Lingthusiasm Episode 78: Bringing stories to life in Auslan - Interview with Gabrielle Hodge

Communicating is about more than the literal, dictionary-entry-style words that we say – it’s also about the many subtle ingredients that go into a message, from how you keep your audience in mind to how you portray the actions of the people you’re talking about.

In this episode, your host Gretchen McCulloch interviews Dr. Gabrielle Hodge, a deaf researcher and writer based in Melbourne, Australia. She specialises in research relating to d/Deaf people, signed languages, and communication, and has worked with Auslan and British Sign Language (BSL) in Australia and the UK. We talk about Gab’s work analysing how people tell stories using a mixture of conventional signs (such as “book”) and enactment, aka showing what another person or character did using your body, such as depicting how someone is carrying a heavy book. We also talk about collaborations in multiple countries and assessing what makes a translation accessible to deaf people.

We’re excited to bring you this bilingual episode in Auslan and English! For the full experience, make sure to watch the captioned video version of this episode at youtube.com/lingthusiasm (and check out our previous bilingual episode in ASL and English with Dr. Lynn Hou while you’re there).

Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here.

Announcements:
Since we filmed this interview, Gab has accepted a position as Senior Lecturer in Sign Language Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh. We’re excited to see more great work from her there!

In this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about four science fiction books/series we’re read recently that project interesting future versions of English. We also talk about reading books set in the future but written in the past, and how several of these books now exist in a future that’s in some ways more similar to their imagined futures than the time when they were being written.

Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 70+ other bonus episodes, as well as access to the Lingthusiasm Discord server where you can chat with other language nerds. It’s thanks to our patrons that we’re able to occasionally bring all of you bilingual video episodes like this one.  

Here are the links mentioned in the episode:

• Gabrielle Hodge on Twitter
• Gabrielle Hodge’s website
• Previously in bilingual Lingthusiasm episodes (ASL and English): ‘Villages, gifs, and children: Researching signed languages in real-world contexts with Lynn Hou’
• The Auslan Corpus
• Deafness Cognition And Language research centre
• The BSL Corpus

You can listen to this episode via Lingthusiasm.com, Soundcloud, RSS, Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download an mp3 via the Soundcloud page for offline listening.

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Lingthusiasm is on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Mastodon, and Tumblr. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com

Gretchen is on Twitter as @GretchenAMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.

Lauren is on Twitter as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.

Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, and our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins. Our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.

This episode of Lingthusiasm is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license (CC 4.0 BY-NC-SA).

Excerpt from Episode 41 of Lingthusiasm: This time it gets tense - The grammar of time

Listen to the episode, read the full transcript, or check out more links about morphology and syntax.