Bilingualism and Identity in Deaf Communities

Transliteration between Spoken Swedish and Swedish Signs

79 Transliteration between Spoken Swedish and Swedish Signs Annica Detthow Interpreting is the process of conveying the meaning of a message from one language into another. Transliteration is the process of representing the discourse of a language in a different form. There is no standardized form of transliteration, but certain strategies used by sign language interpreters have been identified (Winston 1989, Siple 1995). In Sweden, transliteration is referred to as Svenskt påverkat teckenspr åk (“Swedish-modified Sign Language”). Utilizing its awareness of the parties’ knowledge of Swedish Sign Language, an agency can request that an interpreter use this technique. To my knowledge there are no previous studies of Swedish transliteration. The purpose of this study was to determine whether the strategies found by Winston could also be found in Swedish transliteration. LITERATURE REVIEW Interpreter programs in Sweden do not formally address transliteration . Indeed, in Swedish the definition of transliteration is not compatible with the definition of interpretation. For transliteration to be successful, the “receptor” has to know the “base” language (a language’s vocabulary and structure). Sign language transliteration is neither standardized nor does it use two natural languages. Siple suggests that there are three reasons that transliteration is a critical skill for interpreters in the United States. The first reason is that “practitioners and consumers have identi- fied transliteration as a key competency needed by Sign Language interpreters .” The second reason is that “transliteration responds to the communication preference or needs of a large number of deaf community members.” The third reason is that “federal legislation has opened up educational opportunities for deaf people and as a result there is an increased 80 : a n n i c a d e t t h o w demand for interpreters skilled in transliterating at all educational levels” (1995, 11). Humphrey and Alcorn define transliteration as “the process of changing a message expressed in a language into a code of the same language” (1995, 397). They discuss the term transliteration as it is used in music: “The term is used to refer to the transcription of words from one written language into a phonetic form of English, allowing a singer who doesn’t read Italian, for example, to sound out the Italian words by reading them in the transliterated or phonetically based form” (1995, 133). Frishberg describes transliteration used in a written form as a “transcription of a written text from a non-Roman print or script form to Roman letters” and states that “transliteration permits the reader of Roman print to pronounce but not necessarily understand the source language message” (1986, 18). Transliteration for spoken language interpreters seems to be used primarily to impart a flavor of the source language. As Larson points out, certain words “are often transliterated in order to retain a sense of time in history. This is often done in novels and short stories. For example, in translating Spanish novels into English, words like plaza and patio are often used as ‘token’ words to give a Spanish flavor to the translation” (1984, 181). Cokely suggests that “for spoken language interpreters it is quite obvious that there are two distinct languages involved in their interpreting and hence, it is relatively easy to distinguish the two” (1980, 152). He further states that this distinction is not so clear-cut for sign language interpreters , who “most often function in a situation where there are not two languages involved but rather two forms of the same language” (1980, 152). Cokely likens transliteration to “a spoken language interpreter hearing an English sentence and simply substituting German words for the English words, but retaining English grammatical patterns” (1980, 152). Frishberg defines sign language transliteration as “the process of changing an English text into manually coded English (or vice versa). An interpreter who transliterates, also called a ‘transliterator,’ gives the viewer English in a visually accessible form” (1986, 19). However, it is important to note that manually coded signing systems are not the only ways in which deaf and hearing communities come to sign something other than a natural signed language. For example, Lucas and Valli discuss the outcome of language contact between ASL and English (1992). Their study suggests that language con- Swedish Sign Language Transliteration : 81 1. In this chapter deaf refers to the audiological condition of hearing loss and Deaf to social collectivities; Woodward (1972) first made this distinction. tact between...