"Voicing"

I know I've been a slacker lately about posting, sorry I'm trying to do better. This post is going to be a little out of sequence because I'm also working on writing all about the holidays. My posts about Christmas break are going to go up after this one. So no one shoot me for being out of order.

With the start of the new semester I'm assigned interpreters for my different classes. Some of the interpreters I've worked with before and others I haven't. But the interesting phenomena I want to talk about in my post is "voicing." When a person does not speak, whatever the reason, and only signs the interpreter will "voice" for them. Essentially the interpreter is interpreting everything that person is saying for other people who don't sign.
Normally with my classes and interpreters I speak for myself but not always. Sometimes it's easier to sign what I want to know and often it just feels so much more natural. It also depends on the interpreter and how familiar we are with each others signs.  I find that the more I use ASL the less inclined I am to speak orally.

It's just a very interesting thing to watch someone speaking like you (not for you, it's an important difference). When an interpreter voices for someone they are speaking as that person, never for that person.  There are many different views on the use of voicing especially for late deafened adults. A lot of people think that if you can speak you should. Thus they believe that voicing promotes a certain level of laziness. I disagree with that idea. An interpreter voices for me because I make a linguistic choice, I choose to use a different language that I'm frequently more comfortable with. Also it's very hard to switch back and forth from ASL to English. If I'm already watching my interpreter and conducting the class in ASL it's unnecessary to switch back to English to ask a question then back to ASL to receive the answer.

For example today in my technical writing class we introduced ourselves to another member of the class. I signed the entire time and allowed my interpreters to voice for me. I felt much more comfortable doing that and it was a much more enjoyable experience for me. Take my very biased opinions about voicing with a grain of salt and think about it. Would you choose to have someone voice for you?
Rachel