Paths to signed language interpreting in Great Britain and America, 1150–1900

Leahy, Anne Marie (2023). Paths to signed language interpreting in Great Britain and America, 1150–1900. University of Birmingham. Ph.D.

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Abstract

This study inaugurates a history of signed language interpreting (SLI) in the UK and US, with a primarily pre-twentieth-century focus. The problem of inaccurate and incomplete lay and academic research in translation and interpreting studies, legal history, and Deaf histories is challenged with three main questions. First, I investigate centuries of hearing speech–sign bilingual–bimodals, or hearing signers who learned and co-developed gestural communication systems with deaf signers before Deaf educational, linguistic, and sociocultural structures were forged. Similarly, I trace deaf intermediaries who emerged from the resulting Deaf-World habitus in the nineteenth century to function with or without a hearing co-interpreter. Lastly, I reveal a substantial collection of evidence that generates new ideas from well-known sources, and mines new and overlooked texts from historical materials and archival court records in the UK and US. Findings point toward a shared transatlantic pedigree among hearing interpreters, and origins of deaf British and American Sign Language interpreters that are similar to one another, but based in distinctly different cultural origins from their hearing colleagues.

Type of Work:

Thesis (Doctorates > Ph.D.)

Award Type:

Doctorates > Ph.D.

Supervisor(s):