"Who Is My Voice Today?" - Deaf Professionals and Representation

The profession of Sign Language interpreting is constantly evolving alongside the changing needs of deaf customers. One current topic in Finland and worldwide is interpreting for deaf professionals and their representation. The theoretical background of the present study consists of literature regarding deaf professionals, designated interpreting and directionality of interpretation. It resides in the field of sociolinguistics and discourse analysis, and has an interactional sociolinguistic framework. The present study is firstly built on replication of a research by Roy (1987), which investigated perceptions of hearing monolingual evaluators of an interpreted lecture from American Sign Language to English. The interpretation was evaluated inappropriate by its discourse because it was mistakenly perceived as a talk for children. Roy analysed the interpretation and identified the paralinguistic mechanisms which affected the communicative breakdown even though the content of the lecture was adequately interpreted. The present study aims to add the perspective of representation of deaf professionals to Roy’s original research in order to show the advantages of designated interpreting. The methodology of the present study is based on a lecture held in Finnish Sign Language and interpreted to Finnish. Hearing participants were subsequently played a recording of the interpretation and then interviewed. The interviews and the interpretation were analysed to find the characteristics affecting the hearing participants’ perceptions. The findings of the present study are that when the interpretation was done by interpreters who produced adequate discourse and were familiar with the context and content of a deaf professional’s work, the hearing participants were able to recognise the professionality of the lecturer in despite of minor disfluencies in interpretation. The interpretation was analysed for characteristics that were influencing the hearing participants’ perceptions of the deaf professional. A key finding was that the hearing participants considered interpretation separate from their perceptions on the deaf professionals’ professionality, and were forgiving of disfluencies in interpretation