A Multimodal Approach in a Multilingual Context: Interpretation from English to Italian to Italian Sign Language

The sign language of the Italian Deaf can be considered a relatively new and challenging language of study and is especially interesting from a cross-cultural perspective. This paper presents a corpus approach for the multimodal analysis of discourse in the form of interpreted text in a multilingual setting: English, Italian and Italian Sign Language. A corpus was selected representative of the genre most frequently encountered by professional sign language interpreters when working from English, to pinpoint linguistic and cultural features of interest that might emerge during this complex cross-cultural encounter. The corpus is of multimodal nature consisting in the video recordings of four academic speeches on sign language and interpretation, thus within the domain of linguistics, which were simultaneously interpreted from English into Italian and Italian Sign Language for a mixed Italian hearing and deaf audience. Problems related to the parallel transcription process, which was complicated by the three dimensional nature of signs and trilingual nature of the study, are discussed. Initial findings are reported on the microtextual analysis of linguistic and intercultural features revealing extensive textual recasting.