Sign Language Interpretation: The State of the Art

Abstract

The field of sign language interpretation has existed for many years as has the field of spoken language interpretation, but only became a profession as recently as 1964. The profession of sign language interpreters is unique due to the fact that a manual means is used to transmit language. Although the term interpreter is used, a clarification of terms is in order. Sign languages are genetically and structurally independent of spoken languages even within the same language community. There are, however, numerous artificial sign languages which have been developed in various countries to code the spoken language of the community. Where a message in a natural sign language is recreated in a spoken language, or vice versa, the process is known as interpretation. Where the conversion involves an artificial sign language, the process is called transliteration. Therefore, the re-creation of messages between Manual English and English (two forms of the same language) is transliteration. The definitions of transliteration and interpretation are after Fant (1972).