Thursday, September 18, 2008

Beautiful



I saw this and it became all I wanted to say today.

13 comments:

Anonymous said...

It's a lovely song and I see why you chose it.

But I found it bizarre that they cut off everyone's eyes in this video, because many grammatical features in ASL are made in the face, including in the area of the eyes (eyebrows). It makes me wonder who did the actual filming, whether they were really tied to the Deaf community, and if so why they made that choice to snip away an important source of grammatical information.

(No equivalent in English, but it would be sort of as if you wrote something in English then stripped away all the punctuation and capital letters and randomly changed a few verb endings or randomly rearragned words within sentences. Most of the information is still there, but it feels unnatural because it's not how real signed languages work.)

And the ASL translation ... I guess with any song you have to take some artistic license with the translation: you can't really have both an exact translation and also a translation that works artistically. But the signs were different enough that it was almost a different song altogether--similar message, but, really, just a different song. That does seem to be common in the song translation business, though, at least with ASL (and, I'm guessing, probably with other signed languages as well). Not sure why.

But the sentiment in the song is exactly what many people need to hear (or see).

Anonymous said...

I don't know asl - it is so different from bsl - but loved the video. Thanks Dave.

Myr

Anonymous said...

loved it, I miss signing!
I used to work at a school for the deaf, thanks for the vid! it was indeed very beautiful!
Thanks again!

Anonymous said...

Absolutely beautiful! I think watching someone sign is like watching someone dance.

Ettina said...

Yes, ASL is more like FSL.
I liked the song too. I don't know enough ASL to be able to tell what they said, but I guessed it wasn't the same because they had singing at some points when the people clearly weren't signing.

wordsong_girl said...

Hi Dave
Thanks for sharing that beautiful song. I once knew some sign language when my daughter (DS) was little but we both soon lost it when she began to talk.

Here are a couple of videos you might like too.

My daughter was asked to be in a music video, also called Beautiful. The singer/songwriter hadn't originally meant the song to be interpreted the way it was, but everyone was happy with the end product. I love it of course.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqy1T8dGmfM

The other video was scripted, acted, filmed, and edited by the youth (again including my girl)in the film. The video was one of four made that year (2006/07)with open i, a digital filmmaking program for kids with disabilites. Very cool.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-RcLV4eSFE

Hope you like 'em.

Anonymous said...

wordsong_girl:

Is there another version of these videos out there with SUBTITLES? I went to look at them both, but because they have no subtitles, I wasn't able to get anything out of them. (I'm deaf, so I need subtitles or else I cannot understand videos.)

Thanks,

Caroline said...

That actually brought tears to my eyes...

little.birdy said...

Andrea, I was going to make the same comment, that I don't understand why they cut the faces in half. Those people ARE beautiful, and I want to see more of them!

Belinda said...

Beautiful! Thanks for sharing it.

Unknown said...

love love LOVED the video...and am now running to share it!!

i use Christina's song in the 2nd half of my 'welcome to DS' video (it's up on molly's myspace acct)

the words are so powerful...bested only by her voice...PERFECT!

thanks for posting that!


e & molly kate

myspace.com/downsyndrome_awareness

Sister Sunshine said...

Thanks for sharing. That was so beautiful it actually made me cry. Guess it hit a nerve, huh?

Susan said...

Finally! It took me to today to get to a high speed connection, but it was worth waiting for!

Beautiful!