I’ve felt this same way about all these government press conferences that have a picture-in-picture of someone doing sign language translation. I genuinely don’t understand the point apart from virtue signaling. Why not just use live transcription? I can’t imagine that we don’t have the tech to do a good job of it now, in real time, or close enough.
I understand why you might feel this way, so let me try to explain.
Sign languages are a completely different modality/type of language than written and spoken languages. For example, American Sign Language (ASL) is completely unrelated to written and spoken English, and conveying a message between languages is often complicated and requires someone to actively interpret -- it's more of an art than a science. So while Closed Captioning was a huge step forward for making things accessible to deaf and hard-of-hearing people, it's still a subpar method of communication because for deaf people, especially deaf immigrants, written English is often their 2nd/3rd/4th language. When you are communicating important information where comprehension is essential, you *need* an interpreter.
Public broadcasts should absolutely be interpreted to ensure that everyone has access to understanding them.
I encourage everyone to learn more about ASL and to learn a bit of ASL themselves. There are many amazing resources put out by Deaf people to help folks learn.
This is a fantastic point. Learning about CDIs really helped me understand the chasm between written and spoken languages versus sign languages.
For example, writing a program that leverages NLP to provide real-time captioning doesn't necessarily make the content as accessible as you'd think.
Do you have any resources that could explain this different more fully?
Modern ASL includes elements of "signed English" but it it's own language, the third most common in the US.
I am a hearing person, so take my understanding of this with a grain of salt. Here is a Deaf primary resource to describe the difference.
Personally speaking though, I'm against using them in about 99.999% of situations that are not imminent life and death emergencies. The gesturers' motions can be super distracting to the point that it makes the normal political process harder to focus on. It's just distracting enough (IMO) that important details about the normal everyday government business can be missed.
The benefit is including deaf people, not just making sure that they're able to comprehend emergency alerts (though that is also important). While I agree that the system could be refined, another part of me likes it because it gives visibility to something that the vast majority of hearing people wouldn't know about otherwise.
Anecdotally, my partner's parents can read and write English but aren't fluent in it. The prevalence of interpreters in the past few years has made things accessible to them that wouldn't have been in the past. From what I've heard, they aren't alone in their experience.