Abstract
Pollitt offers a perspective emerging from the encounter between sign languages and alphabetized languages. The examples illustrating this chapter are drawn from the challenge of translating sign language poetry, or ‘Signart’. The densely semiotic, three-dimensional nature of Signart increases the demand on translators to expand their intersemiotic range in order to achieve successful translation. Given here as case studies, Pollitt’s experimental intersemiotic practices harness the semiotic resources of various communication modes and materials. Situated in relation to a number of contemporary translation theories, this chapter explores the new meanings that are made available by these alternative translational practices. Pollitt suggests intersemiotic translations of Signart can engage new audiences in different ways, thereby developing new social and cultural forms of communication beyond traditional translations of Signart.
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Notes
- 1.
It should be noted, however, that Elleström’s work requires some adaptation here. For example, Elleström’s taxonomy divorces the spatiotemporal from the semiotic, yet a cursory understanding of the literature on sign linguistics would behove one to reconsider this arbitrary classification. In sign languages, grammatical meaning is routinely derived from the spatiotemporal.
- 2.
An important distinction is made here between the natural sign languages which have emerged historically amongst deaf communities, and those invented systems of communication which have been imposed on deaf children for educational or other purposes, such as Sign Supported English (SSE), Paget-Gorman, Cued Speech or Makaton. These are not natural languages and are consequently much more limited. For more on the history of deaf communities, see Lane (1984), Baynton (1996). For the complexities involved in the ongoing struggles to achieve recognition of sign languages, see de Meulder (2015).
- 3.
Aware of the irony of using such terms as ‘phonology’ to describe linguistic processes in a natural sign language, pioneer William C. Stokoe (1960), Stokoe et al. (1965) proposed alternative terms, such as cherology. In the ensuing battles to prove parity with spoken-written languages, these specialized terms fell into misuse.
- 4.
- 5.
Inflected here means that an image is slightly modified in one parameter or another, and within a visual-gestural language there exists the possibility that such modifications may carry grammatical function.
- 6.
At that time, British Sign Language (BSL) was still taught at the University of Bristol.
- 7.
- 8.
The translation was awarded equal first (alongside William Reed who was working between written German and written English) in the Inside Arts Poetry Translation Prize, 2011.
- 9.
“Jean-Jacques Lecercle calls these variations the ‘remainder’ because they exceed communication of a univocal meaning and instead draw attention to the conditions of the communicative act, conditions that are in the first instance linguistic and cultural, but that ultimately embrace social and political factors” Venuti (2000: 471). He summarizes Jean-Jacques Lecercle. The Violence of Language. London and New York, 1990.
- 10.
The name of the collective references a famous address by George Veditz (1912: 30), then President of the American National Association of the Deaf who, in resistance to an increasing focus on audiology and speech training, declared “first and foremost we are a people of the eye”.
- 11.
The six artists who returned work were Howard Hardiman (fluent in BSL), Fliss Watts, Sophia Lyndsay Burns, Tom White, and Christopher and Fiona Rutterford. Tamarin Norwood and Bob Quinn submitted diary-only responses, whilst Sophia Lyndsay Burns submitted diary notes along with her art.
- 12.
Paul Scott’s ‘Three Queens’ can be viewed at https://youtu.be/sbrCfrlfIRg.
- 13.
Donna Williams’ ‘That Day’ can be viewed at https://youtu.be/YEqqy314o54.
- 14.
John Wilson’s ‘Home’ can be viewed at https://youtu.be/Vo60N63C0l4.
- 15.
Alice Hendy photography.
- 16.
“The Stars Are the Map” was shown at Edinburgh International Book Festival, StAnza, Wordplay, the Macrobert Arts Centre, Hugh Miller’s Cottage, and at the Scottish Parliament in the months preceding the unanimous passage of the British Sign Language (Scotland) Act, 2015. The film has since been included in the anthology Stairs and Whispers: D/deaf and Disabled Poets WriteBack (Alland et al. 2017).
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Pollitt, K. (2019). Affordance as Boundary in Intersemiotic Translation: Some Insights from Working with Sign Languages in Poetic Form. In: Campbell, M., Vidal, R. (eds) Translating across Sensory and Linguistic Borders. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97244-2_9
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