From field to text in research with sign language translators and interpreters: challenges in the transcription of simultaneous intermodal bilingual corpora

This article aims to discuss corpus transcription involving a visual-gesture language and a vocal-auditory language in enunciative-discursive activities of self-confrontation with intermodal translators and interpreters. The discussion starts at the Bakhtin Circle’s conception of text in tandem with linguistic, translational, and interpretive studies of sign languages. We discuss how the self-confrontation device adopted in studies involving sign language interpreters and translators allows for the appearance of language phenomena such as code-blending (Quadros et al., 2011) and intermodal bilingual citation (Nascimento & Brait, 2021). We also explore how such phenomena impacts the process of writing scientific texts, especially those related to the transcription and presentation of statements produced during the construction of the corpus. We present how the proposal for the transcription of bimodal bilingual utterances constructed in our doctoral thesis (Nascimento, 2016) was improved in later research (Nascimento & Nascimento, 2021; Nascimento & Nascimento, 2021), to study translation and intermodal interpretation in audiovisual contexts.

Keywords:
transcription; Bakhtinian studies; Brazilian Sign Language; translation; interpretation