AGM and Workshops – Free for members

AGM Itinerary

Friday 4^th October 2019

There is a Deaf Pub meet up called The Faith at The Imperial Wetherspoon’s Pub from 6pm until late. For anyone arriving that day please feel free to head to The Imperial for a drink; the local community are aware we have our AGM in Exeter and will be around.

The board will be making a reservation for dinner at a local restaurant for approximately 8pm (possibly The Waterfront or Samuel Jones) – anyone wishing to join us is very welcome, please email jill.henshaw@asli.org.uk by 08/09/2019 so we can book the table.

Saturday 5^th October 2019

09:30 – Registration

10:00 – AGM

12:00 – Lunch

13:00 – Workshop 1

14:15 – Coffee Break

14:45 – Workshop 2

16:00 – End

Post-AGM drinks at a nearby bar.

For anyone in Exeter on the Saturday evening wishing to join the board for dinner around 7pm, again please inform Jill and we will include you in the reservation.

Workshop 1: Dr Christopher Stone and Jenny Koehring
Title: Where’s the point: using resources in our environment

It is now more frequent that sign language interpreters will work in a conference style, i.e.
interpreting one-way without being able to interrupt the speaker. Often in these settings
slide presentations are used, with graphics, videos and written information; there may also be an
STTR providing written access to the spoken English. As interpreters who are wanting to provide
access to information we can make decisions to draw our service users attention to the multimedia
environment, giving space to the viewer to read slides, look at graphs, watch videos, etc. and for this
to influence our linguistic representation of those things to make our BSL rendition more relevant to
the moment.

One of the models we can draw upon to inform the decisions that we make are in-vision interpreters
who interpret the broadcast news. In many ways this is conference interpreting in the extreme, it is
prepared although delivered live, it has multimodal resources that can be referred to, and the
speaker cannot be interrupted. We will present an analysis of the language decisions and reference
decisions that both deaf and hearing in-vision interpreters make. This will then lead to a discussion
regarding the types of decisions we can make in the moment when being present in a situation to make our interpretation contextually specific.

Christopher Stone works at the University of Wolverhampton, currently teaching on the BA and recently
started MA interpreting courses leading to RSLI (and RSLT). His research has explored Deaf people
working as translators and interpreters within the Deaf community, with colleagues (Drs Robert Adam
and Breda Carty; Dr Debra Russell), and television (see ‘Towards a Deaf Translation Norm’, Gallaudet
University Press, 2009).
Currently he is researching in-vision interpreting on television alongside other projects and is still
celebrating his recent promotion to Reader (somewhere between Senior Lecturer and Professor
whose meaning is lost in time).
He still works as an interpreter and enjoys it.

Jenny Koehring graduated from the University of Wolverhampton interpreting course and works as a
freelance interpreter, mainly in Derbyshire. She is currently studying for a Master’s degree in
occupational psychology and has a keen interest in cross-disciplinary research. Her thesis examines
psychometric test impact on Deaf people in three measures of specific ability.

Workshop 2: Dr. Gabrielle Hodge, DCAL
Rethinking reference and using the BSL corpus to scaffold existing interpreting practices

One of the most challenging aspects of interpreting between BSL and English is keeping track
of who is doing or saying what to whom. Recent research into the nature of doing reference in
Auslan (Australian signed language) demonstrated just how complicated this can be (Hodge,
​Ferrara & Anible, 2019). In narrative retellings, deaf Auslan signers skilfully coordinate fully
conventionalised forms (such as lexical manual signs and English fingerspelling and/or
mouthing) with more richly improvised semiotics (such as indicating verbs, pointing signs,
depicting signs, and enactments) to identify and talk about different referents. The exact
manifestation of how each referent is expressed depends on a range of factors, many of which
are not yet well understood. These include how established the referent is in the discourse
(e.g. new versus given), what kind of referent it is (e.g. human, animal or thing), and how the
signer makes meaningful use of space. But how do these factors apply to BSL and how can
they be effectively interpreted into spoken English? How can we improve our understanding
of how deaf signers do reference when the research literature is still developing?

In this interactive workshop, we will explore how deaf BSL signers do reference by using video data
of native signers documented in the BSL Corpus. We will look at these videos from the
perspective of communication and interaction (more so than linguistics). By the end of the
session, you will have a deeper understanding of how deaf BSL signers do reference, along
with practical tools to take home with you and use to improve your ability to track and do
reference within your interpreting practice.

Hodge, G., Ferrara, L. & B. Anible. (2019). ‘The semiotic diversity of doing reference in a
deaf signed language’. Journal of Pragmatics, 143: 33-53. DOI:
10.1016/j.pragma.2019.01.025

Dr. Gabrielle Hodge is a deaf researcher specialising in the linguistics of signed languages. She
earned her PhD in Linguistics from Macquarie University in 2014, supervised by Professor Trevor
Johnston. Her doctoral research used the Auslan Corpus to investigate and describe clause structure
in signed languages. She is currently a post-doctoral researcher working with Dr. Kearsy Cormier on
the BSL Syntax Project at the Deafness Cognition and Language Research Centre at University College
London. Her research interests include corpus linguistics and the semiotics of multimodal signed and
spoken language interaction.