He added that he was once hospitalised in a mental health facility for more than one year.
Thamsanqa Jantjie said in a 45-minute interview with The Associated Press that his hallucinations began while he was interpreting and that he tried not to panic because there were “armed policemen around me.”
Mr Jantjie, who stood gesticulating one metre from Obama and others who spoke at Tuesday’s ceremony, insisted he was doing proper sign-language interpretation of the speeches of world leaders.
But he also apologised for his performance that was widely panned by sign language experts as gibberish.
“What happened that day, I see angels come to the stadium … I start realizing that the problem is here. And the problem, I don’t know the attack of this problem, how will it come,” Mr Jantjie said. “Sometimes I get violent on that place. Sometimes I will see things chasing me.”
“I was in a very difficult position,” he added. “And remember those people, the president and everyone, they were armed, there was armed police around me. If I start panicking I’ll start being a problem. I have to deal with this in a manner so that I mustn’t embarrass my country.”
Asked how often he had become violent, he said “a lot” while declining to provide details.
“I am very sorry, it’s the situation I found myself in,” Mr Jantjie told South African newspaper The Star. “Life is unfair. This illness is unfair. Anyone who doesn’t understand this illness will think that I’m just making this up.”
Mr Jantjie said he is currently receiving treatment for schizophrenia.
Several sign-language instructors accused the interpreter of a “rubbish” interpretation Wednesday.
Bruno Druchen, the national director of the Deaf Federation of South Africa, said he “was moving his hands around but there was no meaning in what he used his hands for.
“He’s a complete fraud,” added Cara Loening, director of Sign Language Education and Development in Cape Town.
“He wasn’t even doing anything, There was not one sign there. Nothing. He was literally flapping his arms around.”
Mr Jantjie described his qualifications for being a sign language interpreter, but told The Star he works for an interpreting company that paid him $85 for Tuesday’s event. Other reports said he was paid $77 a day, which is far below the usual rate of up to $164 an hour.
“I would like to tell everybody that if I’ve offended anyone, please, forgive me,” Jantjie said in his tidy cement house outfitted with a big-screen TV and with two late-model cars in the carport on the outskirts of Soweto.
“But what I was doing, I was doing what I believe is my calling. I was doing what I believe makes a difference.”
AP journalists who visited the address of the company that Jantjie provided found a different company there, whose managers said they knew nothing about SA Interpreters.
A woman who answered the phone at a number that Jantjie provided confirmed that she worked at the company that hired him for the memorial service but declined comment and hung up.
A South African deputy Cabinet minister, Hendrietta Bogopane-Zulu, later held a news conference to announce that “a mistake happened” in the hiring of Jantjie.
Government officials said they have tried to track down the company that provided Jantjie but the owners “have vanished into thin air,” said Bogopane-Zulu, deputy minister of Women, Children and People with Disabilities.
She apologised to deaf people around the world who were offended by Jantjie’s incomprehensible signing and said an investigation is under way to determine how Jantjie was hired and what vetting process, if any, he underwent for his security clearance.
The deputy minister said the translation company offered sub-standard services.
Ordinarily, sign language interpreters in South Africa are switched every 20 minutes to maintain their concentration levels, she said. Jantjie was on the stage for the entire service that lasted more than four hours.
Many questions remain, including who in the government hired the company that contracted Jantjie, how much money the government paid the company and Jantjie’s own involvement with the company – and even whether it really exists.
But the deputy minister declined to say who in South Africa’s government was responsible for contracting the company that provided the bogus translator, or how those rules were flouted.
“It’s an interdepartmental responsibility,” she said. “We are trying to establish what happened.”
Source
No comments:
Post a Comment