Anybody notice the awsomeness that was the interpreter for Matt Inman at the BAHfest?

She nearly stole the show a couple of times!

That link cuts ahead a bit so you’ll want to go back, of course…I just wanted to give a sample.

We were pretty much guaranteed awesomeness with The Oatmeal’s Matt Inman giving the keynote speech for Zach Weiner’s Bad Ad-Hoc Hypothesis festival, but that interpreter deserves an award!

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It was also great how Matt was thoroughly confused why the audience cheered so much after that sentence. “WTF? You shouldn’t be applauding this??”

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The sign for “die” is different in BSL:

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I’ve seen both (or rather some sort of ‘thing falling’ representing ‘dead’) sometimes from the same people. I don’t actually know sign terribly well though.

Aren’t there several versions (ASL and BSL and a few others or something?) and aren’t they supposed to be given room to be expressive and amusing?

I’m sure more than a few of us were watching her because we’re awful, immature people and he made her sign ‘eight legged vaginas who bite to give you erections until you are dead’

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I don’t know either sign language (I’m waiting to settle down somewhere before I decide on a sign language to learn), but Moss is not using BSL. It does look like the interpreter is being quite creative in their use of ASL, but it’s impressive to see how much facial expressions and body language can be used to add to the meaning being passed on, even when it’s definitely not a joke. I thought this video was cool, a deaf sign language interpreter was receiving signs from someone in the crowd and then signing in a more fluent way including expressions (as a hearing interpreter would be interpreting into their second language):

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Oh yeah, isn’t that excellent? We definitely saw a lot of that in bits of the speech we saw her in (and also plenty of bits where she had to go back to lettering because…science words!)

One thing I love about our brains is the fact that everybody knew exactly what she meant. :smile:

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