The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Pragmatics

Sign language interpreting, pragmatics and theatre translation

Siobhán Rocks

Introduction

This chapter focuses on the translation and interpretation of theatrical performance texts into British Sign Language (BSL), a provision that has grown and developed over the last three decades. The discipline might initially appear to be a process of simultaneous interpretation, but, as will be shown, is an undertaking of audiovisual translation of a multimodal theatrical text, followed by the simultaneous delivery of the signed rendition, synchronous and co-creating meaning with the live performance.

I will pay specific attention to two areas of pragmatics, turn-taking and spatial deixis, each of which, in the source text, has a fundamental impact on how the translation can be made, due to the visual-spatial nature of sign languages. I will also discuss how, in the signed rendition, the maintenance of turn-taking patterns and the construction of deictic space enables one theatre sign language interpreter (TSLI) to attribute dialogue to multiple characters.

Before this discussion, however, it is useful to consider the current provision of sign language interpreted performances in the UK, and the nature of the potential Deaf theatre audience.

1 The state of play

Theatre, the world over, is usually created by and is about hearing people; that the work has been made by hearing people is inherent in the staging, the “signs” of the work, the actors’ mode of communication. Thanks to the growing recognition that theatre should to be accessible to diverse audiences, and that BSL is the first language of Deaf communities throughout the UK, many mainstream theatres in the UK provide performances of their productions interpreted into BSL, and, as a result, more Deaf first-language sign language users are being given the opportunity to experience theatre in translation (Rocks, 2011).

UK touring theatre companies such as Fittings Multimedia Arts, Graeae and TransAction Theatre regularly integrate the interpreter as a “shadow” interpreter, or interpreting character, acknowledged by the other characters during the performance, and often with dramatic purpose, in addition to the functional one of interpreting dialogue, giving her the same status as the other actors. This integrated approach clearly not only requires the interpreter to have comprehensive performance skills and experience in addition to those of theatre translation and interpreting, but also for the company to be fully knowledgeable of and engaged with and the needs of both the potential Deaf audience and the task of the actor-interpreter.

In the UK, however, by far the most common approach is to situate the BSL interpreter at the side of the stage, outside the performance space, for a single interpreted performance of a production. The issues of translation, however, are fundamentally the same for any theatre sign language interpreter (TSLI), integrated with or located separately from the performance.

The Deaf theatre-goer’s experience of a performance interpreted into sign language from the side of the stage differs quite dramatically from the standard theatre experience of the hearing spectator. For the hearing audience, both the dialogue, spoken by various characters, and stage activity are receivable from one location: the performance space. For the Deaf audience the performance is deconstructed, the dialogue, rendered into sign language by one interpreter, and the stage activity reside in adjacent spaces and compete for the Deaf audience’s attention (ibid.).

2 The target audience

The notions of deafness are complex and nuanced. In the UK there are approximately 9 million people with a hearing loss, the majority of whom are hard-of-hearing and deafened due to acquired and age-related hearing loss, and have a spoken first language. Of that 9 million, however, approximately 87,000 Deaf people use BSL as a first or preferred language (BDA: no date) the majority having been born with profound hearing loss or become deaf before the acquisition of speech (DWP, 2017: 106). While the deafened and hard-of-hearing individuals access theatre through captioned performances (in which the written text of the performance is projected on screens in the auditorium as the dialogue is spoken), it is the Deaf BSL users who make up the potential audience of theatre interpreted into BSL. Ladd (2003: xvii) differentiates between “deaf” and “Deaf”:

The lowercase “deaf” refers to those for whom deafness is primarily an audiological experience. It is mainly used to describe those who lost some or all of their hearing in later life, and who do not wish to have contact with signing Deaf communities, preferring to try and retain their membership of the majority society in which they were socialised. “Deaf” refers to those born Deaf or deafened in early (sometimes late) childhood, for whom the sign languages, communities and cultures of the Deaf collective represents their primary experience and allegiance, many of whom perceive their experience as akin to other language minorities.

BSL is the preferred first language of Britain’s Deaf community and is a non-linear spatial-visual language with linguistic properties unrelated to those of English. While there is no natural universal signed language, BSL, like other signed languages, combines specific hand shapes located in and moved in the “signing space” in front of the signer, modified by facial expression which conveys elements such as tone, mood, interrogatives, the conditional and subjunctive (see Sutton-Spence & Woll, 2005; Rocks, 2011).

In the majority of the non-sign language using community BSL has a low status compared to minority-spoken languages due to its history of suppression (as will be discussed later) and the general perception is that BSL is not a true language, but simply coded or transliterated English to “help” a disabled community understand what they can’t hear.

In the UK, Deaf first-language BSL users although native, are also a cultural-linguistic minority embedded in yet also marginalised by the dominant hearing society (see Lane, 1984, 1992; Alker, 2000; Ladd, 2003). Whilst a Deaf person might have occasion to interact with hearing people on a daily basis, the reverse is not the case; hearing members of society rarely meet Deaf individuals, and the notion of “deafness as disability” is still prevalent outside Deaf communities.

In a general sense, Deaf people who grow up in the UK are familiar with its cultural norms, eating the same types of foods, celebrating festivals, participating in similar social activities and so on; a Japanese film, for example, even though it might be presented with an in-vision sign language interpreter, would be equally as exotic to a British Deaf person as a hearing one. Yet Deaf people also share a history and sense of identity quite different from that of non-Deaf people.

Ninety to ninety-five per cent of Deaf children are born to hearing families and as such are unlikely to share a common language with their parents (Smith, 2013: 3). These children are routinely medicalised, labelled as “hearing impaired”, and schooled differently and often separately from their non-Deaf peers (Lane, 1992; Ladd, 2003). Deaf people have historically been given poor access to education, identified by the dominant hearing community as “disabled”, and sometimes “learning disabled”, rather than as members of a linguistic minority. In 1880, in Milan, Italy, the Second International Congress on Education of the Deaf declared a ban on the use of signed languages in schools (Vallverdú, 2001: 183; Moores, 2010: 450) in favour of the “oral method” – the use of speaking and lip reading only. Harlan Lane (1984: 388) highlights Geneva school director Marius Magnat’s support for the oralist approach:

Manually taught children are defiant and corruptible. This arises from the disadvantages of sign language. It is doubtful that sign can engender thought. It is concrete. It is not truly connected with feeling and thought. [. . .] It lacks precision. [. . .] Sign cannot convey number, gender, person, time, nouns, verbs, adverbs, adjectives.

And conference president Giulio Tarra: “for us it is an absolute necessity to prohibit that language and to replace it with living speech, the only instrument of human thought” (ibid.: 393).

The oral method became the sole approach to the educating of Deaf children, and the ban on signed languages throughout Europe continued until 1980 when the 15th International Congress on Education of the Deaf, in Hamburg, West Germany, declared the rights of Deaf students to be educated using the modes best suited to their individual needs (Brill, 1984: 385). Still, the use of sign language in schools, and Deaf people’s access to information in BSL has been very slow to develop:

In 2002, the UK Government gave protected language status to the indigenous UK languages including Welsh, Scots, Ulster Scots, Scottish and Irish Gaelic and recently Cornish. BSL is not included in this list which reflects the continued policy perception of BSL as a communication tool for disabled people despite extensive academic research to the contrary that BSL is the UK’s one of the indigenous minority languages [sic].

Although DWP [the Department of Work and Pensions] “recognised” BSL in 2003, this was merely an acknowledgement by one Government department that it exists as a language and did not offer any legal rights.

(British Deaf Association, 2015: 3)

Whilst the general perception may be that the right to education in BSL for Deaf children has been established (as in Wales, where Welsh and bilingual education is available), there is no legal obligation to provide education for Deaf children in BSL. Deaf sign language users qualify for protection under the Equality Act (ibid.), and this obliges schools to make only “reasonable adjustments” (ibid.: 3). The British Deaf Association states “education and employment are just some of the areas where Deaf people’s rights are not protected adequately by the Act”, highlighting the that the reasonable adjustment in schools, which takes the form of employing “Level 2 [GCSE-level] Communication Support Workers [as opposed to fully qualified BSL-English interpreters, or teachers who are fluent sign language users] in mainstream settings, denies learning to deaf children who need BSL” (ibid.: 2).

As a result the use of sign language in schools has been very slow to develop. Although at the time of writing there is a pilot programme for the GCSE in BSL being delivered in six English schools (Signature, 2017), BSL is not included in the national curriculum in the UK, and specialist teachers of the Deaf are not required to have any level of fluency in sign language (see University of Edinburgh, 2016; University of Birmingham, 2017; University of Leeds, 2017; University of Manchester, 2017).

With a few exceptions, Deaf people are not truly bilingual in BSL and English, and levels of bilingualism and literacy vary greatly throughout the Deaf community. Because they share a history of Deafness as disability, Deaf education, the suppression of signed languages, and the perception of the world through visual markers, Deaf people have a different world perspective from hearing people. They also share many experiences of Deafness with Deaf peoples from other countries and cultures.

In the UK, Deaf people, in the main, are not encultured in going to the theatre. This is in part due to sign language interpreting for theatre being a relatively recent provision, and theatre venues are generally not yet skilled at marketing to a potential Deaf audience, but also because theatre created by and for hearing people does not speak to the Deaf identity. In our case, the Deaf theatre-goer is not witnessing a production of a play translated into and performed in sign language, but watching a drama about and performed by the majority society in the majority language, interpreted simultaneously by one interpreter. For the Deaf spectator, theatre is almost always – and quite visibly – in translation.

In the light of this, then, can we view the Deaf audience as a “foreign” audience? In some ways yes, but not precisely in the way we might consider a spoken-language foreign audience. The Deaf spectator is “foreign” not due to an unfamiliarity with the broader cultural codes of the society presented onstage, but more due to a lack of shared knowledge and life experiences with hearing members of society, and we can never assume that for example, musical or literary allusion, intertextual references, and so on, will be understood as such by the Deaf audience.

3 Theatre text and translation

The play script is complete as a dramatic text, and contains instructions – either explicit as stage directions or implicit within the dialogue – for the production of a piece of theatre, yet it does not constitute the complete work.

Although written to be spoken, the play script alone does not include the sentiment of the message, it lacks the physical and vocal qualities of the actor, and the empathy of his or her performance; these are the elements the actors and director discover during rehearsal. The actual occurrences in the production and performance depend upon the choices of the makers of theatre, the combination and layering of audible information (voices and sound design) and visual information (movement, set, costume and lighting design) support the creators’ collective interpretation of the piece.

In the case of the foreign language play, a written translation is made available for the actors to rehearse with (although often the translator is able to refine the text during rehearsal), and ultimately becomes assimilated into the finished performance. Espasa describes translation for the stage as

a paradoxical activity: it starts from a written text, while taking into account the non-verbal dimension of theatre, but the end product provided by the translator is another written text, which will be staged by a theatre company in a given culture.

(2013: 320; see also Johnston, 1996; Vivis, 1996; Bassnett, 1998)

Johnston (1996: 58) observes that “translation for the stage is about giving form to a potential for performance. It is about writing for actors”. The much-debated dilemma for the theatre translator and the producing company is the “performability” of the translated text (whether it is easily understandable and “speakable” for the actors, and therefore easily understandable by its potential audience), the extent to which its “foreignness” can or should be retained and how it might live within the potential performance (see Bassnett, 1998; Espasa, 2013). Katalyn Trencsényi (2015: 277) quotes literary manager Sebastian Born in his belief that a good translation must “preserve the otherness where the play comes from, but on the other hand not create a barrier for the English audience”.

The TSLI, however, translates a text that already exists as spoken in the context of the production, and delivers the signed rendition in the moment of performance. Whilst she may not need to domesticate the broader cultural codes of the original, and may be able to produce a signed rendition that appears natural and is easily understood by the target audience, she cannot relocate the characters to a “Deaf” context in the way that, for example, Pedro de Senna’s Brazilian Portuguese translation of Sara Cane’s play Blasted relocates the action from Leeds to Rio de Janeiro (de Senna, 2009). In the sign language interpreted performance, the “otherness” is preserved by the presence of the production itself, in the actors’ modes of communication; the Deaf spectators cannot avoid the fact that they are witnessing hearing actors speaking to each other – they are clearly not seeing themselves on stage.

Although the TSLI might be able to begin translation during rehearsal, having the complete performance to work from affords her the benefit of knowing how the spoken text operates within the context of the drama.

In multimodal texts, the semiotic elements, also called modes or resources have an interdependent relationship (see Gambier, 2006; Taylor, 2016), a concept that Baldry and Thibault (2006:4) term the resource integration principle, which describes how multiple and different modes make different meanings according to their organisation within a text. In the case of a work of theatre, these resources include the words of the dialogue, the actor’s person and performance, costume, set, lighting, sound design and so on. Thus, theatrical dialogue in performance appears “not as a text set among other ‘texts’ but rather blended with them, through which it partly loses its independence as a literary text and becomes subordinated to the overall structure of the performance” (Limon, 2010: 124). The TSLI’s theatrical source text, therefore, is a multimodal one, and her task is one of audiovisual translation:

it is the integration of all these semiotic modes in a multimodal text that creates meaning and, although that meaning is translated into words, it is the task of the audiovisual (AV) translator to find the wording in his/her language that best expresses that integration of semiotic forces.

(Taylor, 2016: 224)

Because it is only the spoken text that is translated, the visible channels function not only as part of the source text for the translator, but also as part of the target text for the receiving audience (Griesel, 2005; Rocks, 2015).

It is only possible, then, for the TSLI to complete the translation after the production is fully realised, as the mise-en-scène, the architecture of the production, has such a profound influence on how the translation can be constructed, in part due to (as we shall see) the visual-spatial nature of signed languages.

In theatre complete meaning is only realised when dialogue is uttered in the context of the performance, often partnered with specific visual activity, and subtext emerges from or is implied by the discrepancy between what the characters say and how they behave, leading the audience to infer things about the inner reality or psychology of the characters: The effect of a character saying, “I love you” whilst holding a gun to his head, isn’t the same as the character saying, “I love you” whilst holding a gun to his lover’s head. Since the Deaf audience is only able to see one element of this action at a time (the action or the rendered dialogue), the interpreter must be aware of how these resources combine to make meaning, decide which to prioritise (if possible), and in which order the audience must see them.

This complexity of the theatrical text means that the TSLI must have a keen knowledge of how the performance generates meaning. Usually hired after the performance is in production, the interpreter must, effectively, act as her own dramaturg. Johnston (1996: 57) observes “any translation done with performance in mind must seek to create not a linguistic construct based on the interrogation of authorial intention but a living piece of theatre developed from a dramaturgical analysis of the original text” (see also Pavis, 1989; Johnston, 2002; Peghinelli, 2012). In terms of the live sign language interpreted performance, the analysis must be of the complete production and how the semiotic modes co-create meaning within the spatial-temporal context of the performance, in order to develop a signed translation that functions with the performance.

With specific reference to the pragmatic phenomena of turn-taking and spatial deixis, then, the following section explores the ways in which the performance text influences the interpreter’s construction of the signed rendition.

4 Perspective, turn-taking and spatial deixis

4.1 Perspective

By virtue of being produced in the visual-spatial modality, essentially all of linguistic expression in signed languages depends on the use of space.

(Perniss, 2012: 413)

What is known as the signing space is an area in front of the signer’s body, and it is in this space that signers construct meaningful utterances, choosing the loci of referents to express temporal, spatial and semantic relationships, and to express comparison between the status of and attitude towards referents (ibid.).

Signers use locations in the signing space syntactically, employing “grammatical structures which move in space between grammatically defined points” (Sutton-Spence & Woll, 2005: 130) in pronominal reference, or to identify a verb’s argument, for example (Sutton-Spence & Woll, 2005). They also use space topographically which “recreates a map of the real world” (Sutton-Spence & Woll, 2005: 129) and locates physical or conceptual referents in the signing space, to express the spatial or metaphorical relationships between entities in the discourse. Perniss (2012: 418) adds:

In describing complex events, narrators convey information about referents acting and interacting within a spatial setting, thereby constructing a representation of the event space in which the event takes place. To achieve this, signed narratives rely to a large extent on the use of signing perspective.

Signing perspective refers to the way in which an event space (real or imagined) is mapped or projected from the perspective of the signer, who conceptually locates herself in relation to the event space (ibid.).

There are two signing perspectives. The first is observer perspective, in which the signer conceptually locates herself outside the event space, and uses her signing space topographically to represent a three-dimensional map of the event, from a global vantage point. In this way a signer might reconstruct, for example, the events of a witnessed car accident, or the way in which the planets are ordered in the solar system.

The second signing perspective is character perspective, in which the signer locates herself within the event, and projects the event space as “life-sized, encompassing and surrounding the signer” (ibid.: 419). In this way the signer can relay detailed information about the actions and reactions of participants, including herself, in an event.

When describing or recounting an event, a signer can switch between observer perspective and character perspective in order to present details from different viewpoints of the event space.

It is the signer’s switching between various character perspectives (i.e., the different viewpoints of interactants from within the event conceptually), however, that sign language users refer to as role shift. Goswell (2011: 61–63) describes role shift as:

a mimetic feature, whereby the signer depicts the affect, speech and/or action of another character, including themselves in a past or future time [. . .] this type of enactment is not exclusive to signed languages: role shift is equivalent to direct speech and the mimetic-like use of prosody and gesture in spoken languages [. . .] the general idea [is] the ability of a signer to change character roles and perspectives within a text.

It is the use of role shift and character perspective that pertains particularly to the TSLI’s representation of both the turn-taking patterns of the characters presented on stage, and the spatial deictic constructions in the rendition.

4.2 Turn-taking

As Quinn (2017) observes, comparatively little research has been undertaken into the pragmatics of signed languages; research has only been truly possible since the technology to record and play back signers in conversation has been available. It is known, however, that natural turn-taking in signed languages shares a number of features with that in spoken languages. McCleary and de Arantes Leite (2013: 123) find that signers: “orient to ‘one party talks at a time’, and that the management of talk-in-interaction is achieved within a tightly organized system which includes resources traditionally associated with the ‘linguistic’, ‘paralinguistic/prosodic’, and ‘kinetic/gestural’ domains’”. Because signed languages are visual languages, there are naturally differences in signed turn-takings, such as raising and lowering the hands, maintaining eye contact or looking away from the signer, or using body posture or change of signing speed, to initiate or shift turns (Wilbur & Petitto, 1983: 227). Due to requiring eye contact with the addressee before they begin to sign, signers usually wait for their turn for the floor, although Baker and Bogaerde (2012) also identify more overlaps in signed interactions, which manifest mainly as back-channelling, and use of the collaborative floor.

Turn-taking in theatre, like theatrical dialogue, is intended to simulate natural conversational patterns, yet has a dual function: “the real addressee of everything that is said during the performance, is the spectator, and not the interlocutors engaged in the dialogue on stage” (Limon, 2010: 132). Rozik (2010: 136) describes theatre as functioning on two axes: the fictional character–character axis of interaction, and the theatrical stage–audience axis of communication, and as such, dialogue operates differently on the fictional interactants on stage and on the audience.

Theatrical dialogue is constructed in turns that invite a response, either spoken or performed, from the receiver character (Wallis & Shepherd, 2002: 52) and all exchanges are structured to lead the audience through the development of the drama. The characters’ conversational patterns, length of turn, and combinations of short and long turns, interruptions and overlaps, give energy and rhythm to a scene, and define character and relationships between interlocutors (ibid.). An over-long turn, for example (perhaps indicating that the speaker is boring or verbose), is brought into focus by a very short, sharp, contrasting turn, known as the drop line, in response (Edgar, 2009).

When scripted, silence (particularly in the work of playwright Harold Pinter) has a dramatic function: when indicating a character’s inability or refusal to communicate, for example, the silence can stand for a line of dialogue or an action (see Esslin, 1982; Stucky, 1994; Edgar, 2009). Playwright Caryl Churchill’s post-1979 plays feature characters regularly interrupting each other’s dialogue, and extended overlaps of talk, as a way of shaping the dialogue to create particular rhythms and effects (Ivanchenko, 2007; Edgar, 2009).

Since the TSLI can deliver the dialogue of only one character at a time, overlapping dialogue cannot be rendered as such. Similarly, in the case of dramatic silences, there is nothing for the interpreter to render – yet the silences, like the overlaps, have communicative relevance. In these instances of dramatic silences, the interpreter looking back to the stage and guiding the audience’s attention to a moment of non-communication is a solution, but, like the dramaturg, the interpreter knowing the function of the interruption, the overlap, or the silence is essential, in order that she is able to produce a signed rendition that produces an equivalent effect upon the target audience.

As previously noted, in the vast majority of cases the TSLI delivers the rendition from a location outside the performance space, thereby taking the Deaf audience’s attention away from the stage. As a result, the Deaf spectator cannot rely on retrieving visual cues that may indicate which character is speaking at any one time, nor can the Deaf theatregoer pick up audible cues, as they are unable to hear the spoken dialogue. How, then, is the theatre sign language interpreter able to attribute dialogue to and represent the turn-taking patterns and conversational interactions of the various onstage characters? The strategy that has developed in sign language interpreted theatre is the use of role shift.

As we have seen, in the narration of an event, the signer, using role shift, switches between various character perspectives to show the actions and interactions of interlocutors within the event; the signer becomes, in turn, each of the interlocutors in the recounted discourse. Role shift requires the signer to physically shift his or her body and/or head to show the speaker’s (that is the speaker in the narrative) relative position and orientation in space. The signer’s eye gaze shows direction of address, and also indicates the relative position in space of the addressee; eye gaze can suggest the relative distance between speaker and receiver(s) in the narrative, heights of the interlocutors (whether any participant is taller or shorter than the others, seated, lying down, or in an elevated position, for example). Role shift also includes characterisation (Morgan, 1996; Sutton-Spence & Woll, 2005) and attitude.

Once the signer has indicated a shift of role and perspective by his or her change orientation in space, eye gaze and so on, everything that is signed is produced, in first person, as if it were from that person’s physical and assumed psychological perspective (Brennan, 1992) in the context of the discourse, and re-enacted as if in the now (McDonald, 2012).

In a signed narrative, interlocutors from the source text are not visibly present; they exist initially in the imagination of the storyteller and finally in that of the audience. The relative positions of the characters represented must comply with the logic of the narrative, but the telling of a story or the recounting of an event allows the signer a certain amount of licence or flexibility in his or her use of space; the spatial relationships between persons and entities in the narrative are chosen by the producer of the narrative.

In the theatrical context, however, the sign language interpreter renders and transmits the dialogue of characters that are visibly present. The interpreter is not the sole producer of the text; the rendition of the original spoken dialogue is delivered alongside and must be temporally synchronised with the performance of the original, the stage and interpreter co-constructing meaning.

Like the signer of a narrative, role shift requires the TSLI also to become each of the characters; the signed rendition, in first person, takes the form of a succession of “shifts” into and out of representations of the stage characters’ conversational turns. The actors’ orientations in space, direction of address, eye-gaze, manner and attitude, prosody, pauses, silences and so on, determine those of the interpreter, and the rendition must also synchronise temporally with the performance. In this way, the Deaf audience is able to identify the character speaking by the interpreter’s shifts corresponding with the actors’ blocking, orientation, eye gaze and manner. Effectively, the sign language interpreter imagines herself within the performance conceptually, and adopts the vantage points of each character in turn to deliver the rendered dialogue.

4.3 Spatial deixis

In signed linguistic systems, as highlighted by Bellugi and Klima in Jarvella and Klein (1982: 299), deixis is literally pointing; broadly, the signer points to visible referents in the discourse, temporal elements (future referents are located in front of the body and past referents over the shoulder), and also to referents that cannot be seen by naming the entity, locating it in the signing space and referring to it further by pointing at its location in the signing space. As we have seen, the moment-to-moment orientations and arrangement of the characters on stage prescribe the role shift of the interpreter, but these configurations also determine the deictic construction of the interpreter’s rendition.

As the speaker role switches from one character in the performance to another, so does the deictic field. As the TSLI “role shifts” into and out of the vantage points of each character in their turn, so she also must switch between deictic fields. The interpreter must imagine herself conceptually in the performance environment, at the same deictic co-ordinates of the “I”, “here” and “now” of the character currently speaking, and deliver the rendition of that dialogue. This means that the objects the characters interact with during the performance, and their spatial relationships to each other influence the topographical arrangement of the interpreter’s rendition.

The parameters of the performance space, and arrangement and direction of movement of entities within that space, are already fixed for the TSLI by the performance itself, which can also be seen by the Deaf audience. Thus, if the spatial construction of the interpreter’s rendition is inconsistent with that of the stage, the translation will be in this respect inaccurate, and potentially confusing for the target audience “If we place the signs anywhere else, [. . .] then it is ungrammatical” (Sutton-Spence & Woll, 2005: 129). Consider the following dialogue:

Penelope:	[. . .] if anyone asks any questions just say your name is Humphrey.
Clive:	But why Humphrey?
Penelope:	He’s just the man who’s coming to do the service tomorrow.
Clive:	But I–
Penelope:	Take these things in there and change . . .
Clive:	And why must I go in there?
Penelope:	Because I’m in here! [my emphases]

(King, 1946: Act 1)

In rendering the text (above), spoken in the context of the live performance, the TSLI does not point to the entities or referents in the physical performance environment, but to those in her own projected conceptual performance environment, as if located at the deictic co-ordinates of the character whose dialogue is being rendered.

In order to render accurately the first line in the above dialogue “if anyone asks any questions just say your name is Humphrey”, the interpreter must know the location of Clive in relation to Penelope. Imagining herself within the performance environment at Penelope’s deictic co-ordinates, she points at the location of Clive (to render “your”) according to Penelope’s perspective; if Clive is located down stage left of Penelope, for example, then the interpreter points to a conceptual down stage left in her projected signing space, not by pointing to the location of Clive on the material stage.

The audiences’ vantage point of the situation is anchored to its location, so that in the rendering of the lines:

Penelope:	Take these things in there and change . . .
Clive:	And why must I go in there?

the interpreter must be able to refer to the location of “there” according to its actual location in the performance space, first from the perspective of Penelope, as her line is rendered, and then from the perspective of Clive, as his line is rendered. In the performance space, depending on the spatial arrangement and blocking of the actors, the same referent “there” may be located to the left of Penelope and to the right of Clive. The interpreter, rendering “there” by pointing, must first point left, to “there”, from Penelope’s perspective, then shift into Clive’s perspective, pointing right, to the same “there”. At the same time, the interpreter must accurately reflect the actors’ manner, direction of address and as far as possible (in order to be seen clearly by the audience) orientation in space, and synchronise her rendered utterances with those of the characters.

The same attention to detail is required not only for the static location of entities, but also for the movement of entities between locations. Sign language verbs that convey an action include direction in the movement of the sign. The interpreter’s rendition of a character’s line “I’m leaving” would naturally include the direction of that character’s exit. If, after speaking the line, the character then exits upstage left, but the interpreter’s rendition moves in any direction other that described by the actor’s movement, it would be inconsistent with the original.

The use of constructed space in the rendition is not only restricted to the visible performance space, but also extends to the representation of the notional space beyond the perceived world of the play, implied by the entrances and exits of the characters (Scolnicov, 1994).

The 20 Stories High production of Blackberry Trout Face, written by Laurence Wilson and directed by Julia Samuels, was interpreted into BSL by Sarah Rafiq at Contact, Manchester in 2009. The set is the kitchen of a council house. In the first scene teenage character Kerrie, having exited upstage left, is heard to shout “Mum!!” In the extended unseen space of the production, her mother is understood to be in the bedroom, located beyond the exit upstage left, and “upstairs”. Rafiq renders this off-stage utterance as if she is Kerrie standing at the bottom of the stairs “shouting”. Her eye gaze is up, to the left, and slightly over her shoulder; the sign “Mum” is made emphatically, and slightly forward and upwards, reinforcing the direction of Kerrie’s address.

In the same scene, Kerrie, explaining to her brother that she routinely takes a tray to her mother in bed, delivers the line “I take it up every mornin” (Wilson, 2011: 25). In the rendition, the movement of the verb “take up” contains very specific information implied by the staging of the production. In BSL the utterance “take it up” is required to include a starting location, direction of travel and end location. Although this line is uttered a moment or two before Kerrie’s exit, in the rendition Rafiq begins the sign as if she is naturally holding the object in front of her, and moves it diagonally up and to the left, foreshadowing first the direction of Kerrie’s exit (to left) and second the implied location of Mum (upstairs). Here, the interpreter not only maintains the spatial relationships of objects and characters populating the visible performance space, but also assists in defining the notional space beyond – the extended world of the play.

Limon (2010: 18) observes that actors, “through their gaze, gestures, behaviour, etc., describe the world as perceived by the fictional figures”, and it is these movements and behaviours that also, to a large extent, determine the TSLI’s rendition. Thus, since each new production re-imagines the play, involving “a new set of artistic and pragmatic choices” (Hale & Upton, 2000: 9), the influence of the temporal-spatial construction of the production on the TSLI’s rendition is such that any signed translation and interpretation of a new production must be re-imagined also.

Concluding remarks

The provision of sign language interpreted performances in UK theatres continues to grow, and the discipline of sign language interpreting for theatre is still developing.

However, the task of the TSLI, and what sign language translating and interpreting for theatre entails, is often misunderstood. This is in part due to the common misconception by the majority of non-BSL users that signed languages are simply coded spoken languages, and that the Deaf community, the potential audience for sign language interpreted theatre, is a disabled minority and not a cultural and linguistic one.

In this discussion, we have seen that, due to the nature and requirements of a Deaf theatre audience, the multimodality of the source text, and the visual-spatial nature of sign languages, the TSLI cannot solely concern herself with the translation of the spoken dialogue in isolation from the performance.

Written translation for the stage differs from sign language translation and interpreting for theatre because of the fundamental determination of the temporal-spatial architecture of the performance text on the construction of the TSLI’s rendition; the spoken text only achieves complete meaning when performed within the context of the live performance. The constructed turn-taking patterns of the onstage characters in the world of the drama, their arrangement in space, and vantage points from within the performance environment, prescribe the interpreter’s patterns of role-shift and spatial deictic construction in the interpretation.

Only by rigorous dramaturgical analysis of the range of multimodal resources in the performance text, paying particular attention to the pragmatic features of the dialogue, is the TSLI able to begin to create a rendition that maintains the internal coherence of the theatrical communication; by temporally synchronising the rendition, she co-constructs meaning with the live performance, thereby assisting also in maintaining the coherence of the whole text for the Deaf audience.