thumb allows you to pick things up. Right?

00:26:04 Sharon

And so, to me, on each hand, the thumb, you can either put processing or confidence on your thumb and it lets you pick up the work with the other 4 strategies, the other 4 steps.

00:26:19 Sharon

And so that's why they're the thicker, the, the fuller chapters.

00:26:25 Tim

I would give that a thumbs up. [Sharon starts laughing]

[SHORT TRANSITION MUSIC]

[ROCK EXIT MUSIC STARTS]

00:26:32 Tim

Woohoo, we have a new book from Sharon Neumann Solow. Check out the links in the show notes for where you can buy it.

00:26:40 Tim

First, let's take a look at the episode.

00:26:43 Tim

Let's see the key points that we can take away from this to help us change our lenses as well.

00:26:49 Tim

First, I know it's simple, but when she was teaching, she kept a red binder, a notebook where she outlined her lessons, the important key points that she wanted to deliver to her students.

00:27:04 Tim

And as she was teaching, she can add to those notes. The experience of teaching students in different backgrounds, different regions help to change how she delivered those lessons. For us as interpreters, we can take something out of this.

00:27:22 Tim

For our own work, if we are preparing for a conference, why not make our own red binder?

00:27:30 Tim

Create an outline, create notes and keep points that we should remember, that we have studied from the materials that we have from the titles of the presentations from the people's backgrounds.

00:27:44 Tim

If you remember, Sharon said she was still flexible as a teacher, but she had to have the key points written down.

00:27:52 Tim

That's something we can take to remember if we are focused. If we write down what we are going to anticipate in the interpreting situation, it will help prepare us mentally for the work for the interpretation.

00:28:08 Tim

It will help us pull out the needed information when we need it for the work, it gives that foundation for flexibility.

00:28:17 Tim

Another important note is the example of her co-teacher who gave the therapy example.

00:28:24 Tim

For me, that just reminds us that if we're going to teach interpreting, we also need to practice interpreting.

00:28:32 Tim

So, the students can see an authentic lesson.

00:28:36 Tim

I think the most important point we have is the moment when Sharon's world was changed.

00:28:42 Tim

When her perspective on our work was opened up to the big picture, to realizing that interpreting is not just the language, it's something more.

00:28:54 Tim

It's a skill set, a mental process, that actually is above the languages used. Even the modality used, and we can crossover those divides between languages, different cultures and see the big picture.

00:29:12 Tim

We always have to think we're not out of the woods yet.

00:29:16 Tim

First we see the trees, then we see the woods, the forest.

00:29:20 Tim

But what's next?

00:29:23 Tim

What's outside of that box?

00:29:25 Tim

So, let's not give up. It may take 40 years to produce what you've been thinking since that particular lens has changed, just like Sharon. We're in this together.

00:29:39 Tim

So, keep calm.

00:29:41 Tim

Keep interpreting.

00:29:42 Tim

I'll see you next week. Take care now.

[ROCK EXIT MUSIC ENDS AT 00:30:22]