Dialogue between the lines: Deaf and hearing interpreters’ interaction during intralingual co-interpretation

This study focuses on the practice of simultaneous co-interpreting in the media, specifically examining the interaction between a hearing interpreter (HI) and a deaf interpreter (DI). The HI’s role in this context is to interpret the spoken source speech in Belgian French into French Belgian Sign Language (LSFB) for the DI, who, in turn, conveys the discourse to a deaf audience. The main objective of this research is to explore the phenomenon of adjustment within the HI-DI interaction and the strategies used by the HIs to overcome the inherent challenges of this configuration. To do so, the study analyzes a collection of recorded press conferences related to the COVID-19 crisis, featuring four HI-DI teams. By analyzing a set of video data from press conferences, this study aims to identify the types of information exchanged during the interpretation process, such as specific concepts, meta-comments, the speaker’s intentions, and so on. Additionally, the study aims to identify the strategies used by the HIs throughout the process. This analysis reveals the complex dynamics of the HI-DI interaction, shedding light on the HIs’ efforts to convey content and meaning from the source speech, as well as their use of metalinguistic indications to make effective adjustments. This article focuses on three specific strategies employed by the HIs: compression strategies, whose goal is to provide the DI with time and space to reformulate the (pre)interpreted message; explicitation strategies, used to make explicit logical connections and prosodic information in the discourse; and interactional signaling strategies, which facilitate interaction between the interpreters.