Batman

Marijke de Lang recently raised the issue with me of how the blind negotiate meaning, given that meaning negotiation has so much to do with images in our brains (and what we do with them). It got me thinking, and here are some links that I found thought-provoking.

The relevance for translation is at least two-fold: one is that we will communicate better with our audience if we know that audience better. The other is that not unlike Deaf communities, our communication with the blind may improve if we are able to re-locate them (at least to some degree) in our categories of thinking, away from handicap and toward diversity.

Helen Keller once said that blindness separates people from things, while deafness separates them from other people. After reading and listening to the links below, consider this possibility: echolocation (all necessary changes having been made) may eventually do for blind people what sign languages have done for the Deaf. And of course the cognitive implications remain to be worked out.

Comments are welcome as always.

The actual story of the blind guy does not start until after the prologue, but the whole show is interesting.