How difficult is it for hearing impaired friends to defend their legal rights? Almost only one lawyer can communicate with them seamlessly
There are more than 270 million hearing-impaired friends across the country. They usually speak in sign language, but who can speak for them in court?
This issue of "News Weekly" focuses on Tang Shuai, a sign language lawyer, "Speech for the Silent".
At one o'clock in the afternoon, Tang Shuai had just arrived at the law firm compared to the reporters who arrived early in the morning.
He worked late into the night on the hearing impaired case.
Although deaf-mute cases only accounted for 30% of the law firm's total cases, it consumed a lot of his energy.
Sign language lawyer Tang Shuai:
Because I have lived in a silent family since I was a child, my own parents are both deaf and mute. Over the past 30 years of getting along with deaf and mute people, I have a different kind of understanding of this group. A group of healthy people, the kind of empathy that they lack.
A screenwriter asked me a question. He said how can I really try or experience the helplessness and despair of deaf-mute people in the shortest time. I said it’s very simple. Give yourself earplugs and promise You can’t hear any sound for a month, and you use tape to seal your mouth. You can’t speak for a month. No matter how urgent you are, even if it’s a life-saving moment, you can’t hear it or say it, then you can. Experience the state of the deaf and mute.
We have been isolated for too long between the deaf-mute group and the able-bodied society.
Being out of touch with society's weakness leads to discrimination and disregard. Compared with ordinary people, they are more likely to be violated, tortured, wronged and defrauded, and have a strong demand for legal services.
The procedural law stipulates that cases of hearing impaired persons must be recruited by the judiciary to participate in sign language, but the sign language interpreter hired in judicial practice speaks Mandarin or Chinese sign language, which is completely different from the natural sign language used by deaf-mute people.
Sign language lawyer Tang Shuai:
Our Chinese sign language is called finger language, and its characters are relatively abstract.
Like ordinary deaf-mute people when they were in the nine-year compulsory education, although they learned Chinese sign language in school, when they entered society, they were gradually assimilated and used natural sign language, which was sign language. Similar to some hieroglyphs on our text, its gestures are very vivid.
Another difference is that the grammar between the two is completely different. The grammar of our Chinese sign language and the grammar of speaking with our healthy people are synchronized, but the grammar of natural sign language is the inverted subject, predicate and object.
Tang Shuai emphasized that the communication barriers of dumb eating coptis and talking between chickens and ducks have made the circle of hearing impaired people a closed loop away from the mainstream society. When there is no way to complain about infringement, it is a desert in the rule of law; However, they often rely on guessing to preserve the job of translators, which can easily lead to unjust cases.
Among the more than 400,000 registered lawyers, almost only Tang Shuai can communicate seamlessly with more than 27 million deaf and mute people.
He has provided legal services to countless deaf-mute people in his nearly ten-year career and is known as the first Chinese sign language lawyer.
Sign language lawyer Tang Shuai:
Many people call our law firm the "Four Dissimilarities", which stems from the fact that our law firm has done a lot of things beyond the scope of our lawyers' work.
For example, it is the work of the public security to represent the deaf and mute to report a case, and then mediation is added, which is the work of the court.
During that time, it was because of work pressure that gave me depression. You Tang Shuai is a mortal, how can you face the 27 million people across the country?
But the status of this group is there, and when they find you and seek you, you cannot refuse.
The hearing impaired case was labor-intensive and a loss-making business. He mortgaged the house and the law firm.
It's hard to do it alone. He organized his colleagues to learn sign language, but he gained little, because the sound people did not have the thinking and application context of the hearing impaired. He attributed the thinking of the hearing impaired to the ant worldview.
Sign language lawyer Tang Shuai:
Today I say thank you to you. I can use three different tones. In the eyes of the deaf and mute, the different tones are all sincere thanks to them, because they have lost this hearing. , They can’t get the emotional perception of the sound behind the text, they always look at the problem on the surface, so in the world view of the deaf-mute, it is either black or white, good or evil, so they look at it like ants Food is a two-dimensional world view, and they only stay on a flat surface.
In the end, I realized that the deaf-mute group is the deaf-mute person who knows best.
Tang Shuai realized that if he can rely on a hearing impaired person who understands the law to carry out front-end preventive law popularization, and accurately deliver legal knowledge and awareness of rights protection to tens of millions of hearing impaired people, this will greatly reduce the probability of them getting into legal difficulties. .
Sign language lawyer Tang Shuai: There is
actually no political and law college or university’s deaf-mute school in the country that recruits deaf-mute people to study law. That will lead to a narrower way for them to obtain legal knowledge. I have to recruit deaf-mute people across the country. The dumb people come, and I teach them law by myself. From 2017 to the present, a total of more than 30 hearing impaired people have been recruited.
Tan Ting, who learned the questioner's information through voice recognition and responded, lost her hearing due to a medical accident when she was 8 years old.
But she didn't give up studying, and rarely went to university. After graduation, she saw Tang Shuai serving the hearing impaired and joined them.
In fact, she is the only one among the more than 30 law students who is currently the first hearing impaired person in China who has passed the judicial examination. She has struggled for three years for this.
Sign language lawyer Tang Shuai:
Every time a deaf-mute person comes to us for help, Tan Ting always has moist eyes. She can truly experience the kind of helplessness and despair, which is the sympathy. Heart, compassion and empathy, let her persevere.
Tan Ting:
I found that many deaf people who come to lawyer Tang Shuai for help are generally low-level of education, leading to their own infringement of other people's rights, or that their rights have been violated by others.
They didn't even know how to defend their rights, so I thought of popularizing the law.
Tan Ting, who visits the community, enters university, and plays on social platforms, receives hearing-impaired people from all over the country, and spans Mandarin sign language and natural sign language, greatly expanding the potential of hearing-impaired people, and has become Tang Shuai's happiest in recent years. This has created motivation for him to cultivate talents like Tan Ting.
Sign language lawyer Tang Shuai: If
colleges and universities don’t do it, I still have to stick to it. It’s really impossible. I set up an education and training institution to train deaf-mute people to learn the law, to provide the source of accurate law popularization for this group, and to provide it for this group. They bring people who provide accurate legal services. I think this is a very meaningful thing.
This Thursday, September 23 is the International Sign Language Day. The theme of this year is: We support people's rights with sign language.
Among the current 27 million deaf and mute people in China, only one prospective lawyer has been born. This is not a small problem, but is cherished like a panda. Under the background of ruling the country by law, deaf and mute friends know how to take up the law. At the same time as the weapon, I also hope that there will be more Tan Ting and Tang Shuai in the court.