PWPL, Vol. 1, 2016

Joanna Falkowska

Interpreting figurative language from Polish into Polish Sign Language, English and French Joanna Falkowska Faculty of English, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań [email protected]

Abstract Up until the second half of the 1990s, Polish Sign Language (henceforth: PJM) had been scarcely investigated. Usually, the literature equates the results from spoken language interpreting to sign language interpreting, which can be a dangerous generalisation. A PJM interpreter works in a visual modality and handles different working conditions. Moreover, the figurative language of PJM is different to that of spoken languages. Therefore, the aim of this study was to investigate interpreting strategies used by PJM and spoken language interpreters when facing figurative language. In the study, ten professional interpreters were asked to interpret simultaneously a 10-minute recorded excerpt of a real speech delivered in Polish. The text consisted of 14 figurative expressions and was rendered into the B-language (3 PJM, 4 English, 3 French) by participants. The PJM interpreters were recorded on a camera in an enclosed room while spoken language interpreters were recorded on a digital dictaphone in interpreting booths. Their rendition was assessed for acceptability and then compared with regard to strategies used. Among translations accepted by native-speakers, spoken language interpreters aimed at finding English or French counterparts of Polish figurative expressions, whereas sign language interpreters mainly resorted to the paraphrasing technique. The results support the hypothesis that sign language interpreters process the source text differently in order to render it without mistakes. Keywords: sign language interpreting, interpreting strategies, Polish Sign Language, PJM



1.

Introduction

Sign language linguistics is a young field of research. For years, people engaged in the Deaf1 community have constituted a small group and had little time to devote to academic work. When first studies on sign language began to appear, their aim was to give sign languages their necessary legitimacy. In other words, researchers tried to prove that sign languages were actual languages but just expressed in the visual channel. Finally, when sign languages got public acclaim, studies started to centre around sign languages themselves. Even though the field is currently developing in different countries, St. Jerome Publishing provided a telling message considering sign language research. In 2007, it started publishing The Sign Language Translator and Interpreter. Within three years, the journal issued six numbers and with the coming of 2010 ceased publishing explaining that “[they] have struggled to bring in a consistent flow of high quality papers to the standard needed for a journal that stands as a 'sister' to The Translator.” (St. Jerome Publishing 2011). It is impossible to provide an exact number of Poles with hearing damage. There is no one uniform measuring scale among experts, nor comprehensive statistics (Szczepankowski 1999: 44). Similarly, the community of deaf and hard of hearing people (henceforth DHH) is split into those who speak PJM and those who have never been taught this language. In 2004, the World Health Organisation estimated some 275 million DHH around the world (World Health Organisation 2012). Szczepankowski et al. (2005: 13) estimate that the number of the deaf in Poland is 50,000 and the number of people with moderate hearing damage is between 800,000 and 900,000. According to data from 1992 (Perlin and Szczepankowski 1992: 13), it is estimated that

1

Deaf is written with a capital D to distinguish a community with its own culture from a purely medical term defining hearing impairment.

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there are 40,000 native users of PJM. Hearing signers are either trained interpreters, educators, teachers, priests, activists (in total around 2-3,000), or the hearing children of deaf adults (henceforth CODA). As any language, PJM has L1 and L2 users. CODA are particular sign language users as they prove to be naturally bicultural and they are a big group among the very few fluent PJM hearing signers (Perlin and Szczepankowski 1992: 13). People who study sign language in adulthood often struggle with its spatial grammar and might transfer the linear sequence of spoken languages into the signing mode (Friedman 1977: 4). Sometimes, the term sign language is used to describe manual sign systems that developed in hearing communities as a transliteration of vocal language into the visual modality (Strazny 2005: 961). Particularly in Poland, the manually coded Polish is controversial due to its use in public schools for DHH children. The emergence of manually coded Polish was an attempt to connect PJM and Polish. An utterance is based on Polish grammar and structure, enforced by speech and expressed by means of PJM signs. Sign gaps caused by differences in grammar are filled by sign neologisms invented for this purpose. Inflection endings are made up for via manual alphabet. As a consequence, manually coded Polish is simply a complete transliteration of Polish into the signing mode. In practice, however, even people educated in manually coded Polish tend to facilitate this system, as it does not stand duty for spoken Polish (Kelly and Lonergan 2009: 6). In the end, the only fluent users of pure manually coded Polish seem to be the teachers (Kelly and Lonergan 2009: 3) and professional interpreters, but the latter learn it mainly for the sake of interpreting exams (Eunika Lech, p.c.). Nowadays, practically all Polish DHH are bilingual (Asher 1994: 3889). Their mother tongue is PJM whereas their second language is Polish. However, only 1,500-2,000 DHH know Polish fluently and can write and read without difficulty. Some several thousand DHH know Polish passively, mostly thanks to television (Perlin and Szczepankowski 1992: 14). Many remaining DHH are Polish illiterate. Roughly calculating, only 4% of DHH can fully understand the artificial system. Manually coded languages changed the life of many DHH as of 1880. In that year, the second international congress on the education and welfare of the deaf was held in Milan. During that conference, educators decided that sign language is primitive and backward and should be prohibited in class. From then on, sometimes even outside the class, students could not sign. They had to adhere to the so-called oral approach. It focused on learning to speak and speechread (Vermeerbergen 2006: 171). In 1984, Polish schools implemented the method that nowadays is much frowned upon. Children were no longer taught in their native PJM but by means of transliterated Polish that they were expected to know. If Conference in Milan was detrimental to sign languages across the world, one hundred years later, in 1980, the International Congress of the Deaf in Hamburg criticised the oral approach. As a consequence, linguistic research on natural sign languages has been carried on for around 40 years worldwide and for about 20 years in Poland (Polski Związek Głuchych Oddział Łódzki 2010: 5). Problems in sign language research are manifold. The most primary, and definitely still quite significant, is the false stereotype that sign language is primitive, backward and represents more of a pantomime than a language itself (Polski Związek Głuchych Oddział Łódzki 2010: 4). One reason for this widely held belief is the iconicity of many vocabulary items (Stokoe 1978: 369). Another is related to limited forms of transcription. Sign language can be glossed in the form of words, which needs further translation into a verbal language (Vermeerbergen 2006: 173). Also, some linguists spread misconceptions that sign language is a gestural representation of a spoken language (Vermeerbergen 2006: 169). This is only true for manually coded systems. Up until recently, technology was also a huge obstacle in sign language research. Filming was only possible on large, heavy and expensive cameras (Stokoe 1978: 370). Bearing in mind that research in the field of sign languages was not excessively subsidised, one can understand why sign language corpora have started to be compiled only recently. Video cameras are cheaper and more available than ever but quality studios are still expensive. For example, in order to elicit German Sign Language, DGS-Korpus-Projekt required a mobile studio with 7 cameras and 12 computers. They have gathered 500 terabytes of data (Sylwia Fabisiak, p.c.). While the British, the French or the Germans can now collect data for their corpora, several years ago researchers were mostly trying to persuade other linguists that sign languages are natural, which often led to studies trying to prove their equivalence to spoken languages. However, trying to fit sign languages in the frames established for spoken languages ignored some sign-specific features (Vermeerbergen 2006: 170f.). Describing new phenomena by means of already known schemata might be easier but not necessarily correct. The main aim of this paper is to explain why sign language interpreting could be treated as a distinct subfield of translation studies. The author argues that PJM interpreters have to process the source text deeper than spoken language interpreters. One reason for which sign language interpreters have to do that is that figurative language in sign languages is different to figurative language in spoken languages (Falkowska 2012: 47ff.). This hypothesis was tested in an experimental that was first presented in the author’s unpublished master’s thesis (Falkowska 2012) and is discussed in an abridged form in this paper.

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When contrasting sign language and conference interpreting, attention may be paid to technical differences between the two professions. Studies may discuss questions such as, when spoken and sign language interpreters are needed, why the mode of delivery (consecutive vs. simultaneous) differs in the two types of interpreting, why directionality matters, why working in the visual channel changes the work of interpreters, whether interpreting conditions differ in spoken and sign language interpreting or where Polish interpreters can learn their profession. Interpreting may also differ because of linguistic factors such as figurative language. PJM does not share many figurative expressions with Polish. According to Marcinkowska (2009: 54-109), metaphors and metonymies in PJM can be found on the sign level rather than the sentence level, and iconicity in sign languages is metonymically and metaphorically motivated. There are certain patterns in the way PJM signs are built. Their structure is based on structural, orientational and ontological metaphors as well as metonymies. Although at the moment the data regarding metaphors in PJM is very scarce, some further analysis of this phenomenon can be seen in Marcinkowska (2009) and Falkowska (2012: 47ff.). Sign language interpreters come across similar challenges that spoken language interpreters do. The question remains, however, whether these challenges happen equally often and if interpreters can use identical strategies to tackle them. For example, if there are many identical conceptual metaphors between two spoken languages but there are fewer between a spoken and a sign language, then a sign language interpreter will face more challenging fragments in the same text than a spoken language interpreter. If two languages share certain conceptual metaphors, then the interpreter does not have to conceive any complex solutions; but if they do not, then this puts a strain on interpreter’s creativity. Bearing in mind the already mentioned problems that sign language interpreters face at work, one may wonder whether sign language interpreters do not work closer to saturation levels than spoken language interpreters. In order to answer this question, this paper presents the results of a study partly modelled after Sheridan (2009). Sheridan compared strategies used by two Irish Sign Language interpreters when rendering idiomatic expressions, which included fixed expressions and idioms. She analysed two recordings of two different interpreters. Both recordings were very similar and some excerpts in the text were identical. She then chose nine idiomatic expressions from those identical excerpts and compared the interpretations. Sheridan had no influence on the procedure, neither did she know to what extent both interpreters prepared before recordings. Of the chosen fragments, only one expression was rendered in the same way by both interpreters, while other fragments were tackled by means of different signs. The analysis showed that the prevailing strategy was paraphrasing. On the whole, there were 13 instances of paraphrasing but only four expressions were interpreted by means of paraphrasing by both interpreters. In the five remaining cases, one of the interpreters either translated the fragment literally or found an equivalent idiom in Irish Sign Language. Whenever literal translation was adopted, the target text remained acceptable and understandable in sign language. Sheridan concludes that interpreters had to introduce some cultural adjustments, which proves that not only languages but also cultures have to be translated. She also says that irrespective of modality, the interpreters of all languages face the same challenges. On the surface, the interpreting process may be the same but a detailed analysis may prove that there are many variables that make it different. Therefore, it would be preferable to compare these recordings with the work of spoken language interpreters. It may be true that both modalities face problems when meeting figurative language and that they choose from a set of similar strategies but the strategies that they pick may differ in frequency. This is the reason for which in this paper interpreters of several languages were compared to investigate whether similarity is only skin-deep or wheter different modalities require different solutions. 2.

Method

2.1.

Materials

The participants in the project interpreted a 10-minute excerpt of a speech delivered by the Polish president Bronisław Komorowski in the German Marshall Fund on 8 Dec 2010. The transcript is provided in Appendix A. The beginning of the speech was chosen in order for the interpreters not to feel lost or out of context. The speech was delivered sufficiently long ago for the interpreters to forget its content if they had ever listened to it. At the same time it was recent enough to be current. It did not, for example, discuss out-of-date facts. The speech was interpreter-friendly, given at a slow pace in a casual manner. The speaker did not read things out, neither did he discuss specialist subjects. The speech has been downloaded from the German Marshall Fund website (http://www.gmfus.org/). While the audio was of very good quality, the video was of mediocre quality but still proved to be helpful since almost all participants used the opportunity to both listen to and watch the speaker. In the text, both metaphorical and idiomatic expressions were found. For the purpose of this study, metaphors are understood as expressions that provide “understanding for a more abstract concept (the target

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domain) through a more concrete one (the source domain)” (Kövecses 2006: 126-127) whereas idioms are unproductive units of language, fixed expressions that cannot be changed in order to create new units (Gibbs 2007: 698-702). After a preliminary analysis of these expressions, 14 figurative expressions were selected for analysis, among them 6 idiomatic expressions and 8 metaphorical expressions. The list of the selected figurative expressions is provided in Appendix B. 2.2.

Participants

Table 1 shows an overview of participants. There were ten native Polish interpreters: four working into English, three working into French, three working into PJM. Different language families were chosen to investigate whether spoken language interpreters aim at similar strategies irrespective of their working language and can therefore be treated as one group. The youngest spoken language interpreter was 27, the oldest was 68. The youngest sign language interpreter was 25, the oldest was 55. The selected participants had to be active interpreters with professional experience. The mean experience of spoken language interpreters was 18 years and that of sign language interpreters was 35. However, the experience of sign language interpreters is in reality different because all of them were early bilinguals and they started interpreting early in their lives. This can be as early as at the age of 4. It is therefore evident that these instances of interpreting were of different nature but it is almost impossible to assess at what age a CODA becomes an interpreter. One of PJM interpreters was a witness of a situation in which a 10-year-old child was told to interpret at the divorce proceedings of her deaf parents because the professional interpreter was inaccessible (Eunika Lech p.c.). This is the reason for which the author of this paper accepted statements according to which some interpreters have interpreted for their whole life. In order to check if the groups were homogeneous with regard to interpreting training, the participants were asked if they had any academic degree in interpreting. Only two interpreters of English attended interpreting schools, the remaining eight interpreters had no such training. The interpreters were also asked about any interpreting courses they attended. Two spoken language interpreters and all sign language interpreters participated in a short interpreting course. The course of sign language interpreters, however, consisted mainly of vocabulary training. Therefore, the author believes that these trainings should rather be counted as language courses. The participants were also asked about the type of interpreting they usually provided. The spoken language interpreters worked in the conditions of conference interpreting while the sign language interpreters worked in all possible interpreting conditions, e.g. TV interpreting, court interpreting, medical interpreting, conference interpreting, etc. Finally, sign language interpreters were asked about the language they interpreted into, in order to ensure that all of them knew PJM. They said that they knew how to use manually coded Polish but they used it only upon customer’s demand. Otherwise they used PJM. Table 1. Participants – summary. number of interpreters age years of experience (mean) interpreting conditions PJM or manually coded Polish

2.3.

spoken language 7 27-68 18 conference interpreting N/A

sign language 3 25-55 35 all kinds of assignments PJM and manually coded Polish

Procedures

The experiment had four stages. During the first stage the interpreters provided their output. The spoken language interpreters were recorded on a digital voice recorder, the sign language interpreters were recorded on a digital video camera. All listened to the speech and watched it displayed on a screen via a projector in a quiet room. The spoken language interpreters worked in the interpreting booths of Adam Mickiewicz University to make their work as natural as possible. Every interpreter was provided with a brief contextual introduction to the text. The introduction provided information about the place where the speech was delivered, date and circumstances. It also specified that the overall content of the speech concerned the Polish economic situation in relation to the lack of economic support from the Marshall Plan. At the end of the recording, the interpreters were asked about their impression and all of them assessed the text as interpreter-friendly. They also filled in a short questionnaire about their age and experience (discussed above).

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Next, the author transcribed the expressions were produced by the interpreters to render figurative expressions selected for evaluation. After that, the recordings and their transcriptions were given to different native speakers of English, French and PJM for assessment. Each recording was assessed by one native speaker. Sign language recordings were additionally watched by two more sign language users and generally assessed for acceptance in order to confirm the harsh critique of the recordings provided by the Deaf. The native speakers had to acquaint themselves with the interpretation and say whether the selected expressions sounded natural or not. The aim of this stage was to find instances of transcoding since only a native speaker is sensitive enough to find calques in a seemingly correct text. In the last stage, all interpreted expressions were classified with regard to the strategy used by the interpreter. Initially, the author wanted to use categories proposed by Kövecses (2006: 191) but this would result in too many categories to spot any tendency. Therefore, the author merged two Kövecses’s categories of metaphors into one, which resulted in a total of six categories. The six resulting categories were: same, different, paraphrase, omission, transcoding and error. All instances in which the expression used the same words as the source text were classified under the category same. All instances in which the expression was rendered by means of a different idiom or metaphor but rendered the figurative meaning correctly were classified under the category different. All instances in which the expression was rendered by means of providing its literal meaning were classified as paraphrasing. Omission accounted for untranslated expressions, transcoding for calques from Polish that do not exist in the target language and errors accounted for the expressions that were not transcoded however the native speakers assessed them as odd or unnatural. 3.

Results

The results of this experimental study turned out to be difficult to present due to certain limitations that emerged during the analysis of all the recordings. Particular limitations will be discussed in the next section. However, one main problem has to be mentioned now to explain the setup of the present section. Among PJM interpreters, only participant PJM 1 got satisfactory reception from the Deaf. Two personifications of participant PJM 2 were accepted but the remaining expressions were considered incorrect. None of the expressions provided by participant PJM 3 was accepted. Moreover, the latter two interpretations were assessed as incorrect overall, difficult to understand and misleading in many cases. Therefore, the results of the experiment are presented in two ways. Table 2 and Table 3 present the individual results of each interpreter according to the working language. These tables show the number of cases in which a given strategy was used to handle idiomatic and metaphorical expressions respectively. Probably the most striking result in this analysis was the number of incorrect productions. Expressions classified as errors, transcoding or omissions are undesirable. While they may be a proof of unacceptable interpretation, as was the case of the two sign language interpreters, in discussing the strategies used by professionals these categories cannot be counted as voluntary choices. In some cases they are used consciously, especially the omission strategy, but even then these are more life-saving strategies than translation proper. Table 2. Individual results. Interpreting strategies for six idiomatic expressions (as per the number of instances). same different paraphrase omission transcoding error

EN 1 3

EN 2 3

1 1 1

1 1 1

EN 3 3 1

EN 4 2 1

2

1 1 1

FR 1 2 1

FR 2 3

FR 3 4

1 2 1

1 1

PJM 1

PJM 2

PJM 3

4 1

6

5 1 2

Table 3 Individual results. Interpreting strategies for eight metaphorical expressions (as per the number of instances). EN 1 same different paraphrase omission transcoding error

4

1 3

EN 2 1 3 1 1 1 1

EN 3 3 3 1

EN 4 3 4 1

FR 1 1 4 2 1

1

FR 2 3 5

FR 3 1 6 1

PJM 1

PJM 2

2 5 1

2

4

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PJM 3

1 5 2

PWPL, Vol. 1, 2016

Joanna Falkowska

Individual results show that the participants within the spoken language interpreter group acted in a similar way. Due to the numerous incorrect renditions resulting in a lower number of total correct expressions it is difficult to talk about any notable tendencies in the group but a trend towards interpreting through the use of figurative expressions can be spotted. On the other hand, interpreter PJM 1 paraphrased all correctly translated idioms and also had an inclination to paraphrasing with regards to metaphorical expressions. None of the expressions rendered by interpreter PJM 1 was identical to Polish expressions, while spoken language interpreters resorted to such strategy very often. Summary group results are shown in Table 4. Due to the lack of approval on treating two PJM interpretations as correct, they were not included in the summary classification. This means that the group results juxtapose the results of seven spoken language interpreters with only one sign language interpreter. This does not allow for any generalisations about sign language interpreters, neither does it unveil any tendencies or trends in strategy use globally. Still, the strategies used by interpreter PJM 1 stand in sharp contrast to those used by spoken language interpreters. Table 4. Group results. strategies for idioms

same different paraphrase omission transcoding error

spoken lg 48% 7% 7% 7% 24% 7%

strategies for metaphors PJM same different paraphrase omission transcoding error

83% 17%

spoken lg 22% 52% 9% 5% 5% 7%

PJM 25% 63% 12%

It can clearly be seen that in the case of idioms, interpreter PJM 1 paraphrased all expressions while spoken language interpreters tried to find an identical idiom in their working languages. Interestingly, most participants omitted one idiom. Whenever an interpreter tried to tackle this idiom, their rendition resulted either in an error or a calque from Polish. Omission of this particular expression, żyliśmy w gospodarce księżycowej, is a small mistake since the president paraphrases it himself in the next sentence by saying that we lived in the socialist economy. Interpreters with a décalage long enough to spot it resorted to the omission strategy and were much more successful than those who tried to render it. Word-for-word rendering in this example draws attention of the listener who may start questioning the validity of the whole interpretation. Another interesting case concerned the idiom byliśmy zieloną wyspą that was paraphrased by interpreter PJM 1. It has not been rendered correctly by any of the remaining nine interpreters. The expression literally means ‘we were a green island’ and was coined at the beginning of the current global economic crisis to describe the Polish state of the economy. Polish GDP was the only one to remain in the black while the rest of Europe was in the red. This was represented on a map of Europe during a government presentation, where all countries were marked as red and only Poland remained green. Poles, familiar with that presentation of the government and frequently reminded about this phrase, quickly associate the phrase with its meaning. Foreigners, however, do not know how the phrase was coined and do not have any associations with it. Therefore, the only case in which this expression was understandable was when interpreter PJM 1 rendered it as: we were a green island Poland managed [to cope with the crisis]. With regard to metaphorical expressions, interpreter PJM 1 resorted either to paraphrasing or to using metaphors different than the original ones. It was interesting to see that regardless of anticipated results, the interpreter did use expressions that were metaphorical in nature. For example, a metaphor regarding the iron curtain was interpreted by means of a metaphor about the Berlin Wall. However, the total number of figurative expressions was considerably lower than that used by spoken language interpreters who, in turn, paraphrased to a very small degree. Most of their metaphors were rendered by means of figurative expressions. 4.

Discussion

As pointed out in the previous section, the results of this experimental study were difficult to present due to certain limitations that emerged after the data had been collected. First of all, during one instance of recording sign interpretation there was a technical problem with the video camera, which lost its focus and as a result only five idioms and six metaphors of participant PJM 2 were recorded. On the other hand, since the recording was assessed unfavourably on the whole, this was not overly significant.

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The second, and at the same time, the most undesirable problem was the evaluation of PJM interpreters. The author was surprised upon receiving the information that the two CODAs were so bad. It turned out that PJM interpreters 2 and 3 used manually coded Polish and the DHH assessors said that the expressions that they gave simply do not make sense in PJM. It is therefore difficult to talk of any tendency whatsoever in the group of PJM interpreters. A small-scale study like this one is always based on a case-by-case interpretation of results and it does not reveal any statistically significant data. It is rather an encouragement or a discouragement to engage more efforts in a particular field of research than a result that could be generalised over the whole community of professionals. Nevertheless, it may reveal certain trends as long as all the collected data can be used in the analysis. In this case, it was impossible to draw conclusions from the work of two PJM interpreters, which had a significant influence on the whole analysis. The third limitation resulted from the number of selected expressions. Some interpreters had as many as half of their translations incorrect. This should be taken into account and a much higher number of figurative expressions should be selected to compensate for similar complications. Another important issue concerned the choice of idioms. In fact, the selected idioms could be categorised into two different subgroups, conventional idioms that are transparent in Polish and idioms that have been coined within recent decades. The latter group resulted in many more mistakes than the former. Hence, they should be avoided in similar studies as they do not contribute to the results. With regard to metaphors, after having analysed the recordings of sign language interpreters with a Deaf person, the author of this paper realised that sign language does allow for the use of personification more than it allows for the use of other metaphors. In fact, every sentence needs an agent and it also applies to sign languages. Therefore, the use of personification in the set of metaphorical expressions might be a factor that confuses the results. Finally, there was one limitation that has not proved to be very significant in this experiment but could be confounding in large-scale experiments. Sign language interpreters prefer working in the direction of their B-language, while spoken language interpreters are usually stronger when working into their mother tongue (Van Dijk et al. 2011). It seems however, that contrastive analysis of these two types of interpreters is only possible when all participants are asked to interpret into their B-language. Interpreting into Polish would require them to work on texts that were manipulated and delivered by different speakers. Such texts are hard to compare and are almost impossible to create due to the linguistic specificity of figurative language. 5.

Conclusion

Summing up, this experimental study revealed many factors that should be taken into account when comparing spoken and sign language interpreters. Due to the unexpected failure of two sign language interpreters, this experiment can only be treated as a pilot study before a bigger scientific venture. The results of this experiment revealed something that the author was not initially interested in, that is the quality of interpreting services in PJM. It was interesting to see that although most spoken and sign language interpreters had no particular education in interpreting, only the former group gave acceptable output. This may stem from the fact that all spoken language interpreters had academic background in linguistics and, as a result, their command of foreign language was higher. On the other hand, all sign language interpreters were early bilinguals, which should ensure the highest command of language. Another aspect that was revealed by the study was that the number of analysed figurative expressions has to be higher. It is not clear and thus should be verified whether personifications should be included in the analysis or not. The individual results of interpreter PJM 1 support the hypothesis that was suggested at the beginning of this paper. The sign language interpreter had to process the source text to a higher degree. There was no single expression that the interpreter rendered word-for-word and there were very few expressions that had their metaphorical counterparts in PJM. Out of the fourteen selected expressions, ten were paraphrased and their literal meaning was given. This means that the interpreter had to process the expressions very thoroughly. These results prove that sign language interpreting requires high development of skills that are less crucial in spoken language interpreting. A sign language interpreter does not simply look for relevant counterparts in PJM, he or she has to get to the real core of the source text provided by the speaker. This can be treated as an extra effort in interpreting. Although effort models in interpreting theory generally account for the effort of comprehension (Gile 1995: 159-190) and interpreters reiterate that they interpret sense and not words, this statement acquires extra value in sign language interpreting. It may be suggested, therefore, that it is necessary to pay a lot of attention to reformulation exercises and text comprehension when educating novices in the world of sign language interpreting.

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Concluding, this experiment should be repeated on a larger group of interpreters taking into consideration all of the above mentioned limitations. It is crucial to carry on research on sign language interpreting, not only because it is an underestimated field of linguistics and we know surprisingly little about it. The author believes that such research may be very helpful in our understanding of spoken languages. What is more, good practices of sign language interpreters, for example, how they manage to process the text so thoroughly, may prove to be revealing to spoken language interpreters.

References Fabisiak, Sylwia. 2011. Korpusy języków migowych [Sign language corpora]. (Lecture given at the University of Warsaw, Warsaw, 16 Mar. 2011.). Falkowska, Joanna. 2012. Interpreting figurative language from Polish into Polish Sign Language, English and French. [Unpublished MA thesis, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań.]. Friedman, Lynn A. (ed.). 1977. On the other hand: New perspectives on American Sign Language. New York: Academic Press. Gibbs Jr., Raymond W. 2007. “Idioms and formulaic language”, in: Dirk Geeraerts and Hubert Cuyckens (eds.), The Oxford handbook of cognitive linguistics. New York: Oxford University Press, 697-725. Gile, Daniel. 1995. Basic concepts and models for interpreter and translator training. Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Kelly, Vince and Jack Lonergan. 2009. Sign language, signing, and gesticulation: Considerations in developing performance descriptors in a European Language Portfolio for Deaf and Hard of Hearing people. (A Language Training London Report prepared for the Second Full Consortium Meeting, Plzen, 30-31 October 2009.). Kövecses, Zoltán. 2006. Language, mind, and culture: A practical introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Marcinkowska, Anna. 2009. Metafora i metonimia jako mechanizmy denotacyjne w słowniku Polskiego Języka Migowego [Metaphore and metonymy as denotational mechanisms in PJM lexicon]. [Unpublished M.A. dissertation, the University of Warsaw.] Perlin, Jacek and Bogdan Szczepankowski. 1992. Polski Język Migowy: Opis lingwistyczny [Polish Sign Language: Linguistic description]. Warszawa: Wydawnictwa Szkolne i Pedagogiczne. Polski Związek Głuchych Oddział Łódzki. 2010. Polski Język Migowy: Słownik [Polish Sign Language: A dictionary]. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Studio Koloru. Sheridan, Sarah. 2009. “Translating idiomatic expressions from English to Irish Sign Language (ISL): Theory and practice”, The Sign Language Translator and Interpreter 3: 69-83. St. Jerome Publishing Home Page. 2011. St. Jerome Publishing (http://www.stjerome.co.uk/tsa/journal/3/) (date of access: 1 June 2011). Stokoe, William C. 1978. “Problems in sign language research”, in: Miriam Schlesinger and Lila Namir (eds.). Sign language of the deaf: Psychological, linguistic, and sociological perspectives. New York: Academic Press, 365-378. Strazny, Philipp (ed.). 2005. Encyclopedia of linguistics. Vol. 2. New York: Fitzroy Dearborn. Świdziński, Marek. 2011. (Plenary lecture given at the conference “Teoria i praktyka tłumaczenia PJM. Tłumacze siłą Głuchych” [Theory and practice in PJM interpreting. Interpreters as the strength of the Deaf], Warszawa, 3-4 December 2011.). Szczepankowski, Bogdan, Grzegorz Sokalski, Agata Panas and Krzysztof Cis. 2005. Effatha!: język migowy [Effatha!: sign language]. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Kardynała Stefana Wyszyńskiego. Szczepankowski, Bogdan. 1999. Niesłyszący, głusi, głochoniemi: Wyrównywanie szans [Hard of hearing, deaf and deafmute: equalising opportunities]. Warszawa: Wydawnictwa Szkolne I Pedagogiczne. Van Dijk, Rick, Eveline Boers, Ingrid Christoffels and Daan Hermans. 2011. “Directionality effects in simultaneous language interpreting: The case of sign language interpreters in the Netherlands”, American Annals of the Deaf 1: 47-55. Vermeerbergen, Myriam. 2006. “Past and current trends in sign language research”, Language & Communication 26: 168-192. World Health Organisation Home Page. 2012. (http://www.who.int/en/) (date of access: 8 June 2012).

Acknowledgements The author would like to thank Professor Marek Świdziński for providing some insightful remarks concerning figurative language in PJM and pointing to the metonymical nature of iconic signs. The in-depth analysis of sign language would not be possible without the invaluable support of Ms Eunika Lech, Mr Tomasz Mioduszewski and Mr Maciej Kortas.

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