What can terminological research bring to French Sign Language interpreting and translation practice?
Quels apports de la recherche en terminologie à l'interprétation et la traduction en LSF?
Résumé
Despite the existence of a number of resources that can be considered as terminological, research on terminology - understood as a discipline that systematically studies the designating of concepts particular to one or more subject fields - has hardly been carried out at all regarding French Sign Language (LSF), except, partly, for Pointurier Pournin & Gile (2012). In France, existing “terminological” resources have not been built up as part of large-scale, federative research as is the case in several other countries (BSL Glossary Project, Irish Sign Language STEM Dictionary, ASL STEM, etc.), and come under a variety of names, i.e. "dictionaries", "lexicons", "glossaries", etc. (Segouat, Josselin-Leray forthcoming). The way they have been compiled and are actually used has been little investigated (Segouat, Josselin-Leray, Ranvier 2022). Some are publicly available, while some others have a restricted target audience because they are kept within companies, interpreting and/or translation services (Josselin-Leray, Segouat, 2023). However, these resources are essential to the translation and interpreting professions, to ensure uniformity in the dissemination of knowledge in LSF and to limit the creation of provisional "codes" that do not follow the rules of LSF (Arcambal, 2021).
Our paper thus focuses on the use of these terminological resources in the context of French-LSF interpreting and translation, and in the positioning of professionals towards them. Our methodological approach consists in surveying French interpreters and translators about (i) their actual use of the available resources, (ii) the nature of the resources they use, and (iii) how they view terminology creation in LSF (current trends and prospects for the future).
The global aim of this research is, through the sharing of the results with the professionals concerned, to assess the resources used, to document the professionals’ practices, and to encourage the opening up of resources hitherto restricted to internal use. A study of the impact of this dissemination of results is also planned, to see to what extent professionals' practices might have evolved.