The translation of COVID-19 into Spanish sign language

Abstract

The year 2020 will be remembered for being the year when a new coronavirus made the world wobble. Health systems in all countries are faced with COVID-19, a disease for which we do not have sufficient resources. The successful implementation of preventive measures by society is essential to prevent its spread. However, the information provided by governments is not accessible to all citizens and deaf people find it difficult not to be in sign language, which has serious consequences for their health and that of everyone else. The present paper analyses the translation techniques applied to translate terms about COVID-19 into Spanish sign language (LSE). Through the compilation of a parallel video graphic corpus in LSE and Spanish with subtitles, and taking as a reference the proposal of translation techniques by Hurtado (2001), we have identified the procedures used by a deaf translator to achieve these equivalences. The results reveal that borrowing, either from oral language (through fingerspelling) or from other sign languages (with the widespread sign for coronavirus), is the main resource to cope with the neologisms that have arisen. Furthermore, the use of different techniques for the same word has been found, even when there is an equivalent in LSE dictionaries. Among all of them, generalization stands out as a procedure to make texts more understandable in the target culture, which indicates the importance of cultural and social knowledge in the translator. All of this demonstrates the functionality of translation techniques and the adaptation that is made of them taking into account the (con)text, as well as the dynamic nature of the equivalents. This exploratory research allows us to go deeper into these translation procedures in order to make this information more accessible to the deaf community and to fight together against COVID-19.