International Sign: Its Use as an International Conference Lingua Franca

Abstract

The provision of International Sign (IS) interpretation in situations of inter-lingual communication both at international conferences and on websites serving deaf academics, students, interpreters and deaf association leaders has become increasingly widespread in the last decade. This paper presents some of the linguistic and cultural phenomena underlying the effective use of IS as an international means of communication by examining the linguistic choices of IS interpreters when delivering their message in a unique pidgin variety developed solely between users of signed languages. The corpus consists of parallel IS/English texts obtained from five websites serving the international community of sign language users (see CILS, CDS, ASLW, WASLI and WFD). The paper analyzes the lexical choices and syntactic organization of the IS utterances and points out parallels between spoken language and IS sign language interpreting. Major features of this corpus of web-based monologic IS interpreted texts are found to correspond to features of IS identified in previous studies of live (offline) IS interpreting (Woll, Fischer 1991, Webb & Supalla, Supalla & Webb, Moody 2002, Locker-McKee & Napier, Allsop, Woll & Brauti, Rosenstock 2004, Villeneuve), namely: borrowing lexical items from national sign languages, accessing widely-shared grammatical features of documented signed languages such as the use of space and movement to locate referents and to indicate syntactic relations, body shifts and eye gaze, rhetorical questions, and the use of classifiers, circumlocution, metaphor and the deconstruction of abstract terms into basic meaning units to compensate for the lack of a conventionalized, standard lexicon. Future directions of research into IS, which include retrospective interviews with the online interpreters and follow-up intelligibility studies with target audience signers in a variety of countries, are suggested.