Interpreting conflict from speech to sign on Italian television

Abstract

If research on the role of spoken-language interpreting in global news coverage is limited, the role of signed-language interpreting in this area is news in itself! This joint paper focuses on an aspect of international communication for Italian profoundly deaf and hard-of-hearing people: global news coverage through simultaneous Italian Sign Language (LIS) interpreting on television. It looks in particular at the transfer of news related to global conflicts across the linguistic and cultural divide between the deaf and hearing worlds. A comparative linguistic analysis was conducted on a small multimodal corpus (in both spoken Italian and simultaneously interpreted LIS) of brief video recorded Italian television news bulletins, to investigate textual features of interpreted news and the main linguistic challenges facing sign language interpreters in the domain of conflict such as terminology, foreign loans, foreign proper, toponymic and institutional names. These are some of the aspects covered by this paper to reveal how news crosses the international ‘sound barrier’.