The thesis is divided into seven chapters. The first chapter is a general introduction to the research questions, the hypotheses and the expected results. It is divided into six different paragraphs, namely introduction, research hypothesis, background and rationale for the study, the general method applied in the study, the anticipated contribution of the study and the organization of the thesis.
The body of the thesis is conceptually divided into two main parts. The first part is made up of chapter one and chapter two which focus on Taiwan Sign Language (TSL), whilst chapters three through seven on TSL interpreting. The second chapter is an introduction to Taiwan Sign Language which has to be duly mentioned before talking about TSL interpreting issues. It can be perceived as a diachronic analysis of TSL, and one if its paragraphs is subtitled a historical journey towards dignity, because it emphasizes the efforts the Deaf community, along with linguists and international scholars, have made to recognize the linguistic dignity of sign languages around the world. This chapter covers a historical excursus of TSL, a delving into TSL diatopic and diachronic variation, including an interview with the older generation of signers vs. the younger one, plus the discussion on how
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interpreters deal with the lexical items with different signings when they are doing the interpretation. Therefore, it is important for the interpreters to have a linguistic background. For example, it is essential for the interpreter to be aware of the different geographic variations so that s/he can not only understand different forms of signing but also adapt his or her own signing according to the interlocutor’s geographic and social background. The remainder of the chapter is dedicated to issues such as the question of language “evolution” (from hands to mouth), cued speech, manually coded language, lip reading, oralism, and grammar sign language vs. sign language, which are important and relevant to the present dissertation from the Deaf community point of view, as previously mentioned. These issues will be further emphasized in the TSL interpreting evaluation chapter by underlining the fact that sometimes the text that is used during the exams is Signed Chinese and not Natural Sign Language. Therefore, they complicate the TSL interpreting evaluation process.
The second conceptual part of the thesis is more directly linked with interpreting issues. In the third chapter, the history of TSL interpreting is introduced. A corpus of TSL interpreters have been surveyed to ensure whether the precarious and unprofessional conditions dictated by the government are indeed so. Under the hypothesis that indeed they are so, the rest of the research is fully aimed at proving my thesis, i.e. bimodal interpreters should share the same professional dignity as oral interpreters. The second paragraph of the third chapter is an analysis of TSL interpreting history. The fourth paragraph is titled “professional volunteers”. This title is a pun. It reflects the almost volunteering nature of TSL professional sign language interpreters nowadays, considering the straitened conditions in which they work and it is also a window of reflection on many other sectors, where professionals are really volunteers, which I have personally come in contact with.
The final part of the third chapter underlines the importance that is given to professional evaluation after many years of sign language interpreting history, not only in Taiwan but also abroad (cf. Malcolm Williams, 2004) and will be further emphasized in the chapter dedicated to the issue of TSL interpreting assessment and evaluation.
Chapter four further explores some challenging areas of TSL interpreting, namely challenging areas such as figurative speech and metaphors, which will have to be taken into consideration in the evaluation process. This chapter is aimed at proving that the efforts underlying sign language interpreting are at the basis of the necessity of turn-shifting on stage while interpreting at a sign language event.
Chapter five covers an exhaustive literature review of all the neurobiological studies that are a proof of the fact that TSL is indeed a natural language and not a human construct. Furthremore, this chapter reunites two experiments, namely the qualitative pilot study and the quantitative pilot study, the latter proves the complicated nature of TSL interpreting process. This will have to be taken into consideration in the evaluation process which is in the following chapter. This chapter is focused on the tightrope hypothesis experiment along with the review of two neurobiological studies concerning the bilingual brain in bimodals, which can be applied also to sign language interpreters, seen as bimodal bilinguals. In the present chapter, I will reduplicate Daniel Gile's Effort Model Tightrope Hypothesis Experiment applied, this time, to TSL interpreting. According to Daniel Gile's Effort Model Tightrope Hypothesis, the so-called ‘competition hypothesis’ can be represented in the following way, with the total processing capacity consumption.
TotC associated with interpreting at any time represented as a ‘sum’ (not in the pure arithmetic sense) of consumption for L(anguage), consumption for M(emory) and consumption for P(roduct), with further consumption for ‘coordination’ (C) between
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the Efforts, that is, the management of capacity allocation between the Efforts:
(1) TotC = C(L) + C(M) + C(P) + C(C) and
(2) C(i) ≥ 0 i = L, M, P (3) TotC ≥ C(i) i = L, M, P
(4) TotC ≥ C(i) + C(j) i,j = L, M, P and i different from j
(Where - equation (1) represents the total processing capacity consumption- inequality (2) means that each of the three Efforts requires some processing capacity.
Now, the idea that most of the time, interpreters, irrespective of the modality, work near saturation level is the so-called ‘tightrope hypothesis’, which this experiment aims to prove for sign language interpreters. This ‘tightrope hypothesis’
is crucial in explaining the high frequency of errors and omissions that can be observed in interpreting even when no particular technical or other difficulties can be identified in the source speech (Gile 1989). The precise aim of this investigation is to try to establish, in a sample of professionals interpreting a speech, whether there are indeed errors and omissions (e/o’s) affecting segments that present no evident intrinsic difficulty. If there are, it is likely that they can be explained in terms of processing capacity deficits such as predicted by the EM. The underlying rationale of this study is the following:
One indication of the existence of such e/o’s would be the variability in the segments affected in the sample (at the level of words or propositions).
If all subjects in the sample fail to reproduce adequately the same ideas or pieces of information, this would suggest the existence of an intrinsic ‘interpreting difficulty’ of the relevant segments (too specialized, poorly pronounced, delivered
too rapidly, too difficult to render in the target language, etc.) Another indication could come from an exercise in which each subject is asked to interpret the same speech twice in a row. Having become familiar with the source speech during their first interpretation, subjects can be expected to correct in their second version many e/o’s committed in their first version. If, notwithstanding this general improvement of interpreting performance from the first to the second target-language version, it were possible to find new e/o’s in the second version whereas the same speech segments were interpreted correctly the first time, this would be an even stronger indication that processing capacity deficits are involved. The method used will be the same used by Gile, namely target speeches will be videotaped, transcribed, and transcriptions will be scanned for errors and omissions. This method is not without pitfalls, both because
of high inter-rater variability in the perception of what is and what is not an error or omission, so to avoid these pitfalls, only instances of what appeared to me as flagrant errors or omissions will be included in the analysis, and at least two further opinions from other sign language interpreters will be requested to confirm that the e/o’s I identified were also considered e/o’s by them, so to preserve validity by reducing the probability of ‘false positives’ (mistaking text manipulations considered acceptable by the subjects for e/o’s). The analysis then will proceed by trying to determine: (a) how many subjects in the sample made an e/o for each affected speech segment, and (b) what e/o’s were corrected in the second version of the target speech.
Therefore, without recurring to fMRI or other neurolinguist technicques, the high detection threshold for e/o definition used here in order to reduce to the largest possible extent the number of ‘false positives’ means that other phenomena that could have been used to measure cognitive load were not exploited. In particular, no
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attempt will be made to look at borderline cases, at the deterioration of linguistic output quality. If the low sensitivity of the tool will make it impossible to obtain convincing findings, more sensitive tools will have had to be designed, and reliability could have become a problem. The examples will be provided in the relevant chapters.
The orginal idea was supposed to strengthen the case for the tightrope hypothesis and thus give some support to the Effort Models as a conceptual tool to explain not only oral interpreters’ cognitive-constraints-based limitations but also TSL interpreters, and in Gile's words may give some credibility to the idea that the usefulness of a concept or model in scientific exploration is not necessarily a function of its degree of sophistication. However, the findings of this study are very interesting because they do not necessarily and incofutably prove that the efforts of bimodal interpreting is superior to unimodal interpreting but they do prove the intrinsic difficulty of sign language interpreting. The due explanations will be provided in the relevant chapter.
Chapter six is focused on the issues of assessment and evaluation parameters in Taiwan Sign Language Interpreting (TSLI), with an emphasis on the naturality issue.
I want to propose how TSL interpreting should be assessed and evaluated, based on interpreting challenges, the experiments carried out and the other reflections.
The seventh and final chapter is a conclusion, divided in the following parts: a review of the chapters, some final recommendations and further research suggestions along with some concluding remarks and an emphasis on the limitations of the study.
CHAPTER TWO
Taiwan Sign Language
2.1 Introduction
Language is at the basis of human communication. Languages may be defined as natural outputs of socially constructed codes. According to emeritus professor of linguistics at Oxford University Roy Harris (Harris 1988), linguistics has taught us that language is no longer regarded as peripheral to our grasp of the world we live in, but as central to it. Words are not mere vocal labels or communicational adjuncts superimposed upon an already given order of things. They are collective products of social interaction, essential instruments through which human beings constitute and articulate their world. This typical twentieth-century view of language has profoundly influenced developments throughout the whole range of human sciences.
It is particularly marked in linguistics, philosophy, psychology, sociology and anthropology.
Irrespective of their modality, languages develop naturally within a community of users. Therefore, the notion of language, which in the past strictly referred only to oral languages, has duly been extended also to sign languages.
Sign languages emerge spontaneously among their user, that’s why it is incorrect to perceive sign languages as oral languages spelled out in gestures, or to talk about the hearing pioneers in the education of the Deaf, like Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, as the “inventor” of sign languages, which are independent of oral languages and follow their own paths of development. This is also proven by the fact that British Sign Language (BSL) and American Sign Language (ASL) are mutually
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unintelligible for historic reasons, and that ASL is much closer to French Sign Language (FSL or LSF in French) or that its syntax resembles more modern oral Japanese than spoken English. Taiwan Sign Language (TSL), which is the object of our research, is very similar to JSL, because its origins developed from it during Japanese rule in Taiwan.
According to Fischer et al. (2010), TSL has some mutual intelligibility with both JSL and Korean Sign Language (KSL) and it has a 60 % lexical similarity with JSL.
The reason underlying the lexical similarity with KSL is that Korea was also occupied by Japan from 1910 to 1945.
This serves to say that the development of sign languages is separate from that of oral languages. Some countries, like South Africa for example, with up to eleven official languages, only have one official sign language with maybe a couple of variants (anonymous interpreter B, personal communication, 2012).
Natural languages constantly change. Their phonetic, morphological, semantic, syntactic and other features of language may vary over time. Here, we will focus on the diachronic development, along with its changes, of TSL.
According to Smith (2005), TSL is used by approximately thirty thousand signers on the island of Taiwan and although its lexicon and syntax closely resemble JSL and KSL, as previously mentioned, in the last few decades it has been influenced by Chinese Sign Language (CSL) and by Hong Kong Sign Langue (HKSL) because of the so-called language contact phenomenon.
Language contact occurs when two or more languages or varieties interact.
According to Hadzibeganovic, et al. (2008), language contact can occur at language borders, between adstratum languages7, or as the result of migration, with an
7 An adstratum or adstrate (plural: adstrata or adstrates) refers to a language which is equal in prestige to another.
intrusive language acting as either a superstratum or a substratum.8
2.2 A diachronic analysis of Taiwan Sign Language (TSL): a historical excursus of TSL
The earliest information regarding TSL all date back to 1895-1945, which is when the first schools for the Deaf were founded, during the Japanese rule. Before that, there must have been a local variety of TSL that indigenous Deaf people used back then, but unfortunately not much is known of the pre-Japanese occupation period.
The only remnants of this earlier variety can be found in some city names, like in the signs for TAINAN and KAOHSIUNG.9 The sign TAINAN appears as a combination of the signs TAIWAN and PLACE. As Smith (2005:2) explains
“originally, the name Taiwan referred only to the environs of the present-day city of Tainan, which literally means ‘Tai(wan)-south’. The name of the city was changed to Tainan in the 1800s, before the start of the Japanese occupation, so the sign may be a holdover from the signs of pre-occupation Taiwan”. Another example is the name of the city Kaohsiung which is a blend of the signs for DOG and HARBOR, because the city was then known with the name of Dakau (strike the dog). The aboriginal people used to call the city with the name of Takau. Later, the Japanese maintained the pronunciation but changed the characters, in other words by way of a lexical borrowing based on the sound in Japanese it became TAKA O, which was then transcribed by the Japanese with the characters 高雄, which in Mandarin Chinese are read as Kaohsiung, or Gāoxióng in pinyin10.
8 When one language succeeds another, the former is termed the superstratum and the latter the substratum.
9 Signs are always capitalized.
10 The official system to transcribe Chinese characters into Latin script in the People's Republic of
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During the Japanese rule, one school was founded in Taipei and the other in Tainan and there were not many exchanges between the two. This caused the development of two different topical varieties of TSL, which will be emphasized in the next paragraph.
For historic and political reasons, after World War II, the two schools began to communicate more because they both came under the jurisdiction of the provincial government of Taiwan (Smith 2005). However, during the Japanese rule, teachers were mainly Japanese, who were invited to come from Japan and teach in the schools in Taiwan. Most of teachers at the Taipei school came from Tokyo and the ones in the Tainan area were from Osaka and they brought along the diatopic differences intrinsically present within the JSL.
Later, in 1945, when Taiwan was turned over to the Republic of China, instruction in Mandarin began and the phenomenon of language contact began to sow its seeds. However, although most of the Japanese teachers were sent back home, some of the Taiwanese teachers remained in the two schools, along with the signs they had learned to use during the Japanese rule. This is important because the new generation of teachers, Mandarin-speaking, were instructed in JSL.
Wensheng Lin was a deaf man educated in Tokyo, he became the new principal of the school for the Deaf in Taipei and “he passed on Taipei’s Tokyo signs to a new flock of Chinese teachers” (Smith 2005:3). The same thing happened in Tainan, where Tiantian Chen started training teachers in the Osaka signs that his school had been using thus far.
In the late forties, people started to migrate from Mainland China to Taiwan to take refuge from the Communist Party. Amongst these refugees, there were several
China.
deaf people who were former teachers in the schools for the Deaf of Nanjing and Shanghai. Some of them were even hired to teach at the Taipei school for the Deaf, like Wang Zhenyin who was a deaf man from Nantong, Jiangsu and who started working at the Taipei school for the deaf in 1948, bringing along signs from CSL.
However, as Smith (2005) duly points out, other CSL signs may have been introduced into TSL through another channel, namely by graduates of the Private Chiying Elementary School for the Deaf and Mute in Kaohsiung which originally used a dialect of CSL. The principal was from Nantong and he used a dialect of CSL.
Therefore, when he established his school in Taiwan in 1950, he brought along his own idiolect.
In the years, signers have coined new signs for scientific or academic purposes, to meet the instruction’s demands. It is also possible that some signers don’t sign well, for a plethora of reasons, maybe because they were not raised with sign language or because they did not receive a good instruction. It is interesting to see what interpreters do in these situations. Usually, no matter how good the performance and the interpretation skills are, an interpreter should always adjust his or her signing to the interlocutor, in other words interpreters provide a service and their ultimate goal if that the massage be conveyed. For this reason, it is important that interpreters talk with their deaf interlocutor before any interpretation task to understand what kind of signing the Deaf person is used to and also his or her linguistic level, because it would be useless to sign either too fast or too complicated if the Deaf person does not understand, the purpose of the service would fail.
Another influential figure worth mentioning is Fang Bingmei, who was a graduate of the Nanjing School for the Blind and Mute. At first she was sent to work in the Tainan school but later transferred to Taipei. This means that not only did she bring her own CSL idiolect to Tainan, but also contributed to the signs exchange
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between the two main diatopical varieties of TSL in Taiwan, which will be delved
between the two main diatopical varieties of TSL in Taiwan, which will be delved