Intercultural features of English to Italian Sign Language Conference Interpretation: a preliminary study for multimodal corpus analysis

Despite the exponential increase in the internationalisation of verbal communication since the second world war and a marked advance in the exposure of Italians to the English language, it is assumed from the author’s experience working on deaf issues that the deaf signing community in Italy almost exclusively depends on oral/written Italian for intercultural communication with the English- speaking world or occasionally, direct interpretation from English to Italian Sign Language (LIS), which is generally an L3 to L2 combination (as LIS is rarely an L1 for sign-language interpreters). Alternatively and more commonly, two interpreters are involved in a complex filtering mechanism, firstly from English to Italian and then from Italian into LIS. In order to analyse more closely the linguistic and intercultural mechanisms at play during this complex three-tier translation process from the oral/aural channel to the visual/gestural, a survey was conducted which identified situational contexts and broad disciplines with which the LIS interpreter might be confronted. This paper outlines preliminary investigation in one such area of intercultural communication, which emerged from the survey: conference presentations on sign language itself, delivered by English-speaking experts.