Tradurre la comunità sorda, non solo una questione linguistica

In the 1980s, the renewed interest of linguists in deafness and sign language revealed the emergence of a remarkable resilience within the Deaf community. Deaf people expressed the need to be recognized as social actors and possible precursors of a new way of seeing the world, which was the consequence of their unique, natural, visual-gestural language: sign language. This change in research and attitude resulted in a new way of looking at and understanding deafness, which could no longer be seen as a physical deficit to be treated medically. Consequently, sign language interpreters had to change their entire perspective on translation and shift from an approach that saw the interpreter as a helper working for the Deaf, to one that represented the interpreter as a bilingual professional bridging two cultures. This new perspective overturned the meaning of accessibility, which nowadays focuses on the cultural richness that the Deaf community can bring to society: the so-called Deaf Gain.