The profoundly deaf and hard-of-hearing live and work like their fellow citizens,
but constantly have to adjust to sound deprivation in order to communicate in
mainstream society. How do they cope with international communication? This
paper focuses on one aspect of international communication: global news
coverage through simultaneous Italian Sign Language (LIS) interpreting on
television. A comparative linguistic analysis of a small multimodal corpus
obtained from the transcriptions of video recorded television news bulletins in
spoken Italian and a simultaneously interpreted version in LIS, has revealed
insights into how and to what extent news related specifically to global conflicts
crosses the international ‘sound barrier’ and has highlighted some of the problems
encountered by professional sign language interpreters. This analysis of
professional interpreting in a real life working environment (the television studio)
has led to findings that can be turned to good use in sign language interpreter
training classes
