Over the last four years General Synod has got used to a small group of people pulling strange faces, sitting facing the wrong way round and generally waving their hands about. These people are the British Sign Language interpreters, there to enable the Deaf Anglicans Together representatives to engage fully with all that is happening.

Contrary to popular belief, the hand waving and face pulling is not there as the side attraction to entertain members at the end of a long day! It is part of the grammar of British Sign Language (BSL); a full natural language with its own rules of formation, syntax and cultural influences. (It is not, as is sometimes thought, used internationally. There are other signed languages used in other countries around the world.) Like the majority of the world's spoken languages, it does not have a written form. BSL was recognised as a Minority Language by the UK Government in 2003 but General Synod effectively beat them to it in 2000 when it amended the canons to allow services in BSL.

The basic brief for an interpreter is to take the information provided in one language and turn it into the other language without adding to or taking away anything from the meaning. This cannot be a word for word rendition of the original; instead it is a reproduction of the idea, intent and intensity of the original information, in the new language. In General Synod this mostly means English into BSL but also on occasion BSL to English.

It is necessary for us to have received a whole unit of meaning before beginning to interpret. This means that we are working several seconds behind the speaker and so the Deaf¹ people are receiving the information marginally behind other people in the room. This has an impact when Deaf people are trying to speak in a debate. They are often receiving the end of the information from the person before, when others are standing to request to speak.

There are three interpreters who work as a team at General Synod. At the beginning of the quinquennium a team of two was trialed. It became very clear within that first November session that three would be necessary to be able to work with the structure and content of Synod. We have become used to expecting the unexpected. The breadth of styles ranging from high level legal jargon to Sunday school style songs “…the rain came down and the tax went up…”, from intensely crafted three minute speeches with barely a pause to take a breath (steam rising from our fingers) to highly impassioned, off the cuff replies with the odd bit of Greek or Latin thrown in for good measure.

It is what makes interpreting at General Synod a challenge and a pleasure. So when we are sticking our tongues out at Synod, remember it is only done out of the deepest respect for our Deaf and hearing colleagues; our part in enabling Synod to conduct its business!

Jo Lindley

¹ James Woodward’s (implications for sociolinguistic research among the deaf, Sign Language Studies 1:1-7 1972) now commonly used convention of using a capital D in Deaf to indicate people who consider themselves part of a linguistic (signed language) and culturally minority group, as opposed to deaf people who would not consider themselves part of that group, has been used here.