DeafSA director Bruce Druchen said he wrote a letter of complaint to the commission saying the SABC was using insufficiently skilled South African sign language interpreters and that the use of the deaf language was linguistically not correct.

Druchen, who is deaf, said DeafSA had not been consulted about the interpreters. “The problem is with the interpreters on SABC1 and 2. The SABC3 news interpretations are perfect, but they are (on screen) only 60 seconds long,” he said.

The commission’s Pumeza Jara said letters had been sent to the SABC and the Independent Communications Authority of SA requesting information. “The commission’s next step will be informed by their responses.”

Druchen said South African sign language was a language on its own and had different dialects. But when interpreting, the same grammatical signs should be used. He said the SABC should get someone to interpret correctly. “I would like to get together with the SABC and work out a solution.”

The SABC was not immediately available for comment.

http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/national.aspx?ID=BD4A312748