The Portuguese/Libras educational interpreter and its translation-interpretative choices in Chemistry classes

Abstract

The Portuguese/Brazilian Sign Language Educational Translator and Interpreter plays a key role in spaces that seek to be inclusive of the deaf. In the context of chemistry education, its performance in the teaching and learning processes is surrounded by challenges that still lack scientific research that addresses them, among these, the use of translational/interpretive resources applied to the construction of chemical concepts. Therefore, this study intends to articulate a space for dialogue, involving questions that concern the linguistic choices of a professional Interpreter in a Chemistry class and the resources used during the speech. For this, we started with the analysis of a class recorded in a classroom of the 1st year of high school, in which there was a deaf student. The focus of the research was centered on the Educational Interpreter actions while the conducting teacher addressed the theme 'octet rule'. The analyzes were carried out from the division into discursive sequences and a subsequent observation based on theoretical contributions of the grammar of the Brazilian Sign Language. It was identified that in her action the Interpreter mostly uses signs to give meaning to the syntactic structure of the sentence, however, she uses classifiers in the expression of specific concepts and phenomena that already have, or not, a sign. Finally, the dactylology was used to nominal expression of terminologies, and the gestures, to point.