June 2010


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The Dept. of Liberal Arts will be offering a Diploma in Caribbean Sign Interpreting programme for the first time in the academic year 2010-11. This is a first for us in several ways. It is the first time that we have offered a substantial part of a programme by video-conferencing with the Mona Campus. It is also the first time we have been privileged to offer a programme of direct benefit to the Deaf Community of Trinidad and Tobago. And finally it is the first time that Sign Interpreting has been recognized as a necessity for consideration by the hearing community, pushing back the barrier that has separated the deaf from the hearing in the Trinidad and Tobago context.

Jamaica has a large and vibrant deaf community and the Mona Programme has been running for some time. It was conceptualized and organized there by Trinidadian Ph. D. student Keren Niles-Cumberbatch who will be our main teacher of Sign for the first running of our local programme. Our own local staff members, Kathy-Ann Drayton and Ben Braithwaite, have been studying Sign intensively as well as collecting data throughout the country on the varieties in use. Ferne Regis has also been working on the latter exercise.

In Trinidad and Tobago our efforts have been persistent over five years of liaison with the Ministry of Social Development to bring us to a position of readiness for offering the programme. We have had to compete with US institutions far better resourced than ourselves but have maintained that our students needed to have Interpreters work with our own Sign and not American Sign Language. Frustrations have resulted from persons not fully understanding the extent of difference among different sign languages but finally we have been able to prevail. We are now hoping only that our trainee Interpreters may be GATE funded! This would be a tremendous support as we press forward in this vital area of national engagement.

-Prof Valerie Youssef is a Professor of Linguistics, and Coordinator of Linguistics Graduate Programmes, Liberal Arts Department, UWI, St. Augustine.