C-Print in French
By Karen A. Malley

I provide C-Print services at a private college in Western Massachusetts.  One Friday I went to Disability Services to submit my weekly invoice, and I stopped in the director’s office to chat for a minute.  It was the end of the semester, and she was busy helping students with their schedules and coordinating their accommodations.  She asked me, in an offhand way, if I speak French.  I told her I do, and her eyes lit up:  a deaf student wanted to take French the following semester.  Would it be possible to C-Print for her in French?  I was in a good mood, possibly because it was Friday, possibly because I’d just submitted my invoice, so I replied in the affirmative with much enthusiasm.
      “It would be fun!” I exclaimed impulsively. 
      “Great!” she said. 
      “I’ll do it!” I said.
      “Great!” she said again.

Today, almost four months later, I am indeed providing C-Print in French for this student, and it’s working quite well.  It’s been a lot of work, and I’ve learned a lot about French phonetics, verb conjugation, and grammar – specifically, how they are different from English.  Let me describe to you the kind of work and thought that has gone into this project, and what I’ve discovered about C-Print in the process.

First, I spent twenty hours a week over January recess building a French dictionary.  It was and still is a daunting process, but it was also oddly absorbing.  I’d sit in my favorite local café with my laptop and go into a sort of trance, adding verb form after verb form, adjective after noun after adverb, word after word after word.  It was like knitting, or practicing scales, if you like that kind of thing.  I didn’t start with a system in mind, but decided instead to just dive in and discover patterns through trial and error. 

I did decide first to start with the basic C-Print dictionary, because French and English have so many cognates, and to gradually delete the English abbreviations that interfered with the French ones I was adding.  For example, I had to delete the abbreviation tu, which expands into thank you, because tu in French is the familiar you.  I am still discovering new abbreviations that need to be deleted for this reason.

I decided that verbs needed to be added first, and systematically went through a conjugation chart in a French grammar book, starting with the most common ones – avoir, etre, faire, vouloir, pouvoir, etc.  Verb forms in French vary much more than in English.  In English, for example, the verb to do is easily conjugated:  I do, you do, he/she/one does, we do, they do.  In French, the conjugation of the same verb, faire, is more varied:  je fais, tu fais, il fait, nous faisons, vous faisez, ils faisent. Obviously, this made conjugations more time-consuming.  I discovered that it was more efficient to include the pronoun in the abbreviation.  For example, in my dictionary, je fais is abbreviated jfa, je regarde is jrgrd, et cetera.  I simply used n for nous, v for vous, etc.

And that’s just the present tense.  Without going into too much detail, what I discovered about abbreviating all the verb tenses was that occasionally I had two forms with the same abbreviation, because they were pronounced the same – e.g. il parlait and ils parlaient.  Since I was thinking in phonetic terms, because the s in ils isn’t pronounced, it wouldn’t be in the abbreviation.  I find it inefficient to have to choose from a drop-down list, so I decided to break from the phonetic principle and have two abbreviations:  ilprla and ilsprla.  I have done the same with the plural forms of nouns and adjectives – again, the “s” isn’t pronounced, but I include it in the abbreviation – i.e. chien is shn and chiens is shns.

It was also necessary to create abbreviations for the verb forms without the pronouns, because there are often words that come between the verb and its subject, such as ne…pas.  Because this is how the negative is formed in French, with ne before the verb and pas after it, there are a number of negative expressions that I’ve also abbreviated, including jnsp for je ne suis pas and jnsap for je ne sais pas. 

In general, it’s been an ongoing, unscientific, intuitive undertaking.  While captioning in class, I’ve discovered that some of my original decisions didn’t make sense, and so I’ve been fine-tuning it as I went along.  One thing I’ve realized about C-Print that I never realized before is that you can, and must, at times, break from the phonetic system, and I’ve been doing that more in English as well.  I was told at one point that the test for certification will use only the abbreviations that were originally put in the dictionary, but certification is apparently not imminent, so for example in an Economics class, I’ve been using abbreviations such as emp for employment and nemp for unemployment. 

I do think that a captionist needs to be fluent in a foreign language before undertaking to use C-Print for this purpose.  I’m currently learning Spanish, and hope also to create a Spanish dictionary so that that language will also be more accessible to deaf students at this college.
It is very satisfying to provide this service.  As I’m sure you all know, deaf students are generally told that it’s impossible to accommodate them in a foreign language classroom, and now I know that is not true.  So, if you know a foreign language well enough, and there is a demand for it, I say, go for it!