“There's Pressure to Use Standard English”: Lingering Linguicism in the Work of Signed Language Interpreters

Applied linguistics and interpreting have much in common; however, the education of signed language interpreters in the States provides barely any applied linguistics training. Linguistic racism (linguicism) frames the education and evaluation of sign language interpreters. Mainstream English is consciously and subconsciously valued by practitioners. This research is the first in the field by exploring the biases working practitioners possess about African American Vernacular English (AAVE). Twenty interpreters were interviewed, and 100% reported that standard English is of primary importance when working. Seventeen indicated that they can understand the majority of spoken AAVE. To test this, they listened to and then retold a 1 min 10 s AAVE narrative. When retelling, they omitted 53% of the narrative AAVE content, achieving just a 47% mean accuracy score.