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Comments on “Back Translation”
- Sign Language Studies
- Gallaudet University Press
- Volume 2, 1973
- pp. 73-76
- 10.1353/sls.1973.0000
- Article
- Additional Information
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COMMENTS ON BACK TRANSLATION William C Stokoe, Jr. Two implications that Tweney and Hoemann may not intend lie in the ambiguity and negation of their first paragraph: ASL has no "adequate formal grammar"; some regard it as "ungrammatical"; "few attempts have been made to describe formally [its] grammatical properties"; yet only two (the best or worst?) are specifically disqualified. The implication that only a post-Aspects grammar is worth attempting obscures the fact that the phenomenal recent sophistication of grammar has deep foundations; whether accepted intact as Cartesian or knocked to rubble as postBloomfieldian , grammatical studies since Panini support the formal edifice now in the mode; and adequate grammars of ASL may yet arise on all kinds of unlikely footings. The implication that the experiment in back translation constitutes formal grammar or is superior as a descriptive instrument to studies dismissed as "few attempts" would be hard to justify. As ardently as Tweney and Hoemann, I wish for grammars of ASL in the manner of Chomsky, Fillmore, Halle, Klima, Lees, McCawley, Ross, and Jacobs and Rosenbaum. Unfortunately no one with a native signer's intuition of ASL has written such a grammar, though I remember announcing the desideratum in 1966 (p. 249). Without it one presumably studies the language as it is known and used by native signers, but the eight deaf adults who translated and back translated were "approximately the same age" with a mean of 30 years use of ASL, and "None had acquired ASL as a first language from deaf parents." (04) Having written at length on the matter of Sign competence and Sign and English bilingual competence (1969-70, 1970, 1972a & b), I will summarize: Sign Language Studies ASL as a natural language with its own grammatical properties seldom is out of contact with English. Only the deaf child of deaf parents acquires the peculiarly visual symbolic orientation that makes signing differ most from speaking (cf. Cicourel and Boese 1972; Lenneberg 1971; Bellugi passim). Not only is the ASL linguistic community bilingual in a variety or varieties of Sign and a variety or varieties of English (Woodward 1972), but it is also a textbook case of diglossia (Ferguson 1959; Stokoe 1969-70, 1972a); i.e. there are varieties of ASL reserved to special functions and differing from each other in lexicon, grammatical structure, and manner of acquisition. One variety has virtually the grammar of English in that it follows English order and its user fingerspells words that have no conventional sign equivalent; yet this variety is ASL not English by virtue of its complete substitution of motor signs for vocal activity. It is also the variety taught to persons not native to ASL. The person who encounters it at the age of ten or fifteen or later, especially if deafened after maturation, penetrates to the least English-like variety with difficulty if at all. Moreover even deaf signers who control the whole range or continuum of varieties (Woodward in preparation) may regard this last variety as "ungrammatical" (cf Ferguson 1959). It is possible then that the activities Tweney and Hoemann elicited are less like translation and back translation than like encoding and decoding. Using fingerspelling (54), i.e. an alphabetic code, and sign-word glosses (55), i.e. a lexical code, a user of ASL can transmit and receive English sentences without synthesis or primary linguistic activity (Mattingly and Kavanagh 1972:2-5), i.e. without using or even needing to have competence in that variety of ASL differing least trivially from English. What I regard as an error in design, the uncertainty about subjects' Sign competence, may then be compounded by the kinds of stimulus sentences employed for back translation. These utilize transformations not only unique to English, foreign to Sign, but also to be encountered in precisely those situations that constrain signers to use the most Englishlike variety of ASL they control. Subjects free by design to move from English surface structures into alphabetic and lexical coding are also free Comments to bypass the deep structures or base component of ASL completely. Equally uncertain is their competence in English at the level of the seven transformations of the declarative sentence used as stimuli. Printers can and...