Turn-Taking, Fingerspelling, and Contact in Signed Languages

Turn-Taking Mechanisms and Active Participation in Meetings with Deaf and Hearing Participants in Flanders

73 Turn-Taking Mechanisms and Active Participation in Meetings with Deaf and Hearing Participants in Flanders Mieke Van Herreweghe If Deaf signers and hearing nonsigners want to attend a joint meeting, communication among them is usually accomplished by means of at least one sign language interpreter.1 In these “mixed” meetings (with Deaf signers and hearing nonsigners), we generally assume that the presence of a sign language interpreter creates equality of both parties (Deaf and hearing), in other words, that, by means of the sign language interpreter, equal participation of both parties becomes possible. Moreover, as Roy (1993) states, To assist outsiders in understanding the practice of the interpreting profession , professional interpreters often describe their role by using metaphors such as “bridge” and “channel” which suggest the link or connection that they make between people who do not speak a common language. Interpreters themselves find it difficult to explain their role without resorting to these conduit metaphors, which then leads to a general perception of interpreters as passive, neutral participants whose job it is to mechanically transmit the content of the source message in the form of the target language. (342) This concept of the interpreter as the neutral creator of equality leads to what Metzger (1999) calls “The Interpreter’s Paradox” (21), or the fact that “[i]nterpreters have expressed the goal of not influencing the form, content, structure, and outcomes of interactive discourse, but the reality is that interpreters, by their very presence, influence the interaction” (23). The study described in this chapter looked at equal participation of Deaf and hearing participants in a mixed meeting, on the one hand, and the 1. It is customary to write Deaf with a capital letter D for deaf people who regard themselves as members of a linguistic and cultural minority group of sign language users regardless of their degree of hearing loss and to write deaf with a small letter d when not referring to this linguistic and cultural minority group. 74 : m i e k e v a n h e r r e w e g h e influence of the sign language interpreter on this participation, on the other hand, by observing turn-taking mechanisms used by meeting participants in Flanders. Mixed meetings with one or two sign language interpreters were videotaped, and the turn-taking mechanisms in these mixed meetings were compared to those in all-sign meetings to establish whether participation of Deaf participants in an all-sign meeting is comparable to participation of Deaf participants in a mixed meeting. However, before elaborating on the main issues of this study, some background information on Flanders and signed language in Flanders follows. BACKGROUND INFORMATION ON FLANDERS AND SIGNED LANGUAGE IN FLANDERS Flanders is the northern part of Belgium, a small triangular country in Western Europe with its capital, Brussels (which is also the capital of Flanders), situated in the middle of the country. In 1993, Belgium became a federalized monarchy with basically two states (Flanders in the north with about 5,500,000 inhabitants and Wallonia in the south with about 4,500,000 inhabitants) and two official languages: Dutch in Flanders and French in Wallonia.2 Actually, the situation is more complex because, in addition, the eastern part of Belgium includes a small German-speaking area, and German is the third official language (with about 60,000 speakers), but going into all these political aspects is not necessary. Worth mentioning, though, is that many immigrant workers speaking their various first languages (Turkish, Arabic, etc.) reside in Belgium and that, of course, various signed languages that are not officially recognized are also used. The Flemish Deaf community is estimated to include approximately 5,000 signed language users. The education of deaf children in Belgium and its neighboring countries was and has continued to be strongly influenced by the resolutions accepted at the Milan Conference in 1880. Deaf children were educated orally, and signs were banned. By the begin2 . The Dutch that is spoken in Flanders is the same language as the Dutch that is spoken in the Netherlands with minor differences (mostly pronunciation differences and, to some extent, lexical and minor grammatical differences). Actually, the two uses can easily be compared to the English that is spoken in the States and the English that is spoken in Britain. ning of the twentieth century, every major town in Flanders...