Fingers of speech - Sign Language Associates

Nation's Business, July, 1989 by Sharon Nelton

Fingers Of Speech A hearing-impaired woman gives birth to her first child at a hospital in Alexandria, Va. With her is a sign-language interpreter, who makes certain that the young woman and the medical staff understand each other during the crucial hours of labor and delivery.

A Washington, D.C., woman receives a call notifying her that her daughter, a deaf 17-year-old, has been hit by a car. The mother's anxiety is magnified by fear that her daughter will not be able to communicate with the medical team. But when she arrives at the hospital, a sign-language interpreter is already in the treatment room with the injured teenager.

In both instances, the interpreter was supplied by Sign Language Associates, a Silver Spring, Md., firm specializing in communication services for the hearing-impaired in the Washington area. But SLA does not limit its services to dramatic hospital scenes.

The brainchild of Janet Bailey, once an aspiring actress, SLA provides interpreters for virtually any occasion: court appearances, business meetings, political rallies, even nightclub performances. One SLA interpreter found herself accompanying a group of hearing-impaired students on a slaughter-house tour and having to explain the finer points of one cow's swift demise.

"I was sort of fated to do this," Bailey, 40, says of her unusual business career. As a small child, she learned the sign-language alphabet from her mother, who had once worked briefly at a school for the deaf. In junior high school, she and a boyfriend, the son of a deaf man, had fun communicating with each other by finger spelling.

When she went to Huron College in Huron, S.D., to study theater, she spent a six-week practicum working with deaf children. Still she did not see the pattern.

But after she married and had two children, she and her family lived in Silver Spring in an apartment across the hall from a family with a deaf daughter. Bailey used her rusty finger-spelling skills to communicate with the girl and finally realized that she was really interested in the deaf.

She began studying sign language at Washington's Gallaudet University, the nation's only university specifically for the deaf. After working briefly at the National Association of the Deaf and then spending six years in television and public-relations jobs at Gallaudet, she became one of about 10 full-time free-lance interpreters of sign language in Washington.

Very quickly, she saw that each interpreter had his or her own inefficient little enterprise and was dependent on an answering machine to get new assignments. The lack of a system was also unsatisfactory to clients, who had to go down a list of interpreters, calling each one until they found someone who was available. "I realized this was no way to run a business," Bailey says.

Bailey convinced seven other interpreters to join her in creating a single, efficient business, and by 1982, SLA was under way. The partners' first and only "advertising" was to put a message on each of their answering machines directing callers to dial the answering service they had hired to handle all their calls. "One of us would collect the calls and divvy up the jobs," says Bailey.

Once clients realized they had to make only one call to find an interpreter, she says, SLA was deluged.

SLA now has more than 20 full- and part-time employees and 100 free-lance contractors. It has grown to over $1 million in annual revenues and more than 600 clients, including local and federal government agencies, nonprofit organizations, and businesses. For example, Hewlett Packard's regional sales headquarters in Rockville, Md., brings in SLA interpreters to "sign" business meetings and other special events for its two hearing-impaired employees.

The basic cost for SLA services is $60 for up to two hours and $25 per hour thereafter.

"We never expected the growth that we've experienced," says Bailey, who is now majority stockholder and president of the firm. She points out that Washington may be an exceptional market--Gallaudet attracts a great number of the hearing-impaired to the area, and the federal government is a major employer of the deaf.

Bailey's theatrical training has not gone to waste. She has interpreted performances in nearly every theater in Washington. And sin language itself calls on the skills of the thespian. Says Bailey: "It's one more way to express yourself, and it's just so beautiful."