Is this the way ASL is done in professional settings? ASL interpreters I’ve seen previously on TV interpreting for politicians do not mug it up nearly as much as this guy does with his various faces. Is this normal ASL for professional environments?
If I couldn’t hear somebody but I could see their facial expressions, I would be able to tell the difference between “coffee’s ready” and “GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE, THERE’S A FIRE!” I would be able to discern the level of urgency. I suspect people that read lips and hands as a fact of life can do it much better than me.
He’s kinda a goofball, but I don’t know that it’s actually inappropriate. I think he’s overexaggerating all his signs (my ASL is extremely bad, I haven’t needed it for over a decade and I never learned it all that well), mainly because he’s probably used to needing to sign for large groups that can’t see him as well. If I’m overexaggerating everything, I’d probably end up with some odd expressions too.
Plus, I can’t imagine there’s hordes of good interpreters out there. He may just be whoever the city has on payroll and there’s not a lot of options for replacement.
I don’t know much about ASL, but I can see the need for something along these lines as basically similar to using a smiley face or an emoticon in text. You sometimes don’t get the full “vibe” of a spoken statement in text, and in the same way you might not get it from straight sign language, so a facial expression could help communicate the entirety of the communication.
Agree with the above that those might seem very exaggerated in a close-up shot, but need to be that way when signing to a large room full of people.
I don’t know ASL, but that doesn’t look like any language… he uses the same exact gestures repeatedly and has a limited number of them; it’s hard to believe he is communicating much of anything with what seems to be such a small vocabulary. I have no idea what’s going on with his face… he isn’t repeating the mayor’s words, he’s just making faces.
I’ll be the first to say that he’s a fake.
[Skinner]
Prove me wrong, kids.
[/Skinner]
ETA: HA! I proved myself wrong! [Cite.
](The Sign Language Interpreter for De Blasio’s Press Conference Was Deaf. How Does That Work?)
Take that, ignorance! 
The guy at the Mandela funeral was better.
Yes, facial expression is a huge part of ASL grammar.
For example if you sign “dangerous” while giving a halfhearted shrug you’re saying “it might be dangerous, maybe”. If you sign “dangerous” with a severe and frightened expression, this signals “the danger is real, take it seriously.” Note how efficient this makes ASL.
I didn’t like his interpretation, only because it had big pauses, and so at times he failed to introduce people as they spoke because of this. It wasn’t a word for word, which is more of a style issue that can be debated. It was more ASL than it was SignedEnglish. Btw, people who don’t recognize sign language (and beginner students) often have trouble distinguishing between signs with similar hand shapes (for example, school, cheese, and movie are similar looking to beginners/non signers).
Agreed, that performance was dead on.
Are the shrug and the frightened expression grammatical elements, in the sense that you can take exactly the same gestures and append them to different signs with the same semantic result?
IOW are they morphemes?
I’m not super up on my linguistic terms, but I think I understand what you’re asking and I think the answer is yes. Adverbial and emphatic words like “very” aren’t used in ASL. The forcefulness of the gesture combined with your expression conveys that content. An example is “should” vs. “must” – the hand gesture is the same, the forcefulness is different and the expression is different to convey different shades of “ought to” ranging from “it would be a good idea” to “You will have a major problem if you don’t do (whatever)”. I [should] exercise vs. I [must] file my taxes.
Fear expression + “dog” = I’m scared of dogs or that dog is scary, depending on the context. You might also lean your body away from the location in space where you placed the sign for dog, (which in turn should show where the dog was compared to you) or make a Yuck face to show that was unpleasant. .
Interestingly, sign languages are not mutually intelligible, but most facial expression that convey emotion are almost universally recognized across cultures.