Communicating without a sound

Last year during his Hurricane Sandy press conferences the mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg, used Lydia Callis as his sign language interpreter. Watch this YouTube video to see how her exuberant gestures effectively communicated his message to the deaf community. Later she blogged about her experience in The silver lining of a hurricane, which also is on a video.






During the memorial service for Nelson Mandela this month there was a completely ineffective sign language interpreter standing next to the speaker behind the lectern. Thamsanqa Jantjie made far fewer gestures than the woman interpreter back in the SABC studio did, as shown in the full video coverage (for example, at about 0:31:51).