Marla Berkowitz, Ohio’s only Certified Deaf Interpreter and senior lecturer at Ohio State demonstrates the sign for “hope.” Credit: Courtesy of Marla Berkowitz
Gov. Mike DeWine’s daily press conference has given rise to bingo boards, a parody theme song to the tune of “Laverne and Shirley,” and memes. Included in all of them is Marla Berkowitz.
Berkowitz, a senior lecturer in Ohio State’s American Sign Language program and certified deaf interpreter who has risen to recent notoriety alongside DeWine and Ohio Department of Health Director Dr. Amy Acton, said she is amused by her new fame, and hopes more than memes will come of it.
“ASL interpreting profession is sacred to me,” she said in an email. “The responsibility is enormous when it comes to interpreting at any situations, even more so during crisis. Deaf people who use ASL deserve to have first-hand information at the same time as their hearing counterparts about their safety and health.”
An hour before the press conferences, Berkowitz and the two other interpreters — Christy Horne and Lena Smith, hearing staff ASL interpreters from Deaf Service Center and Opportunities for Ohioans with Disabilities, respectively — consult with the press conference staff to gather information and with the tech staff to discuss camera angles and lighting.
Berkowitz, who is deaf herself, signs during the opening and shares the question-and-answer portion with Smith. ASL interpreting is a mental and physical labor, requiring translation between two cultures and both a visual and spoken language, Berkowitz said.
“The communication modalities are unlike one another,” she said. “Therefore the brain has to process the concepts, meanings, and nuances conveyed by the English speakers.”
Certified deaf interpreters work with a hearing interpreter who signs the spoken English to the CDI, who then looks at the structure of the English message and reformulates it into ASL form. Berkowitz is the only CDI in the state of Ohio, putting her in a unique position. For hearing ASL interpreters, ASL is their second language, but Berkowitz said that since she is deaf, it’s easier to culturally relate to her audience.
“ASL is the language we use to express our thoughts, ideas, and feelings naturally,” she said. “It is how we communicate freely without any barriers.”
Berkowitz has fulfilled this role for quite some time. She was first drawn to interpreting in the early 1970s, when she was just 7 years old and attending a residential school for the deaf in New York, where she is from. Some of her teachers were not fluent in ASL and classmates would look to her to explain what the teachers were trying to say.
Since then, she’s worked in a number of places — both in New York and Ohio — including court, education and medical settings. She once was asked to lip read for a man who couldn’t use his voice to communicate with his family in the hospital.
The responsibility is immense, especially in a state with about 303,000 deaf and hard of hearing people, and Kristin Wickham-Saxon, a senior lecturer in the ASL program who has known Berkowitz for 15 years and co-teaches a service-learning course with her, said she was worried about Berkowitz when she first started interpreting for the conferences amid a rollout of shutdowns.
“This is all so huge and hard to process and emotionally taxing for all of us and she’s getting it, that information, for the first time on a TV screen,” she said. “You don’t — you can’t have your personal reaction. And you’re still having to process like, ‘Oh, my God, no one can go to a restaurant anymore.’ That’s in your head as you’re trying to convey that information. And you have the responsibility of not screwing it up.”
Berkowitz, who is juggling press conferences with teaching and transitioning her classes online, said some days are more stressful than others, and when she’s not interpreting or teaching, she finds solace in yoga, meditation, taking walks and cooking.
The visibility and notoriety can also serve as an educational opportunity about ASL. Wickham-Saxon said that when Berkowitz first became a staple of the daily press conferences, she knew there would be ignorant comments such as, “Why is she making those big facial expressions?” and, “She’s so distracting.”
However, facial expressions are a crucial part of the language and serve as grammar markers to indicate whether a speaker is asking a question or making a statement. interpreters must also convey if a speaker is being authoritative or calming, which speakers express with vocal inflections, Berkowitz said.
“Stay at home,” for example, is a phrase that requires a stern or pleading expression to convey importance and urgency, and Berkowitz said she sees her position as an opportunity to raise awareness.
“Even in the spotlight, people are finally seeing the authenticity of ASL as the language which often have been misappropriated, misused, and watered-down for years,” she said.
The experience has also required Berkowitz to be more open-minded and consider feedback from all facets of the deaf community composed of deaf, deafblind, deafdisabled and hard-of-hearing people of all ages.
For example, she started wearing dark-colored shirts after learning that pastel colors made accessibility more difficult for people with limited vision.
Though the responsibility is even greater during crisis situations, there is still a huge gap to fill in terms of conveying information to the deaf and hard-of-hearing community, Wickham-Saxon said. Even President Donald Trump does not use interpreters during his press conferences.
With live events, there is often no captioning, and it can be poor and inaccurate when there is, meaning it could be hours before a transcript is available, Wickham-Saxon said.
“If you look at transcripts — whether it’s from a radio program or TV — because of the way we talk, reading it doesn’t make any sense either, and so there’s just so much left out,” she said.
Berkowitz said she hopes her visibility will encourage her students and other hearing people to be better allies of and advocates for the deaf and hard-of-hearing community.
“[My students] can brag about me all they want but I expect their take-away to be prominent allies of the Deaf community — that is to advocate for Deaf people’s access in every aspect of societal life,” she said.
