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How Hearing People Understand the Deaf and Some Legal Implications of Their Misinterpretation of Visual Expressions

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Abstract

While the complexities of interpreting in constrained legal contexts such as trials may gradually be getting better understood by legal professionals, the particular difficulties of interpreting for the Deaf remain largely overlooked, and the recent involvement of citizen judges in Japan’s justice system makes it even more important to raise awareness about this aspect of language disadvantage. This paper focuses on a key feature of Japanese Sign Language: the non-manual markers produced by facial and body movements that accompany hand and finger signs. Research shows such markers to be poorly understood by non-Deaf observers and indeed even sign language interpreters sometimes conflate them with gestures used by hearing people.

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Notes

  1. 裁判員制度 (saibaninseido) whereby six citizens sit alongside three professional judges in criminal trials.

  2. Our translation.

  3. Our translation.

  4. It has been found that CODA (Children of Deaf Adults) also use gestures influenced by sign language that differ from those used by hearing people (see for example Taira [5, 6]).

  5. Our translation.

  6. Deaf people acquire language in different ways according to their communicative environment. Some older people did not attend school for the deaf and communicate by using gesture-based “home sign”, which might be understood only as an iconic gesture.

  7. 強く踏んで壊した as opposed to 強く踏んだら壊れた.

  8. Ways of involving the Deaf as lay judges were being discussed in Japan even before the lay judge system was introduced (e.g. Asashi Shimbun, 2008 [15]), with simulations conducted under Konan University Law School’s Professor Osamu Watanabe, while the eligibility of the hearing impaired for jury service has been considered by the courts in Australia (see Lyons v Queensland [2016] HCA, Oct. 5, 2016).

  9. Discussed in the Japanese courtroom context, for example, by Mizuno, 2004 [16].

References

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  2. Japan Federation of Bar Associations (日本弁護士連合会) portal. http://www.nichibenren.or.jp/ja/citizen_judge/about/. Accessed 1 March 2016.

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Acknowledgements

Baba Hiroshi, a Deaf teacher of Japanese Sign Language at Kwansei Gakuin University, was the model for the photographs.

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  1. Kwansei Gakuin University, Nishinomiya, Japan

    Eiji Taira & Shizuka Itagaki

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  1. Eiji Taira
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  2. Shizuka Itagaki
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Correspondence to Eiji Taira.

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Taira, E., Itagaki, S. How Hearing People Understand the Deaf and Some Legal Implications of Their Misinterpretation of Visual Expressions. Int J Semiot Law 32, 819–829 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-019-09644-1

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