I changed my WordPress blog, danielgreene.com, to the Mystique theme. I love it! It has this widget on the top with links to my RSS feed, Facebook Page, Twitter profile, Flickr photostream, and YouTube channel. It has a combo widget on the right that shows recent comments, top posts, archives, tag cloud, and category lists. And it uses a beautiful font that has true italics. I like!
Blog Archives
Why I retitled this blog Daniel Greene’s Interpretation
Daniel Greene’s Blog-o-rama sounded too general. The “-o-rama” suffix implied a wide view and a surplus–which this blog is–but it sounded like it was about nothing in particular. I never put interpreter or interpreting in the title because I write about much more than interpreting. In the 16 years that I’ve been writing this blog, I’ve covered acting, singing, dancing, modeling, poetry, voiceover, web authoring (HTML & CSS), telecommunications, technology, typography, e-books, EPUB, products and services, photography, photo sharing on Facebook, Flickr, communication via social media, and more.
It was time to focus. I renamed this blog An Interpreter’s Interpretation for a few days, and wrote the blog description “of interpreting ASL-English language, Deaf-Hearing culture.” I had thought taking my name out of the title would show humility and focus. But people know me by name, and for more than just interpreting. Besides, danielgreene.com has been my domain name since 1998.
Yet I needed to add something about interpreting to the title. I thought about “take” because it is a short word for interpretation, perspective, opinion, etc. But I kept imagining it being pronounced tah-keh in some other language and meaning something terrible. Besides, the word interpretation would focus the blog while allowing for other, well, “interpretations,” such as perspective and opinion. So I changed the title to Daniel Greene’s Interpretation.
I then considered one of two descriptions: of interpreting, communications, media, and life or of interpreting, communications, media, and the world. “Daniel Greene’s interpretation of life” sounds like I’m a philosopher or guru, and “Daniel Greene’s interpretation of the world” sounds like I’m a news analyst or travel guide. I thought about using a general extender like and other stuff, and other things, and more, etc., or et al., but et cetera means “and that which follows,” and some things I write about don’t logically follow the others. My favorite general extender was et alia, because it means “and others / and other things” but it sounds esoteric. I finally settled on topics that were inclusive enough for me.
What do you think of the new title and description? Have you ever struggled with a similar dilemma?
Like this:
I love my new blog theme!
Been Blogging for Over a Month Now
It seems that every time I get discouraged because no one is responding to my posts, I get a comment or an e-mail that reminds me I’m not just shouting in the dark. Well, I am shouting in the dark– but people are listening! Hmm… let me put that in a deaf-friendly way: I’m waving my hands over the abyss– but people are reading my signs from afar!
I checked my web site statistics, and my site has received an average of 1,592 hits per day. The site received the most hits — 2,371 — on August 29, the day I posted the video of myself singing Cockeyed Optimist on YouTube.
One thing I have found is that blogging can be very time consuming! Between this and my activities on Flickr and YouTube, as well as my reading of other blogs, I have been spending too much time on the Internet. I suppose I may as well admit now that I am powerless over the Internet and that my life has become unmanageable, as that is the first step to recovery! Honestly, I don’t know how other people manage it. I guess I’ll have to start scheduling limited amounts of time each day to get on the computer, sign on, do my surfing or uploading or reading or whatever, and sign off and be done with it. Plus, I have to schedule limited amounts of time for writing blog posts, moderating comments, creating vlogs or videos, taking photos, uploading photos to my computer and editing them, etc. It really has become too much. I look forward to finding moderation in this soon!
Poetic License in Interpreting
In my search for blog posts about ASL interpreting, I found this interesting post regarding poetry, interpretation in general, and the poetic license visible in ASL interpreting:
Reading Finnish Rhapsody in particular reminded me of watching a live sign-language interpreter while listening to a live speech. I experienced this while at a convention when one of the ASL interpreters was often more dynamic than the speaker in her communication. I do not know ASL and I was listening to the speaker, however I found that the way in which the interpreter communicated was much clearer on an emotional level. And even though she was obviously quite skilled, I was pretty certain she didn’t interpret the speech word-for-word.
Even though interpreters are charged with “render[ing] the message faithfully by conveying the content and spirit of what is being communicated,” (RID Code of Professional Conduct Section 2.3), sometimes an ASL interpretation is just more poetic and expressive than the English source message. Sometimes this is because there is an inherent passion in the words that is missing from the speaker’s facial expression and body language.
LiveJournal Communities re: Interpreters
Here are some of the LiveJournal communities I found last night:
- aslterps: started 5 October 2003; c. 240 entries; last entry 18 August 2006.
- anti_bad_terps: started 5 March 2004; c. 40 entries; last entry 23 April 2006.
- certified_terps: started 2 February 2006; 14 entries, last entry 15 August 2006.
- itp_students: started 1 February 2006; 14 entries; last entry 23 July 2006.
- vrs_411: started 21 June 2006; four (4) entries; last entry 28 June 2006.
(By the way, it took me an ungodly amount of time to compile those data. Does no one know of an easy way for a LiveJournal Community visitor to see when the community was started and how many entries it has without having to page back through all the entries?)
I guess these really are more journaling “communities” rather than “blogs.” Online interpreter communities have been around for a long time, especially in the form of ListServ’s, Yahoo! groups, etc. These communities differ from ListServ’s in that they are out in the open for all the world to see. They each have their group originators and moderators, but no one person seems to be the main blogger of any of them. Some of the posts and comment discussions are interesting. For the most part, they don’t seem to “log the web” in the sense of providing links and commentary about other Web documents, as discussed in Journal vs. Blog. They are more a collection of discussions about either real or hypothetical interpreting situations, or bad experiences they had with other interpreters.
