I’m saying what I would do in the situation. Which of course doesn’t mean it actually happened, and of course would mean the other person would also have to have the same idea in this hypothetical.
I am confused as to your problem here.
I guess - but it turned out that his best wasn’t helpful. 
Trubba not, friend.
As a teen, a friend and I pretended that he was deaf and I was his translator. I just made up some hand gestures and we set out to have some pranky fun. wouldn’t you know it, the very first people we tried to prank just happened to actually know sign language and the jig was up very quickly. We lost steam after than and moved on to pretending to be jehovah’s witnesses…
That’s how I speak German!
German person: something something something
Me: Ich habe keine Deutsch; ich bin ein Amerikaner
German person: something something something
Me:Ich weisse nicht
German person: something something something
Me: Ich habe keine ahnung
German person: something something something
Me: Ich bin nicht schlau.
German person: something something something
Me: Ich verstehen Sie nicht!
My British relatives: Wow, it’s great that you speak such good German!
I don’t know what that means. I’m old.
That reminds me of this smart ass thing we did in high school at like IQ bowl events. One person would speak gibberish at McDonalds or where ever, and the other would translate. You would do fun things like a very short sentence would be a long part of the order, and a very long sentence would translate to “diet coke”.
I’m older than you 
.
For reasons that made sense at the time (and resulted in a change of school policy) I memorized a great many ways to say “I don’t know” in German when I was in High School.
I remember my goto opening phrase was, “You have to speak slowly like a baby. I am a dumb American.”
I’m new to this planet. Since when was a deaf person ‘Deaf’ (with a capital D) ? A proper name I can understand, like my brother has Assburgers , or my mom suffers from Reynaud Syndrome … but. deaf is just deaf, no? Unless an attributable cause is placed in front of it, like Jerry suffers from Lawson Deafness.
You get my point. I sure hope my ride comes back soon, this planet is infested with Stupid people.
I have been told I have a decent ear for accents, but have no gift for language. This has the odd effect of my few phrases in French or Spanish often precipitating a fully fluent response and then when I have to back off, I’m probably worse off than if I didn’t even try. I do better in German, where I can actually get a few basic phrases across and can answer simple inquiries.
Forget the translator out of his depth, what about the Commissioner at an emergency briefing?
“I have my little handy dandy pig here that I hold when I’m stressed out and I just wanted to say that as I stepped out to go to lunch, I got out of my car and there was this lucky penny with the heads up (displays penny). So I hope that’s a good sign that we will not be as inundated as we are expecting.”
Is this clip from Saturday Night Live?
In fairness, his appearance alone indicates he may have been pressed into service by someone. Experienced ASL interpreters generally wear clothing that contrasts with their skin color, better for people to see their hands against that background.
As a German native speaker, I am impressed.
I have to ask.
Sorry.
What kind of Stupid?
I’ll search Wikipedia for the rest, and see myself out, ok?
Not in close proximity to the Deaf community myself, but my understanding is that “Deaf” is capitalized because it refers not solely to the condition of impaired hearing but also to an entire culture that connects this community. By (potentially controversial) analogy, this is why you sometimes see Black capitalized but not white, within the same publication – in the US there’s generally considered to be a somewhat cohesive Black community, but there’s no single community of whiteness (even though it does represent, in broad strokes, the dominant culture).
Additional background: http://www.deafcounseling.com/whats-up-with-the-big-d-in-deaf/
Kudos to whoever changed the headline of this post, which originally suggested bad intent on the part of the conscripted interpreter.
The rules keep changing and no one really tells you… like new traffic laws. Half the stuff out there was never on any test, yet we gotta adhere to it. Ok… Deaf it is.
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