Crossing the Sound Barrier: Communication of LSP in Audiovisual Translation for the Deaf

Global communication between peoples has accelerated exponentially since the digital revolution of the eighties. Better and faster technological channels for communicating information across the globe, have led to a handful of languages taking centre stage, with English holding the lion\u2019s share in the fields of international business and science communication. It is estimated that there live around 70 million deaf or seriously hearing-impaired people world wide that experience a constant state of silence and are cut off from much communication by an invisible physiological barrier: deafness. They live and work like their fellow citizens, but constantly have to adjust to sound deprivation in order to communicate beyond the self. If properly trained, they can learn to lip-read and speak the language of their country of residence or they may resort to sign language amongst themselves. But how do deaf people cope with international communication, for example the use of English as a foreign language? Deaf people can and do learn foreign spoken languages, but only a minority of them reach high levels of competence, whereas the rest, rely on written translation like hearing people. How is the barrier of spoken English dialogue crossed? How do deaf people gain access to information through English and how is LSP, so commonly encountered in international communication, transferred to deaf people? An attempt is made to address these questions by outlining research in progress on access for the Deaf to American feature films through audio visual translation via (subtitling). Research is reported on domain-specific discourse of socio-political nature and more specifically the legal, medical and institutional terminology found in a multimodal corpus comprising three well-known contemporary American feature films covering different socio-political themes from which two parallel written corpora have been compiled for comparison and analysis: the transcribed spoken-English dialogues aligned with their Italian subtitles. Analysis of the corpus has centred on the investigation of how Anglo-American cultural and identity traits are constructed and transferred through languages for special purposes and how their \u2018image\u2019 is \u2018reflected\u2019 in Italian to reach the deaf target audience. Findings are reported briefly, with examples of how international anglocentric textual models cross the international sound barrier through the Italian visual media and whether they are compatible with deaf cultural norms, or rejected, or are conversely adapted in some way through textual recasting