Enunciative analysis of modals in libras-portuguese simultaneous interpretation's corpus

Abstract

This paper focuses on the work of the sign Language interpreter in the condition of a second speaker within the speech production. These professionals, when interpreting, they look for re-create [actualize] the emanated concepts  from the source language into the target language, creating, then, a second enunciative instance. The theoretical basis is situated in the perspective of the theory of enunciation (BENVENISTE, 1989; FLORES, 2008, 2009a, 2009b, 2010) and in the study of the modals in spoken languages and LIBRAS. We aim to find what are the marks left in the discourse by the second speaker of the text, in this case, the interpreter, regarding specifically to the use of modals, and  additionally, to analyze their choices for using one or other type of modal (in the target text), which might have been made explicit or implicit in the first enunciative context (source text). In order to reach these goals, sampling was composed by a transcription of a video-recorded speech of a deaf person with the length of 40’ (forty minutes) that was being simultaneously interpreted into spoken Portuguese. Six excerpts from the total speech, in which modal’s occurrences were attested within the source or target language, were submitted to the analysis. The main findings are: 1. the tendency of the deontic modality being almost always interpreted in the same way of the source language; 2. the interpreting choices are always guided by enunciative clues that are left in the speech of the first speaker, to which the interpreters must to demonstrate expertise in recognizing these language-specific aspects; 3. in the absence of explicit modals in the speech, the interpreters appears to be sensible to the modal’s notions spread by the whole text’s surface; 4. the temporal omission of epistemic modals with a high degree of certainty is understood as an interpretative strategy and not as an infidelity with the original information; 5. the term “tempo de checagem” is being proposed to cover the lack of a specific term that refers to the non-chronological time in which the interpreter, after receiving the source language information, make the interpretation available to the listeners.