DrChristopher Stone

My research covers a variety of areas within Interpreting Studies, ethnography, language and cognition. My most recent work covers the areas described below:

Deaf interpreters: exploring the translation style(s) adopted by Deaf interpreters as community members. Identifying the role of community membership in the types of pragmatic enrichments and impoverishments (following Relevance Theory) that occur between the source and target language by analysing the accounts of Deaf interpreters. Also identifying the emergent political acts of reclamation and post-colonial defiance when interpreting mainstream news broadcast for a minority language audience.

Systemic influence and the ruling relations of interpreting: exploring the invisible work of interpreters within and without the language-event. Applying an Institutional Ethnographic lens the work of interpreters to identify the policies and texts that coordinate the work of interpreters within different institutional settings (e.g. education, the police, courts).

The Development of Deaf legal discourse: documenting the emergence of specialised vocabulary in ASL, its linguistic features and looking at the process in which specialised signs come to fruition. An informed understanding of deaf American lawyers’ development and use of specialised terminology in ASL is crucial to building solutions which are needed to address the gap in the linguistic repertoire sign for deaf law students, deaf communities and the sign language interpreters who serve them.

Deaf and hearing interpreting teams: exploring accounts and examining the work of interpreting teams to describe and understand effective co-working strategies. This includes the role of pausing, non-manual markers, prosody of pivot and final rendered language, and the team dynamics within the language-work event and the macro team-work.

Interpreter aptitude: examining the foundational and developmental cognitive skills of interpreters in university training compared with expert interpreters (who are university graduates). Specifically looking at L2 phonological development, working memory, set shifting, grammaticality judgements and L1 fluency.