Letters to Juliet

Brandt survived the semester!  He’s now just one year (2 classes and the dissertation) away from being DOCTOR Brandt. 

So to celebrate, he took me out to see a chick-flick last night.  The reason we saw a chick-flick was because our local movie theater chain only shows one movie per week in Rear Window Captioning, usually the biggest opening movie, and this weekend it was Letters to Juliet.  I told him we didn’t have to see it, because I knew it would be really sappy and he’d probably fall asleep halfway through, but he insisted.

The large group of teenage girls in front of us couldn’t figure out what our RWC viewer panels were, and asked each other, “Do we need to get those?  What are they for??”  Finally the leader of the group asked me, and I told her it was for the captioning that was projected from the back of the theater.  I pointed to the big LED screen in the back.  They all looked at it, tried to read the backwards letters, and were still confused.  One of the girls whispered, “I think it’s for Deaf people…”  They all nodded, then looked back at me, puzzled.  I know they were thinking something like, ‘But they’re talking, how are they Deaf?’  I didn’t elaborate and they didn’t ask anything else; it was more fun to keep them confused (I was a teenager once, too—sometimes they need to be reminded that they don’t know everything!)

The theme song to Letters to Juliet, “Love Story” by Taylor Swift, was the first song I ever saw translated into ASL on YouTube (see below).  The signer is Ally, a Deaf Education student.  She says:

“I strongly believe that music should be widely accessible to the Deaf and Hard of Hearing, just as it is to Hearing.  For this to be possible, it is essential that the music and lyrics are both signed using accurate ASL structure and features.”

This was about a year and a half ago, when I had first become interested in learning Sign.  Watching the video was extremely overwhelming, because the signs were flying by so fast and I didn’t know any of them.  I knew I’d never be able to sign like Ally, but I worried that I’d never even be able to understand what she was signing.  Happily, I can now watch this video and know most of the signs.  Keep in mind when you watch Ally’s videos, she is interpreting in ASL—it is not word-for-word English, it is a different grammar and syntax, and often the words/signs themselves are different.  (Unfortunately she does not provide captioning to show what the song’s lyrics are versus what she is signing, but on some of her videos she provides an explanation of how to sign the song, such as “Just to See You Smile”.)

Ally has a lot of videos, and I recommend them as a great way to see ASL in action.  If you would like to see ASL songs with the lyrics and actual signs (the “gloss”) captioned, check out “CaptainValor” on YouTube.  His video for Miley Cyrus’ “Party in the USA” is very well done (although the song will probably be stuck in your head for the next week!) and provides both the lyrics and the gloss (the signs he is performing) underneath in ALL CAPS.  My favorite video of his is “I Gotta Feeling” by the Black Eyed Peas (another one that will get stuck in your head).  This one doesn’t have captioning, but if you expand the description under the video, he has the lyrics and gloss written out.