Friday, September 15, 2017

The Man in Yellow

image from video of Sept. 8 
Manatee County news conference
A viral video shows a news conference in Manatee County, Florida as Hurricane Irma approached. What makes the video of interest is the fact that the sign language "interpreter" didn't know how to sign. Tampa's WFLA-TV reports the man, Marshall Greene, is a lifeguard who works in the county's marine rescue unit. Because he had a deaf relative, county officials assumed he could sign adequately. They were wrong. Dressed in a yellow shirt (a no-no for professional interpreters) Greene basically signed gibberish to viewers. A spokesman for the National Association of the Deaf told WFLA, “Everybody was talking about it on social media, everyone was shocked, asking leaders in the deaf community to do something about it.” There are more details of what happened here. Below is a news report from WFLA (the link will take you to a captioned version of the video).