The Role of Culture and Context

In the first reflection, we politely but firmly escorted out the idea that languages map neatly onto one another like identical semis on a suburban estate. They don’t. There is no tidy “this equals that” in interpreting. Once that comforting illusion is dismantled, something rather more interesting appears.

Interpreting is not simply linguistic work. It is cultural work.

Every utterance arrives carrying more than vocabulary. It brings assumptions about hierarchy, politeness, humour, disagreement, intimacy, and power. Language carries these visibly; culture organises them underneath—rather like a stage set supported by an impressive amount of scaffolding you’re not supposed to notice.

When meaning falters, it is rarely because someone forgot a word. It is because those underlying expectations have not aligned.

BSL and English operate within distinct cultural logics.

BSL uses structured space, visual framing, and embodied perspective as core grammatical resources. Meaning is constructed in three dimensions. Deaf cultural norms often favour directness and shared understanding built through visual clarity.

Spoken English environments, by contrast, may prioritise indirectness, status-marking, and linear verbal explanation. Meaning tends to be sequenced verbally rather than spatially. Authority can be signalled through register, pace, and syntactic complexity.

Neither approach is superior. But they are different—and difference has consequences.

Interpreters operate inside those differences constantly. We recalibrate tone. We decide when to retain directness and when to temper it. We make implicit norms explicit—or leave them implicit. We manage rhythm, relational cues, and conceptual pacing.

This work is almost always invisible. From the outside, it looks like seamless transfer. Inside, it is a series of rapid micro-decisions shaped by cultural awareness:

A clarification that prevents a misunderstanding before it blooms into something administrative and awkward. A pause that allows conceptual alignment rather than hurried confusion. A choice to preserve narrative structure rather than force it into syntactic neatness that feels tidy but loses the point.

If you do it well, no one notices. Which is both the triumph and the curse.

Bilingualism allows transfer.

Bicultural agility allows judgement.

Agility is the capacity to read cultural dynamics in real time and respond proportionately. It is noticing the raised eyebrow that signals hierarchy, the softened phrasing that masks disagreement, the shift in posture that indicates discomfort. And then making decisions—quickly—about how those signals should travel across languages.

But agility is not improvisation for its own sake. It rests on knowledge. And knowledge, inconveniently, requires time.

Which brings us to what sustains this work.

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Knowledge

Training provides frameworks.

In professional discourse, we often emphasise technical competencies: memory capacity, processing speed, lexical range. These are measurable. They are teachable. They can be assessed without anyone crying. Yet complex interpreting moments rarely resolve through technique alone. They demand contextual judgement.

That judgement rests on tacit knowledge, knowledge developed through sustained practice in specific environments.

Tacit knowledge is not mysticism. It is cumulative pattern recognition. It is the ability to anticipate the trajectory of a mental health assessment, to recognise when legal phrasing carries procedural weight, or to gauge how classroom authority dynamics will shape interaction before anyone says so explicitly.

Mental health settings refine sensitivity to affect and nuance. Legal contexts sharpen precision and procedural awareness. Educational environments demand attentiveness to hierarchy, developmental stage, and shifting authority. Over time, repeated exposure consolidates into working knowledge that operates at speed. It feels like intuition. It is, in fact, experience sedimented into judgement.

If the first reflection dismantled the myth of one-to-one translation, this second replaces it with something more accurate—and frankly more demanding: Culturally situated decision-making, supported by accumulated, domain-specific knowledge.

Which leads, inevitably, to the question hovering politely at the edge of the room: If interpreting involves this degree of judgement, what responsibility accompanies it?

That is where the third reflection will go. And yes, it gets even more interesting.

This mini series of 3 blogs – here, the 2nd of 3, gathers a few reflections from 35 years working between BSL and English. I begin with the myth of one-to-one translation—because once that assumption starts to unravel, it reveals the cultural, tacit, and ethical judgements that quietly shape the work.

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📚Further Reading

Eugene Nida on Dynamic Equivalence Formal vs. dynamic equivalence explained explained—how translating meaning, not just words, can shape entire disciplines.

Equivalence and Translation Studies A scholarly overview of how “equivalence” became both a cornerstone and a controversy in the world of translation.

Sign Language Interpreting and Cultural Framing This paper digs into how interpreters navigate culture, not just language—a sharp read from Heriot-Watt researchers.