Deaf professionals’ perceptions of 'trust' in relationships with signed language interpreters

Abstract

The concept of ‘trust’ is frequently used when discussing the working relationship between deaf signers and signed language interpreters, with interpreters often claiming that trust is a prerequisite to a successful interaction. This paper presents original data from an in-depth research project which used collaborative autoethnography to gather the experiences of seven deaf academics who work regularly with British Sign Language (BSL) interpreters, who interpret between BSL and spoken English, to analyse the concept of ‘trust’ in our working relations with BSL interpreters. We found that ‘trust’ is not a useful or productive concept for our interpersonal and professional aims. Instead, we outline multiple ways in which deaf academics can assess and evaluate interpreters’ values, competencies, and performance without relying on ‘trust’. Our findings provide an important, powerful and under-explored perspective on the working relations between deaf academics and interpreters. We suggest these findings can be applied by deaf BSL signers and interpreters in contexts beyond academia, and constitute an important contribution to the literature on interpreting.

“I faced so many barriers”: Access to support for deaf female survivors of domestic violence in the UK

“…Trust of interpreters has been identified as a critical issue generally (Edwards, Alexander & Temple 2006;Napier et al 2017;, but in DV situations it is brought to the fore even more because of the vulnerability of deaf women in this context. Deaf academics have argued that it is not an issue of trust but of deaf people's ability to evaluate interpreters' competence (O'Brien et al 2023).…”