Sign Language Brokering

In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Emily Pacheco speaks with Professor Jemina Napier (Heriot-Watt University, Scotland) about her 2021 book Sign Language Brokering in Deaf-Hearing Families.

This book details a study of sign language brokering that is carried out by deaf and hearing people who grow up using sign language at home with deaf parents, known as heritage signers. Child language brokering (CLB) is a form of interpreting carried out informally by children, typically for migrant families. The study of sign language brokering has been largely absent from the emerging body of CLB literature. The book gives an overview of the international, multi-stage, mixed-method study employing an online survey, semi-structured interviews and visual methods, to explore the lived experiences of deaf parents and heritage signers. It will be of interest to practitioners and academics working with signing deaf communities and those who wish to pursue professional practice with deaf communities, as well as academics and students in the fields of Applied Linguistics, Intercultural Communication, Interpreting Studies and the Social Science of Childhood.

Summaries of Sign Language Brokering in Deaf-Hearing Families can be found in BSL, ISL, and International Sign.

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Transcript

Emily: Welcome to the Language on the Move Podcast, a channel on the New Books Network. My name is Emily Pacheco and I’m a Master of Research candidate in Linguistics at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia.

My guest today is Dr Jemina Napier. Jemina is a professor in the School of Social Sciences, Language and Intercultural Studies at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland. Her work includes researching interpreting and translation, linguistic and cultural diversity, gender inequality and interpreting in academic professions, higher education and leadership, and sign language brokering.

Today we are going to talk in general about an area of study in linguistics known as child language brokering, and in particular about a 2021 book that Jemina wrote entitled Sign Language Brokering in Deaf-Hearing Families.

Jemina, welcome to the show, and thank you so much for joining us today!

Dr Napier: Thanks, Emily. Thanks for the invitation. It’s really a real privilege to be here.

Emily: Oh, thank you so much again! And just to start off, can you tell us a bit about yourself, how you became a linguist, as well as what led you to research sign language interpreting?

Dr Napier: Sure. So, I’m, as you can hear, I’m a hearing person, but I grew up in a multi-generational deaf family. So, there are four generations of deafness in my family. Going back from, in my generation, I have one cousin, but my parents, siblings, their cousins, my grandparents and also great-grandparents and several aunts and uncles.

So, I grew up with British Sign Language as my home language and grew up bilingually between British Sign Language (BSL) and English. So, I have the lived experience of child language brokering, which I know we’ll come back to, and began work as a professional sign language interpreter when I was very young, when they were just establishing the profession in the UK, sort of separating out interpreting from social work, support for deaf people.

So, I was in the very early stages of that professionalisation. So, I did my first paid interpreting job when I was 17, and there wasn’t any interpreter training available at that time. But then, so I started working and kind of learning on the job, if you like, but went to university to study sociology.

And then I was lucky enough to enrol in a master’s program in BSL interpreting, which was finally set up. So, I was already working as an interpreter, but then I did training and through that interpreting program, I discovered linguistics and thought, ooh, linguistics! This has been an interesting way to kind of analyse what we do as interpreters and have a better understanding of what we do as interpreters.

So, I applied for a scholarship to do my PhD, a Commonwealth scholarship, and that actually took me to Macquarie University, where you are, where I did my PhD in the Department of Linguistics at Macquarie University, so I graduated with my PhD in 2002, and I looked at linguistic coping strategies of sign language interpreters when they work in university lectures.

Emily: Yeah, yeah, that’s fascinating and awesome to hear how you got that start in-from interpreting into linguistics, kind of similar to myself. And as you’ve mentioned, quite a bit of your work has to do with the sign language interpreting profession, but there is a form of non-professional interpreting that exists and it is sometimes known as child language brokering. So, could you explain what that term means and why it’s something that linguists study?

Dr Napier: Sure, so child language brokering is a term that was coined by Nigel Hall, I think, back in the late 80s, early 90s, but there’s been a real explosion of research in that area probably over the last decade or so, 10, 15 years. Initially, child language brokering research was done to understand the kind of brokering. So basically, child language brokering is a form of interpreting that children do for their parents.

So typically, originally, research has been focused on migrant parents or people who relocate to a different country, whether it’s as refugees, asylum seekers, or for work, for marriage. And if they have young children, often children, as we know, children tend to acquire languages more quickly than adults do, especially if they’re exposed to a new majority language. So, there’s been a whole plethora of research that’s focused on this interpreting that children do between their parents and other people.

So, whether it’s in hospitals, at the local shop, at the bank, all these interactions that their parents might have. And the reason that the term child language brokering was coined was to try and distinguish it from professional interpreting, because what children do, or young children, or young people do is, obviously they are still interpreting. So, you know, language A to language B and back again, but they’ve got more of a vested interest and they’re more involved in it.

And also, there’s a kind of cultural mediation aspect. So, children might take responsibility to explain more, or, you know, they understand what their parents do or don’t know, or family members do or don’t know. So, it’s actually kind of seen as a slightly broader task, if you like, than just the sort of nature of the interpreting and sort of mediation that professional interpreters do and are trained to do. Because they are typically, they remain more impartial than, you know, they’re there just to facilitate the communication and not give any opinions. Whereas, as you can imagine, children can give opinions, but also have power to decide what to interpret and not to interpret. So that’s kind of the broad reason why this term has been coined.

And initially a lot of research was done by psychologists, like educational psychologists, child development psychologists looking at the impact of brokering on children, whether they know there’s sort of parentification, reverse parenting roles, and so on. But over the last 10, 15 years, more linguists and interpreting study scholars have become interested in it because of understanding more about bilingualism, how brokering can be an asset. It can be a cognitive asset for children to develop bilingual skills and actually utilise their bilingual skills. That they develop empathy probably from a younger age because they’re thinking about, well, who I’m interpreting for and what they need. And then linguists now and interpreting study scholars are more interested in looking at the act of brokering, just understanding more about the act of brokering itself. So not just the kind of emotional, psychological, cognitive effect, but actually just as a languaging practice. How, as you’ve said, I’ve done a lot of research on professional interpreting in different contexts like health, legal, education and so on. But child language brokering is a masked interpreting practice. And so, it helps us to understand interpreting needs, you know, where access needs are paramount and maybe not being provided by professional interpreters, but also just as a languaging practice in itself, it’s interesting to see how children manage, and young people manage those practices.

Emily: Yeah, I think it’s fascinating as a language broker myself growing up, I just think the act of brokering is something that needs a lot more research, right? So, it’s great to talk about this today. And thank you so much for defining what child language brokering is. A lot of people don’t know what’s the difference between that and interpreting. Aren’t you, isn’t it just kids interpreting?

So, I really appreciate that. And to move on to the next question, we can talk about your book, your 2021 book, Sign Language Brokering in Deaf-Hearing Families. In the book, you apply the concept of child language brokering to heritage signers in deaf-hearing families. So, what does sign language brokering mean and how might it appear as a language practice in deaf-hearing families?

Dr Napier: Sure, thanks. So just to start off with why I became interested in this, because I often used to be told, oh, you must have interpreted for your parents all your life and you must have been an interpreter all your life. And I used to say no, I used to say no, I’ve not interpreted all my life. Because I never felt that – interpreting wasn’t something that was imposed upon me by my parents. So, it was never something that I was required to do. And so, I always used to deny that and say no, it’s not true.

But then once I had my daughter, she was very young, she was only about 2 or 3, and I actually discovered her interpreting or brokering for my mother when she was watching TV once and the captions weren’t working or something, there was a cartoon on. And so, she was telling my mother what they were saying on the TV. And my mum said to me, I didn’t ask her to do that. And so, it piqued my interest. And I thought, hold on a minute. I realised that actually that’s exactly the kind of thing that I did when I was young, because when I was young, we didn’t have captions, we didn’t have video relay services, we didn’t have professional interpreting services.

So of course I did interpret for my parents, but because it didn’t feel like an imposition, I didn’t think of it in that way. And so, I started, so it piqued my interest, and I realised that I did that. So, I did do that. I did broker when I was a child. I did help my parents, but it was not from being asked, it was because I offered. And so, I started reading around and I discovered the early work on child language brokering and realised, I was like, this is it. This is actually, this captures what it was that I did and from my lived experience. And then I realised that there was no research on it. There was one seminal book that was published in 1994 by Paul Preston, where he did an extensive study with heritage signers, which is the term I prefer rather than children of deaf adults. And there’s a whole other reason for that. We might come on to later. And so, he did his study with heritage signers and touched on their experiences of interpreting or brokering for their parents, but he was focusing more on their sense of identity and linguistic and cultural identity.

So, he did touch on it. But apart from that, there was nothing. And there’s some anecdotal things here and there, but there was really nothing, no substantial empirical research anyway. So, I decided to do this. And so, I coined it sign language brokering because I felt it was important to distinguish between the child language brokering practices that might manifest in families that had deaf and hearing members, whether that was hearing children with deaf parents. And if you think about my family, there were lots of different deaf and hearing people in my family. And most of the hearing people could sign, but other families don’t have that makeup necessarily. So basically, I set out to explore what the parallels were. So, what the similarities and differences were between child language brokering, which has been identified as happening in a whole range of settings.

And even though there are lots of taboos around, you know, using your child as an interpreter or as a broker, we know it still happens. The research shows that it happens, and it happens everywhere and regularly. So, because I was able to draw on that data, I was able to replicate some of that and say, okay, well, let’s look at then how this happens in deaf-hearing families and is sign language brokering the same as child language brokering and what the synergies are and perhaps what the differences are as well.

So, what I found essentially is that, yes, sign language brokering happens in exactly the same way as child language brokering. It happens everywhere, it happens regularly, but it’s actually quite complex and quite nuanced as a languaging practice when you consider the different perspectives of the people that are involved.

Emily: I think it’s fascinating because, like you mentioned earlier, from child language brokering, typically the context is on migrant families, right? And in deaf-hearing families, you don’t always have that migrant aspect, but there is still brokering happening. I think that’s really, really interesting.

Dr Napier: And just add to, yeah, on that point is that many deaf parents might well be very bilingual, you know, in written English. And some parents might choose to speak at times, but for them it’s about accessing and participating in the world around them, which is not accessible because they can’t hear. Annelies Kusters and Maartje De Meulder, who are two deaf scholars, have coined the term sensorial asymmetries, that’s it. Sensorial asymmetries, because they were saying that even though a deaf person could be professionally qualified, professionally educated, you know, very bilingual, multilingual even, in sign languages and written languages, but they can’t access what’s going on around them. And they, you know, many people use different strategies, like, you know, gesturing and writing notes and all that kind of thing. But when you’re getting into quite complex conversations, then there’s some kind of access is needed through interpreters or whatever.

So, I think that’s one of the slight differences is that people might have competence. So, for example, in the UK context where I live now, deaf parents might well be very competent in English, but they still, their children are still brokers for them. And that’s where it becomes really complex and nuanced.

Emily: Yeah, and in your book, you present data from three stages of the four-stage project you did. And stage one utilised international survey across several countries. Stage two involved interviews conducted in Australia. And then stage three applied group interviews in England using vignette and visual methods. Can you explain what vignette and visual methods are and tell us a bit more about the innovative methods you used in stage three, as well as what ethical considerations were needed to work with signing communities?

Dr Napier: Sure. Yeah, that’s a very big question. (laughs)

Emily: I know. (laughs)

Dr Napier: I started off at stage one. Again, I think, I just to give context, I think which is important. So, stage one was the survey, which I actually adapted from a survey that had been done with child language brokers with Latino children in schools in America.

So, I adapted the survey so that it was more culturally sort of specific to deaf communities to get a picture of, okay, is this happening where it’s happening? And then that confirmed that it did. And then I went on to do follow up interviews for people who’d responded to the survey and who lived in Australia, which is where I was living at the time, who were willing to sort of delve a bit deeper and talk about their responses.

And then I did in stage three, when I was back in the UK, I did these focus group interviews with deaf parents and with young children. So up until that point, I’d only been interacting with or collected data from people who were 16 plus. And then I did interviews with some teenage, a couple of teenagers who are sort of 14, 15.

So, once I did the workshops in the UK, we had a workshop that was facilitated by a deaf parent. So, I worked with Deaf Parenting UK, an organisation here. So, I had a deaf parent facilitate a focus group with deaf parents. And then I facilitated a group with young heritage signers, and they were aged from 5 to 15. So, I really wanted to use visual methods because I wanted to engage the children in talking about what they were doing. And I wanted to do something equivalent for the parents.

So, I did a lot of reading around about visual methods and understanding that visual methods are a really great way to engage deaf communities as well as visual language users. And so, I ended up using art elicitation method. So, I asked after talking to children about what we mean by brokering and asking them if they do it, then I asked them to draw pictures and to represent what they did.

And then with the parents, the equivalent was how do you feel about when your child brokers for you? How does that make you feel? And I had photos, pre-existing photos, which were spread out on the floor, and they could pick them up and then talk about why that photo represented for them, how they were feeling.

But another component was the vignette methods where there was actually a video, it went, a video that went viral. I think it was around 2010, I think, at this little girl called Laura in America and she was signing a Christmas Carol, a Christmas concert, and it went viral because the mother posted the video on YouTube saying, oh, isn’t my little girl cute? And all of these people were saying, well, she shouldn’t have been doing that, there should have been an interpreter, and they shouldn’t have asked her to do that. And then the parents were like, hold on a minute, we didn’t ask her to do that, she did it herself. And it turns out that there was actually a professional interpreter there, it’s just that the girl, she was wanting to engage with her parents, and she was doing it for them, and she was very funny. So, I showed that video and asked the parents and the children to respond to that because vignette methodology is a way to present a case which might resonate but gives people a bit of distance.

So rather than saying, I do this, or asking them, do you do this, you can present a case study and then they can talk about their response to it, what they think about it, what they feel about it and then if they’re comfortable, then they can start to say, yes, actually, I do that too, or no, I never would do that and this is why, or I have done that but I wouldn’t do it now. So, it gives you a chance to respond to something, but you can kind of create a bit of distance from your own personal experience if it makes you uncomfortable. So, I used that video as one example and I also created a couple of case studies, written case studies, which I showed and talked through, which were again adapted from case studies that had been used in child language brokering studies with spoken language, in spoken language families, migrant families. So again, because I wanted to be able to have that point of comparison across the different child language brokering and sign language brokering.

The second part of your question was about ethics. And so, I think there are two key things there. One is about working with deaf people, using visual methods and thinking about how you make sure that informed consent is received. So, I made sure that all of my consent forms were available in British Sign Language. Everything was conducted in British Sign Language with the deaf parents. And I brought in a deaf parent so that they would perhaps feel more comfortable talking about some potentially sensitive issues with rather than someone who is a child of deaf parents, but also had to be sensitive to children, thinking about how do we get consent for the children? So, I had to ask parents for their agreement to have the children involved. Also had to ask the children as well about if they understood what they were being asked to do. And I tried to make it as fun as possible, but it was really interesting to see there was a definitely different engagement from the 5-year-olds compared to the 15-year-olds. And the 5-year-olds got bored quite quickly. Yeah, there’s the Sign Language Linguistic Society having a terms of reference for doing research with deaf communities and signing deaf communities and around involvement of deaf researchers, making sure that information is available in sign language, the consent is received and so on. So, I was very careful about adhering to those guidelines.

Emily: I loved reading about your methodology in your book and seeing the visual methods. I thought that was so interesting. And I loved seeing the drawings that you put. And most of the drawings were of children drawing about interpreting at McDonald’s. It’s pretty funny just at the drive-thru, ordering food. I loved seeing that. That was a nice different perspective that I hadn’t seen in brokering research so far. So, I really enjoyed reading about that.

Dr Napier: Thank you.

Emily: And then a really interesting theme you discuss in your book is shame resilience. You point out strategies used by deaf parents and heritage signers that normalise brokering in their families. What are some examples of direct stigma and courtesy stigma? And how did brokering overcome shame in your study?

Dr Napier: Yeah, and thanks for that question. So, Erving Goffman came up with the terms direct and courtesy stigma or indirect stigma. And I drew on another theory of shame resilience and shame web. I can’t remember the name of the author now off the top of my head, but from cognitive psychology and developmental psychology. And I really liked Goffman’s framing of stigma because so when direct stigma basically is when you experience stigma directly that you’re discriminated against directly because someone perceives you as being inferior in some way. So, for deaf people, typically that’s people making fun of them signing, perhaps making fun of the way their voices sound and using derogatory language such as deaf and dumb and just being, quite cruel. And so that would be like, so deaf parents potentially could experience direct stigma.

So, children who have deaf parents could experience courtesy stigma or indirect stigma. So, they see people making fun of their parents teasing their parents, being cruel towards their parents. But also, they can also experience direct stigma as well because a child might be bullied because they have deaf parents or teased because they have deaf parents at school. So, children, heritage signers can experience both. And in my book as well, I should also clarify that I did collect data with deaf and hearing heritage signers who have deaf parents because most research talks about children who have deaf parents as, because 90% of deaf parents typically have hearing children. But I wanted to make sure that I collected data from deaf people as well, because some deaf heritage signers also talk about similar experiences of brokering for their own deaf parents for lots of different reasons. So of course, you’ve got that kind of complexity then of the fact that you can experience direct or courtesy stigma. And what I found in my data from talking to the parents and from young brokers and older brokers is that often brokering is a way, is a form of shame resilience.

So rather than, some of them acknowledge that they did feel shame if they witnessed some kind of bullying or experienced bullying or witnessed teasing or cruelty towards their parents. But they often talked about the fact that they wanted to overcome that and kind of move towards shame rather than back away from it. So actually, kind of confront it almost. And brokering was a way to do that because they could stand up in front of people. And if people were like, I don’t understand what you’re saying, then the child would step in and broker and say, I can tell you what they’re saying. This is fine. My parents not an idiot. And they saw that as a way to almost like take control, not take control, but to support and help and mitigate against that kind of stigma. And the parents also commented on how it was very nuanced for them. It created a lot of tensions for them because parents often talked about the fact that they want to be independent. They don’t want their children to help them, but they appreciate that there’s times when perhaps there’s no other option. And also, they can see that sometimes the child’s pride in wanting to help, wanting to do that. And so, they don’t want to say no because they don’t want to diminish what their child is trying to do for them.

So, there’s kind of a tension there between I don’t really need your help, but I appreciate what you’re trying to do for me, and I want to support you to do that. So that was a very, really strong theme that came out through all of the interviews.

Emily: Yeah, and it’s super interesting to hear the perspective of deaf parents. That’s not really widely researched yet either. And this brokering act, what parents think and feel. So, thank you for explaining a bit more about that, about that shame resilience. I thought that was really, really interesting. And as I’ve mentioned briefly, I am a heritage signer, so both my parents are deaf, and I also am a sign language interpreter who’s now focusing more on linguistics. But just from my own lived experience, I believe your project really has lasting impacts on understanding sign language brokering as a languaging practice. So how does studying sign language brokering raise awareness for signing deaf-hearing families, their experiences with schoolteachers, health professionals, and even opportunities for heritage signers to become professional interpreters and translators?

Dr Napier: Yeah, thanks. As you’ll know, having read the book that the last chapter, I talked very specifically about the implications for these different groups. So not only for theoretical implications, but for parents and other professionals who come into contact with their parents. And I think the key things there are that, because I think child language brokering has been a taboo subject for a really long time. So, I think there was a kind of pendulum swing. When sign language interpreting was professionalised, there was a definite rhetoric, a definite kind of discourse in deaf communities saying, you should not be using your children as interpreters. You don’t need to. We have professional interpreters now. And there was, and I mentioned it in the book, there was actually a whole campaign from a video relay interpreting company in the United States, where they showed a video of a girl talking about how she used to missed school because she used to go to interpret for her parents. And they were saying, you don’t need to do this now. We have this company, we have this video interpreting, you don’t need to do this. So, they actually kind of really perpetuated that discourse.

And what was happening from my point of view is that people then didn’t talk about it. They masked, they was like, no, no, no, I don’t ask my children to interpret. But then through this research, we found that, okay, yes, they do, they broker, but it’s nuanced. I keep using the term nuanced because I think it’s really important because it’s not cut and dry. It’s not, they either, they do, or they don’t. So, okay, yes, sometimes they do and in certain circumstances, and there’s a reasoning behind it, and then there are mixed feelings about that on both sides.

So, I think it’s really important to raise awareness amongst deaf families or deaf parents of mixed hearing families that brokering is actually a normative practice in mixed deaf hearing families and that it’s okay to recognise it and talk about it and not say, no, you shouldn’t be doing that, but also not saying, yes, you should be doing it all the time either. It’s about finding a way to kind of identify, because in one of the chapters in my book, I talk about children’s need to feel helpful and want to cooperate, and that’s natural for kids to do, and they help with chores. So, this is a natural instinct for children as they grow up developmentally. So, for parents to lock that down actually could have an impact, a negative impact on children. So, I think it’s really important for families to have an awareness of what this means, why it happens, the different perspectives that are involved. So, I’ve given various presentations to deaf parent groups and CODA organisations about these findings.

But I think it’s also important to raise awareness amongst professionals like teachers. So, for example, if parents go to parent-teacher night or they bump into a teacher in the school playground, what’s appropriate? So, okay, if the bump into the teacher in school playground and the child turns around and offers to broker a brief conversation with the teacher, okay. So the child has offered, but for the teacher to think through what it means, it means if they say to little Jenny, can you interpret for your mom for me, what that imposition might feel like, both for the mother and for the child, and also not to expect that when you’re having quite detailed conversations with parents, that, I mean, I used to, I interpreted for my parents’ evenings when I was young, because we didn’t have interpreters available back then, but we don’t need, we shouldn’t need to do that now, but we know it still happens, especially in regional or rural areas where there might not be interpreters, but there shouldn’t be an expectation that the children do it. So, they should bring in professional interpreters for some things and then also recognise when it might be appropriate to say to the child, yes, okay, you want to tell me what your mum’s saying? Great, tell me what your mum’s saying, because it’s actually about recognising their bilingualism or their multilingualism and fostering that and making their pride in that.

And so I did another study with a group of people involved in mental health and healthcare research, and we interviewed 11 heritage signers here in the UK, specifically about whether they are a broker in healthcare context, and I was shocked that, I mean, we collected this data in 2017, 18, just before COVID, and all of them said, yes, I regularly interpret for one of my parents in a GP appointment, which, and I live in the UK, where there are very well-established, well-funded healthcare interpreting services, so it shouldn’t be needed, but it still happens. So it’s about educating professionals that they can book professional interpreters, there are mechanisms to book interpreters, and so if a deaf person turns up with their child, don’t just ask the child to interpret, especially if you’re giving a diagnosis and then the child is interpreting for health issues, and how’s that kind of transference and how that makes them feel, especially if it’s quite serious. So, we really need to raise awareness amongst professionals that come into contact.

And it’s the same applies to child language brokering, with migrant parents to speak other languages. It’s the same principle, is that you should be bringing your professional interpreters in these kinds of interactions. But acknowledging that it’s okay, if you come out to the waiting room and the kid says, hey, the doctor says your name has been called, fine. So, it’s all relative, really, isn’t it?

Emily: Yeah, absolutely. And if I could just get you to touch a bit on heritage signers becoming professional interpreters and translators, do you think brokering provides an opportunity to do so? If you could talk a bit about that.

Dr Napier: Absolutely, I published an article about that based on the first survey that I did in 2017, where a lot of the people who responded to the survey and they were made a lot of open comments, like getting the opportunity to provide open comments. And they talked about their brokering experiences being a pathway for them into sign language, professional sign language interpreting. You might feel like this, I know, I certainly feel like this, because I realised it was something I was good at, and I enjoyed. And then when there was the opportunity there to become an interpreter, I followed it. I didn’t even, when I was a kid, I didn’t even know interpreting was a thing, a professional thing that you couldn’t do. Because it wasn’t really, I had never seen examples of it when I was young, very much.

So yeah, talking to people now that are professional interpreters, a lot of them will say, well, yeah, it was a natural process for me. And some said they kind of fell into it by accident because they were kind of pushed into it or they were strongly encouraged by parents or family members. And they didn’t really know what else to do. So, they were like, well, this is something I know that I’m good at. I can wave my hands around, I can sign. And then some talked about making conscious decision that this is something I want to do. And especially for younger generations, they could seek out interpreter training programs. And it tends to be the older ones that kind of fell into it because there wasn’t any training and it was just like, oh, you’re bilingual. We need someone you know. But interestingly, with the younger kids I’ve spoken to, professional interpreting is much more widely available. Some of them were saying, I think only about a third of them in all the interviews and things I did said that they were thinking about interpreting as a career. Others weren’t, but some of them were quite young. And I know that they might change their mind later on. So, there’s definitely a connection, a strong connection there. But interestingly, when we look at other research I’ve done in the last couple of years, looking at diversity and representation in the sign language interpreting profession, we found that numbers of heritage signers who do work as professional interpreters is quite low. And it’s probably gone, in the UK, it’s gone up from about 10% to about 30%, primarily because we have a lot more deaf interpreters now, deaf practitioners who, interestingly, a lot of deaf practitioners are heritage signers. Proportionately, there are more deaf interpreters who are heritage signers than hearing interpreters. So, I’ve actually been saying, well, we need to be thinking about how we try and actively recruit heritage signers into the profession, because maybe they’re not getting that message that it is something that they can do. So, I think we still have a bit more work to do in that area, I think.

Emily: Yeah, yeah, I agree. I think for myself, for me, I always loved brokering, growing up, or interpreting as I knew it then, that I did enjoy it, I wanted to help, I loved signing, working with signing communities, people, and so I just, I wanted to become an interpreter so bad. So, for me, I actively sought it out, but a lot of other friends that have deaf parents or people I know in the community are like, I know that’s not for me, but I don’t know if they fully understand what it means to be an interpreter, or what it looks like and all those things. So, I definitely, more work is needed to be done there and kind of the promotion, recruitment or education, I guess, maybe. Yeah, yeah, I agree. And just to kind of bring our conversation to a close, my last question for you is, what is next for you in your work? What other research are you working on now?

Dr Napier: Yeah, thanks. So, I’m actually just submitted a book proposal. So, I’m planning on writing another book, which focuses on data that I have previously collected, but I just had too much data for the last book.

So, this is going to be a smaller manuscript, hopefully, but actually draws on, kind of replicates the study that was done by Valdes and Angelelli and others in the US, probably about 20 years ago now, but they actually asked young Latino children to broker a meeting between a parent and a teacher. So, what I’ve done is replicated that study, but I’ve done it with sign language brokers all hearing with a deaf parent and meeting a teacher. And so, I’ve adapted the methodology slightly.

So, what I’ve done is I’ve brought in a range of different people. So, I have a professional interpreter who’s not a heritage signer. I have professional interpreters who are heritage signers. And then I have adult heritage signers who don’t work as interpreters. And then two young teenage heritage signers who obviously are not working as interpreters. And I get them all each, I’ve got each of them to interpret or to broker the same interactions. So, the teacher and the parent repeated the same interaction 7 times. So, I’m writing, I’m doing the analysis on that data now and writing that up. So, I’m hoping that book will come out. It’ll probably be 2026 by the time it comes out, I think. So that’s my kind of major, major focus at the moment. So alongside, I’m still doing research on professional sign language interpreting in other contexts. We’re just wrapping up a project on interpreting in Mental Health Act assessments and how mental health professionals work collaboratively with interpreters in that context. Because it was obviously such a high stakes context. So, I’ve had a few publications coming out of that, but I’m still loving the sign language brokering research. So, I plan to continue on that path.

Emily: Yeah, that’s awesome. I’m so looking forward to that book coming out. That sounds like really exciting to read. And something that I’ve always thought is the dream to do is to do that kind of data collection and that kind of method. So, I’m really looking forward to that. Those are all the questions that I had for you today. Anything else you want to add before we go?

Dr Napier: I think it’s probably worth just making the point because I alluded to it earlier on about why I don’t use the term Coda, which is very common. So, Coda stands for child of Deaf adults. And there’s a whole section in my book where I talk about why I don’t use that.

Historically, I think that I kind of moved away, if you like, from that term because I felt that there was a lot of quite paternalistic views of deaf people and their capacity and a kind of an assumption that Codas experienced a lot of imposition as children, you know, and had ruined childhoods or spoiled childhoods because they had a lot of responsibility. And I didn’t have that experience. So, I didn’t want to associate myself with that kind of terminology. I also felt like, well, I’m not a child and my parents aren’t just adults to me, they’re my parents. So, I never quite felt comfortable with using child of deaf adults. So, I coined the term people from deaf families because I also felt it was important to recognise deaf people that grow up in deaf families can also have very similar experiences to hearing kids growing up. And also, to recognise that there are partners or extended family members or people that might have deaf grandparents, but not parents who also have very similar experiences. So, I started to use the term people from deaf families. And then when I was writing my book and came across the concept of heritage speakers and then so, and then a few people have started to talk about this notion of heritage signers. And I really liked that. It really spoke to me a lot more. It’s actually, because I wanted to focus on the use of sign language and the fact that these people growing up, they’re using sign language as their home language, which is different from the majority language that they’re surrounded by.

And actually, it was a heritage language for them. So that’s why I wanted to recognise. But one other area potentially for future research is also acknowledging that a lot of children who do grow up with deaf parents who are hearing don’t necessarily develop fluent sign language skills. And there’s a whole range of reasons for that. And I’ve done some research with Annelies Kusters and Maartje De Meulder on family language policy in deaf-hearing families and who speaks when they speak or sign, who decides, all that kind of stuff. So that’s a whole other area of research around children who have deaf parents, because you can’t assume that everyone necessarily is a heritage signer. So, I just kind of wanted to make that qualification as well.

Emily: Yeah, absolutely, thank you so much for adding that. I think that’s important to mention as well. And I encourage everyone, if this conversation was interesting to you, to go read Jemina’s book, Sign Language Brokering in Deaf-Hearing Families. And I’m looking forward to your next book coming out for sure.

So, thank you again, Jemina, and thanks for joining everyone! If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe to our channel, leave a 5-star review on your podcast app of choice and recommend the Language on the Move podcast and our partner, the New Books Network, to your students, colleagues and friends. Till next time!