Rapping in Sign Language

The star who went viral after the Bonnaroo Music Festival wasn't any of the headliners -it was the woman who danced along with them. Holly Maniatty is a sign language interpreter, a professional who works all kinds of concerts. Rap shows are a special challenge as the words fly fast and are often freestyle, wandering far from the recorded version. Maniatty holds her own interpreting on the fly, but she also does plenty of research beforehand. She talked about her first rap show, for the Beastie Boys in 2009.

To prepare for the show, Maniatty says she logged more than 100 hours of research on the Beastie Boys, memorizing their lyrics and watching past shows. Her prep work also includes researching dialectal signs to ensure accuracy and authenticity. An Atlanta rapper will use different slang than a Queens one, and ASL speakers from different regions also use different signs, so knowing how a word like guns and brother are signed in a given region is crucial for authenticity.

Signing a rap show requires more than just literal translation. Maniatty has to describe events, interpret context, and tell a story. Often, she is speaking two languages simultaneously, one with her hands and one with her mouth, as she’ll sometimes rap along with the artists as well. When a rapper recently described a run-in with Tupac, Maniatty rapped along while making the sign for hologram, so deaf fans would know the reference was to Tupac’s holographic cameo at Coachella, not some figment of the rapper's imagination.

Read more about Maniatty's work at Slate. Link -via Metafilter

Check out more amazing talents over at our Mad Skills blog

Comments (0)

Yeah but aren't atoms like 99.999999999% empty space? When considering the whole volume of the glass, the percentage of space taken up by mass-possessing particles is absurdly low. The glass is always empty.
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And don't forget the engineer take, which has been featured on Neatorama on Feb 9, 2008: "An optimist will tell you the glass is half-full; the pessimist, half-empty; and the engineer will tell you the glass is twice the size it needs to be".
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It is assumed that the question is "Is the glass half-full or half-empty OF WATER." Too bad "geeks" fail at pragmatics. Us normal people get it just fine.
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@No (9)

I agree with Falko. You are ASSUMING the glass is halfway filled with WATER. You could just as easily assume the glass is half full of apple juice or dirt. I've never heard the saying specify WHAT the glass is half full or empty OF.

lol. :)
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I love it. In fact, I thought of this years ago and have just continued to wait until someone asked it the glass was half full or half empty, so I could give my neither-optimistic-nor-pessimistic version, but one that transcends both!

Of course, being a scientist myself, I have always been worried with the flaw in an otherwise beautiful and unexpected answer. For a while I almost changed my stock answer to "It's less than 1 percent full, actually about a billion times less. But I love the "all full" answer so much better.

I did appreciate Gupta's "twice the size it needs to be" comment...

Nevertheless, the glass *is* half full of water the second most important substance of our lives. How is it that so many people forget the glass is also half full of air - *the* most important substance in our lives!!!!
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