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11 Dec 2013

Mandela memorial interpreter ‘a complete fake’

The international sign language community is demanding an apology from the South African government for the “fake” interpreter on stage during the memorial service for Nelson Mandela.

South Africa’s leading deaf association, DeafSA, has voiced outrage that the man who was supposed to be interpreting speeches during the world’s biggest memorial service for Nelson Mandela, was instead making meaningless gestures on stage (see video).

The outrage started on Twitter during the memorial, as the South African deaf community started to raise questions about the signing.

It soon became clear that the woman signing on television screens was using completely different gestures to the man signing on stage.

Then Wilma Newhoudt, a deaf member of the South African parliament publicly voiced her concerns. She contacted members of the ANC’s communications team on Twitter asking them to “do something”. There has so far been no statement from the government.

“He’s a complete fraud,” Cara Loening, director of sign language education and development in Cape Town said on Wednesday. “He wasn’t even doing anything. There was not one sign there. Nothing. He was literally flapping his arms around.”

The memorial service for the former South African president was attended by almost 100 world leaders, and the 95,000-seater stadium in Soweto was filled with people who had queued in the rain to get a seat.

But the deaf community in South Africa, and around the world, said the fake signing was a huge embarassment to the government, and that is showed a lack of respect to the deaf community. One DeafSA interpreter pointed out that he also failed to communicate the hostile reception that the crowd gave to President Jacob Zuma.

‘It was a complete fake’

Sign language differs from country to country. But even the deaf community in the UK thought that the interpreter’s signing on stage was unusual. David Buxton, the UK’s representative on the world federation of the deaf, told Channel 4 News. “It was a complete fake – he seemed to be repeating the same gestures.”

Charlie Swinbourne, editor of The Limping Chicken deaf news website, said that “something didn’t seem quite right”.

There was not one sign there. Nothing. He was literally flapping his arms around – Cara Loening

“The ‘interpreter’ signed in a way I’ve never seen before, a strange repetitive rhythm to his movements – his signs appearing to come in threes or fours, occasionally swinging his shoulders, as if he was signing along with an intermittent beat,” he wrote. “Most puzzlingly, the structure of his hand and body movements didn’t seem to change no matter what the speaker was saying.”

There is an international sign language, used during meetings of people from around the world. However it is more limited than country-specific sign languages, and is rarely used aside from specifically international meetings. The deaf community had expected the Mandela memorial service to be signed according to SASL – South African sign language.

Mr Buxton, who is also head of the British Deaf Association, told Channel 4 News that he was asking for an apology from the government: “It just shouldn’t have happened. We’re demanding an apology to the South African deaf community.”

Some of the tweets from South African interpreter Pholoho Selebano:

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