Deaf Interpreters and Epistemic Injustice

Today's post is a summary of Dr Kristin Snoddon's upcoming talk for the Linguistic Justice Society on the 27th of Jan, at 8:00 EST or 14:00 CET. You can register for the talk here. 

Deaf people are generally at greater risk of epistemic injustice—being wronged in their capacity as knowers—due to not being understood by those around them. In Fricker’s (2007) famous taxonomy, epistemic injustice encompasses testimonial injustice—being wronged as a giver of knowledge—as well as hermeneutical injustice—being wronged as a subject of social understanding. Deaf people also experience the epistemic exclusion which occurs when disabled people’s knowledge is refused admission into the general stock, and are perceived as having reduced moral status.

An example of testimonial injustice, compounded by having a perceived reduced status, occurs when a deaf person giving an account of their social experiences is not seen as credible. These social experiences could, for example, relate to not being understood, not understanding what has been said, and/or being left out of conversations. Hermeneutical injustice can be said to occur when due to other people’s lack of familiarity with deaf people’s social experiences, those experiences are not understood. This is because other people lack the conceptual resources to make sense of the deaf person’s behaviour. As Caponetto and Piazza wrote in an earlier blog post, hermeneutical injustice feeds off testimonial injustice since not being believed and not being understood are mutually reinforcing phenomena.

In my research, I seek to show how deaf interpreters, sign language interpreters who are deaf, illuminate the concept of epistemic injustice. Deaf interpreters often work alongside hearing sign language interpreters and provide what is termed intralingual interpreting within the same target language. In other words, both the hearing interpreter and the deaf interpreter use the same national sign language, with the hearing interpreter interpreting between a spoken and sign language and the deaf interpreter making use of discursive and semiotic resources to convey meaning that extends beyond the hearing interpreter’s rendition. (However, some deaf interpreters, such as deaf Canadian American Sign Language-Langue des signes québécoise interpreters, also provide interlingual interpreting between different source and target languages.)

"LSQ" in Langue des signes québécoise, curtesy of Danachos CC BY-SA 4.0

The deaf interpreters’ role is often seen as meeting the needs of deaf individuals who lack proficiency in a named language—such as migrants, people with additional disabilities, and people who do not know a standard sign language. These deaf individuals are at greater risk of epistemic injustice due to not being seen—at least by hearing sign language interpreters and other professionals—as intelligible. From this perspective, intelligibility is based on knowing and using a standard, national language, such as the sign language varieties which are most often taught in interpreter training programs and which have their origins in deaf schools.

Interviews with Canadian deaf interpreter participants described formative experiences that were rooted in deaf childhoods where a sign language was readily accessible in addition to other languages, and where they encountered a broad range of deaf lives. However, as recent work by Haualand et al. (2024) shows, most deaf children today lack spaces where they can acquire and use sign language. Without early and full access to a language in which deaf children are understood, there is ironically both an increased need for deaf interpreter services and a lack of support for the conditions that foster underlying deaf interpreter competencies.

In their work, deaf interpreters fill gaps in interpreting processes and support understanding for hearing interpreters as well as for medical and legal professionals. This support in turn enables public institutional processes, such as medical appointments and court hearings, to run more efficiently. More fundamentally, deaf interpreters see intelligibility where it has been overlooked and construct intelligibility in interaction with diverse deaf people. This enacts justice on both an epistemic and existential level, since being understood opens the door to other forms of justice and new ways of being in the world.

 

 

Kristin Snoddon is Associate Professor with the School of Early Childhood Studies, Toronto Metropolitan University, Canada. Her current research focuses on sign language ideologies and ideologies of understanding related to deaf interpreters.