A reader has sent me this video of a fake interpreter at Nelson Mandela’s memorial asking if I see any signs of deception.  I do not know sign language.

When watching the video, I do see several notable points:

1. The hand movements of the two signers are dramatically different.

2. One looks precise and the other sloppy.

3. The sloppy one doesn’t seem to be listening for the words to interpret them. He almost acts caught off guard as the speaker talks, like “oh yeah, I gotta do this”.

4. The woman’s gestures vary dramatically. The man’s gestures all seem all too similar and he doesn’t spell out words like the woman does.

5. The man has an arrogance about him. I can feel his love of attention. Can you?

I would definitely be put off by the sloppy, inattentive nature of the man and his arrogance.  He wouldn’t be someone I would trust if he came to speak to me.  I suspect if I were there and watched this, I would be suspect of the man, for sure, but that’s about all I can say.

Readers are asking why did this man do this?  Did he really think he’d get away with this?  While I haven’t spoken to him and I don’t know him, knowing human behavior I can speculate that yes, he thought he’d get away with it.  People who are arrogant often aren’t grounded and realistic.  He likely convinced himself there wouldn’t be enough deaf people listening to call him out.   Yes, that is humorous to us, but he didn’t have that foresight. His arrogance blinded him.

As I always say, arrogance is the biggest stumbling block for liars there is!  It brought this jerk down to earth real fast.