’When I Speak People Look at Me’: British Deaf People’s Use of Bimodal Translanguaging Strategies and the Representation of Identities
Temas
Detalles
Deaf signers’ lives are frequently intertwined with interactions via sign language interpreters. The ‘deaf self’ (Young, Napier and Oram forthcoming) is translated on a regular basis1 and is a long-term state of being. In many professional and public contexts where interpreters are provided, identity becomes known to others and performed through the translated self in many interactions with hearing people where those hearing people do not sign, especially at work. Yet (hearing) others’ experience of deaf signers, largely formed indirectly through the use of interpreters, is rarely understood as intercultural. Interactional, situational and performative understandings of deaf culture(s) have been explored, where relationships that deaf people develop with each other are based on mutual understanding of ‘same-ness’ (Ladd 2003; Friedner and Kusters 2015). However, being translated as a regular feature of deaf signers’ lives, whether by choice or not, has not previously been considered as a component of the shared experience of deaf cultural identity nor cultural formation.