I will start this post by admitting that working in VRS for many years, I never had the opportunity to work with CDI's. (I have been freelancing for 1 1/2 years now, I absolutely LOVE working with CDI's!) By the time this CDI really criticized me, I had worked with CDI's about 10 times.
It was a very complex meeting...lawyers involved, Deaf consumers from another country, ASL their second language. I knew the topic very well and all the while interpreting the meeting, in my head I actually thought I was doing some of my best work. Conversely, the CDI was really struggling. At one point looking exhausted, said to their team, "Im lost, take over".
After the meeting I complimented the CDI's on how hard they worked for the Deaf consumers and how impressed I was.
Suddenly the one CDI (who struggled) said, "We worked so hard because you didnt do a good job interpreting! You "interpreted", you didnt "feed". Then very confrontationally asked me, "How many CDI's have you worked with?!" When I said upwards of 10, she said "Well, Ive worked with 100 CDI/hearing teams." She said I shouldn't take "high stakes" meetings. I told her I may have only worked with 10 CDI's but none of them complained about my work. I also explained that the meeting we just did, Ive done 100 of those so I knew my terminology, I knew the topic every which way.
Besides needing to rant about it 😉 was their struggling my fault? Shouldn't they have told me how they wanted the spoken information given to them? Some like chunking, some are just like, give it to me like you normally interpret. (There were a few times I asked the main person running the meeting, "Please pause while the information is interpreted" when the CDI's were on.)
What do you all think? I know now to always ask the CDI how they'd like me to feed them the information.