A Study On Explicitations By Sign Language Interpreters In TV News Program

Sign language(SL)is a visuo-spatial language with its own unique grammatical structure and morphological characteristics.It is developed naturally in deaf communities and not dependent on any spoken language.There have been more and more studies on SL interpreters on TV news.However,only a small number of studies have discussed how to use natural SL to express TV news.As a translation technique,explicitation has attracted more and more attention from linguists and translators in recent years.However,most of the previous studies have focused on explicitation use during translations among oral and written languages.No research has been done on explicitation between oral language and Chinese SL.Based on the Systemic Functional Linguistics theory,this thesis classifies the explicitation of SL translation into three categories: explicitation of ideational function information,interpersonal function information and textual function information.It further discusses the characteristics of SL as a target language during interpretations,and the specific forms and motivations of explicit strategies.Afterwards,the similarities and differences on explicitation use between deaf and hearing sign language interpreters are discussed.The results show that TV news sign language interpreters do use explicit strategies.The use of these strategies is affected by many factors,including differences between signed and spoken languages,text typologies,objective environments and interpreter’s subjective choices.Moreover,deaf interpreters are more diverse than hearing interpreters in the use of explicit strategies.Similar to the explicitation of oral and written translation,deaf interpreters use literal translation with annotation,explanatory translation,free translation and supplementary interpretation.In addition,they also use non-manual features such as facial expressions,spatial positions and body movements to clarify the implicit information and contextual cohesion in the source language.These strategies related to non-manual features are seldom used by hearing interpreters.