Investigation into Linguistic and Cultural Mediation between the English-speaking World and the Italian Deaf Signing Community.

With the spread of spoken and written forms of English throughout the world since the Second World War, Italians have been increasingly exposed to it, however, deaf people must generally rely on interpreters when subjected to direct contact with the English language which is often fil-tered through Italian first. To date, the nature and extent of cross-cultural encounters between Eng-lish and the Deaf signing community has not been investigated. To this purpose a questionnaire was distributed among professional Italian sign-language interpreters to determine the extent of English to LIS interpretation in Italy and discover which genres are commonly involved to better understand the market requirements of this specialized form of translation. This present paper deals with the aims, format and results of this investigation, showing its significance within an in-tercultural and linguistic framework.