Conducting Interviews with People Who Are Deafblind: Issues in Recording and Transcription

Abstract

For my doctoral research, I conducted interviews in signed language with college students who are deafblind. This qualitative research project included many challenges, including selecting the best process for recording interviews and creating written transcripts in English from these interviews. In this article, I describe the background for the study, briefly review literature in Deaf culture and deafblindness, and examine decisions I made in videotaping and transcription. Finally, I review four rules I developed to guide my translation process, using the seven rules established by Halai (2007) in her translations from Urdu to English as a starting point.