Translating the deaf self

This presentation explores the lived experience of five deaf professionals who use British Sign Language and who work regularly with interpreters in the workplace, and documents how they manage and negotiate their professional identity when they are represented to their hearing work colleagues through interpreters, i.e. how their ‘deaf self’ is translated and represented. Through the frame of identity work (Bucholtz & Hall, 2008), notions of representation and the experience ‘othering’ (Goffman, 1968, 1972) were explored using retrospective stimulated recall interviews. The findings reveal that deaf professionals manage and negotiate their professional self-identity by working with the same interpreters as an occupational strategy, that they experience othering due to lack of direct communication with hearing colleagues, and that representation is a recognisable and important component of communicative access and participation because of its potential consequences for professional identity and the occupational self. As such, engaging with translation is a constituent of the deaf self.

Professor Jemina Napier is Chair of Intercultural Communication at Heriot-Watt University and an interpreter researcher, educator and practitioner. She is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, a Corresponding Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities and a Fellow of the Association of Sign Language Interpreters UK. She conducts interdisciplinary linguistic, social and ethnographic explorations of direct and mediated communication in sign languages to inform interpreting studies, applied linguistics and deaf studies disciplines.

This lecture forms part of the "Translating Across Languages and Cultures Conference Series". It is sponsored by the Institute of Language, Culture and Society (ILCS) and ran by Oxford Brookes University.