Sign language interpreters often work in meetings of an institutional group in which deaf individuals participate as community or stakeholder representatives, or sometimes in the capacity of an employee or expert; typical contexts are a deaf education governance board, or a policy advisory group for a government department that serves deaf people. Meetings are an established way in which information is shared, decisions made and relationships maintained in organisations, and they conform to interactional norms (Bargiela-Chiappini and Harris, 1995; Angouri and Marra, 2010,2012; Svennevig, 2011:20). Providing interpreters in a meeting is assumed to make interaction accessible through interlingual, intermodal transfer between spoken and signed language users, yet interpreters routinely observe that even competent interpreting does not necessarily render the discourse of hearing/professional participants ‘accessible’ to deaf participants or position them as equal co-contributors. The notion of ‘community or practice’, (Eckert and McConnell–Ginet 1992), is useful in explaining how underlying orientations to the endeavour, power statuses, and discourse norms are likely to be shared by hearing members who are institutional participants, but not by deaf participants who have outsider status in terms of language use and lived experience in relation to meeting content.
The relational work done by interpreters to coordinate and smooth interaction is shown to impact the ‘success’ of interpreted encounters (Wadensjo 1993; Napier, Carmichael and Wiltshire, 2008; Major, 2014). The potential for interpreters and hearing meeting chairpersons to establish ways to co-manage meeting interaction to overtly mitigate differences in discourse norms has not been examined empirically. Furthermore, the ways in which a deaf chairperson manages an interpreted meeting, and the effect on interaction, are also unexplored in the interpreting research literature. This paper reports on research that critically examines the ‘accessibility’ of meeting discourse by, (i) analysing interactional work done by an interpreter in meetings of the same board chaired by a deaf chairperson and a hearing chairperson respectively, and (ii) analysing the reflections of deaf, hearing and interpreter participants on their metacognition about interaction during a meeting.
