A Million Dollar Success

You may have seen my Twitter or Facebook updates already in which case you’d know: I have had a pretty damn good week.

The main aims of my VSO placement was to set up interpreter training and deliver this in a few cities across India. The other was to develop the Indian Association of Sign Language Interpreters (ASLI) and the interpreting profession in general.  

For the last three months I have had my head down creating the training which we start delivering tomorrow to our master trainers in Delhi. They’ll be a few more dates round the country including Kolkata in West Bengal and Coimbatour in Tamil Nadu. One pressing issue was to get the training certified. I wrote my first government proposal a few months back. This was delivered in person as Arun and I went to meet the ministry concerned. We explained the course had the highest content of interpreter training that India had seen so far. Many courses have so far concentrated on ISL skills. I had word on Wednesday that the training should be confirmed next week as receiving accreditation which means interpreters passing the ASLI course will be eligible to register with the government. There is still much work to do on registration and standards but this is an incredible first step to improvements in the current system. This was this week’s first bit of good news.

The second came on Saturday morning. Followers of this blog will have seen an update at the end of July concerning work being done for the proposed ISL academy. I stated then that the proposals I helped to develop were well received by other organisations and the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment. Since then there have been a few meetings of the new advisory committee and budgets were firmed up. There was an all day meeting that Arun attended. On Saturday he phoned: the centre has been awarded 80 Crore ($20 million dollars).

This will mean the centre houses one of the biggest Sign Language Linguistics departments in the world. There will be research and training on bilingual education for Deaf children. In a country where very few teachers of the Deaf have any knowledge of ISL this is an incredibly important step. There will be funds to encourage ISL poetry and film production. There will be research and training of sign language interpreting. There will be more employment of Deaf people. The icing on the cake everyone is hoping for is that ISL becomes the 19th official language of India.

I am so proud to have been involved in this project and to have made an impact. For anyone that thought I was on a jolly and didn’t want to donate to VSO, you may do so now by clicking here!

It’s no rest for me though. There’s the Delhi course next week for 15 new interpreter trainers. In between the Kolkata and Coimbatour courses, I have a few weeks to complete my next big job. I will be writing another proposal for the government on providing interpreters nationally. We’re talking about a service for anywhere between 4 – 10 million Deaf people. As the census has never had a separate category for Deaf people, nobody knows exactly how many people are Deaf and use Sign Language.  Those that are need access to medical, legal and financial appointments. School, college and university students need interpreters. The courts and police stations need to be able to call on interpreters at a moment’s notice. With scant provision now, mostly through Deaf organisations, there is no information with which to start. 

After consultations and research I’ll need to work out the logistics of setting up interpreter provision in a country 14 times the size of the UK. I’m finishing up at the end of November and it’s going to be a busy few months. Watch this space. Soon there'll be reports of another million dollar success!