Sign language interpreters’ use of haptic signs in interpreted meetings with deafblind persons

Abstract

This article presents a study of how sign language interpreters use haptic signs in interpreter-mediated meetings with deafblind persons. The analysis illustrates how this kind of interpreting is organized and how interactional space is reconfigured through embodied haptic signs. The material is from an authentic meeting among five deafblind board members of a Norwegian association for the deafblind. Despite their inability to see and hear one another clearly or not at all, the dialogue among them flows. Based on an analysis of video-recordings from the meeting, this article provides insight into the interpreters’ actions as well as their interaction with each other and their deafblind interlocutors. In particular, the article draws attention to how the interpreters alternate their actions between mediating spoken utterances, describing the meeting context and producing different kinds of haptic signs. Haptic signs are conventional signals produced on a deafblind person's body providing contextualizing information about the environment where the interaction is taking place. They also work to convey other participants’ nonverbal expressions, such as turn-taking, minimal-response signals and emotional expressions. As such, haptic signs provide information that the deafblind can use to frame their interaction as well as to enable them to regulate their own self-presentation. In this context, haptic signs produced by the interpreters supports involvement in the ongoing meeting, selecting effective signals and timing the production and adjustment of the signals from the feedback given by the deafblind interlocutors. An interpreter's actions are based on a situated, moment-by-moment evaluation of the participation framework in which all the participants, both the interpreters and the deafblind persons, operate.