Lost in translation

I frequent the Boardgame Geek website, and I enjoy looking some lists people make. One use recently posted a list about his son who has autism, and sopme of the games the son enjoys. It's very interesting. Through that, one of the comments points to this article, which talks about a woman named Amanda. Amanda has autism has translated some of her thoughts for us who don't speak her language. It references a video, which is what I'm posting here. You may not get it, but give it a try before giving up. Oh, and turn off the blog music first.



This is very interesting to me, as this is the population I work with. The most important point she makes, as I see it, is that her failure to learn our language is seen as a deficit, while our failure to learn her language is seen as being acceptable. We do need to understand that communication is not simply what we understand it to be in our view of things, but other people communicate in different ways.

If you look the video up on YouTube, you'll see that Amanda does respond to people's comments of the video, not all of which are completely positive.