Help with sign language (ASL)?
When signing the song “Part of your World” from Little Mermaid how would you sign this verse:
I’ve got gadgets and gizmos a-plenty. I’ve got whozits and whatzits galore.You want thingamabobs? I’ve got twenty!
How do I sign gizmos, whozits, whatzits, and thingamabobs?
what do I do since they aren’t real words?
Are you Signing this song for fun, just because you like it, for your own enjoyment, or are you translating this for Deafs– so that they can understand and appreciate it? Or is this a class assignment? How much do you want to invest in this?
Not everything translates well into ASL. You have heard the saying, “It loses something in the translation…”? This is a perfect case in point. This song is “very Hearing”. It contains words that do not convert into ASL. You cannot translate; you can only transliterate. (When one language lacks something that the other has, you can only provide a close match. [eg: The Greek alphabet has a lambda; English does not. So we use "L". That is the closest thing that we have to it. But it is not really an equivalent.] In this case, we do not have any ASL counterparts. So this piece falls especially flat.) This song is not a great candidate for Signing– if you can pick a different, more concrete one. (When Deaf children want a story terped, we steer clear of Dr. Seuss! It loses so much that the children find it tedious, hollow, and just plain annoying.)
In this case, part of the charm, and the delight to the Hearing ear, is the whimsical, quirky words, themselves– like thingamabob. That nuance is lost on Deafs. There is no way to integrate it for us. It is just “audial” rather than visual. We don’t relate to it. (What does “red” mean to someone who is not sighted? Nothing. Trying to impart the concept is an exercise in futility.) Remember that Deafs come from a different culture than Hearing do. We don’t have identical frames of reference.
I am not familiar with this particular song. But I can tell you that, universally, English pop songs are notoriously difficult to translate into ASL. They are esoteric, they tend to use the passive voice, they have a lot of boring (to us) repetition, and they are heavily laden with English slang– which Deafs generally do not understand. (We have our own idioms and slang. We also have our own forms of “poetry” and storytelling.)
In general, when there is a word that you do not know how to Sign, you ask yourself what it really means, and you Sign that. That is ‘translating’ rather than just copying in English. (The trick is that you cannot translate what you do not understand.)
It seems that this song is saying that you have a bunch of silly, useless, mysterious things. (Not necessarily machines. They could be tools, bric-a-brac, et caetera. Without knowing the song, we should not speculate or misinform the audience.) That is why Hearing people use a word like ‘gizmo’, right? Because they don’t know what an odd thing is for. (Maybe I am not getting the proper gist of it. Without knowing the song, and with only a tiny excerpt to go on, I have to guess. Correct me if I am wrong.)
I would generate it something like this:
THING WEIRD or SILLY (make a baffled face)
THEY WHAT? CLUELESS!
HAVE
DIFFERENT +++
TOO-MANY
DO-DO?
(Act-out picking-up a few, looking them over quizzically, one-by-one, shrugging, and tossing them aside.)
You don’t Sign WANT or TWENTY. Those are expressions. (The, “Do you want…?” is rhetorical.) They are not literal.
With this song, where concrete meaning is lacking, “role playing” and non-manual markers (NMMs), like facial expression, are going to be paramountly important. You must inflect to make this more fun and silly or more solemn. You have to be very animated if you want us to have any interest at all.
I don’t know if you are familiar with the host of techniques that we use in addition to Signs. (Signs, of themselves, arguably constitute only about 40% of the ASL language.) Using only Signs, exclusively, is a very flat, one-dimensional, vague, and monotonous approach to communication.
©
I am Hard-of-Hearing, a native ASL Signer, and I teach ASL.
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