Karen Nurkowksi — if you don’t recognize the name, you may recognize her face. Nurkowski has become a regular presence on Saskatchewan TV screens over the past few weeks, interpreting the province’s COVID-19 updates into American Sign Language (ASL).
She’s been interpreting for 33 years, but making critical health information immediately available to the deaf community is brand new. “I’d never done anything like that,” Nurkowski told Global News. “I really realized the deaf community needed the updates just as much as everybody else did.
And I felt it was a very important job for me to do to make sure our deaf community was in the loop.” Initially, the province didn’t hire an interpreter for its weekday pandemic updates, leaving some to get