Deaf Caribbean Academic Network: Making language policy work for deaf communities in the Caribbean

加勒比地区居住着成千上万的聋人，他们使用手语而不是口语进行交流。尽管人们倾向于认为每个国家都有自己的手语，但实际情况要复杂得多——即使是一个相对较小的加勒比岛屿也可能有两种或三种手语。我们关注两个问题。第一个是关于加勒比地区使用的不同类型的手语。加勒比地区面临许多自然灾害，如飓风和火山爆发。想象一下，你是一个聋哑的母亲或父亲，照顾你的家人。有一个紧急情况，你周围的每个人都在做准备，但你仍然试图找出发生了什么。你打开电视，但屏幕角落里的小翻译正在用你不懂的语言手语。或者想象一下，你是一个在家里用手语的聋儿，但是当你去学校的时候，老师不会用你知道的语言来手语。老师可能会对你说话，所以你不明白他们在说什么。或者老师可能会用另一种你也不懂的手语。这些是加勒比地区聋人面临的一些严重障碍。然而，如果语言政策有效，这些障碍是可以消除的（例如，如果政府确保以正确的语言为每个聋人提供正确的信息）。第二个问题是，聋人很难获得教育，所以他们往往没有他们的听力同龄人所拥有的资格。加勒比地区有几位耳聋人士，他们知识渊博，从事研究工作，但他们无法在学术界立足。我们的项目旨在解决这两个问题。首先，我们在特立尼达和多巴哥、波多黎各和牙买加建立了一个聋人加勒比学术网络（DeafCAN）。他们彼此分享他们的知识和经验，我们让他们与来自世界各地的专家联系，这些专家可以帮助他们找到共同进行研究的方法。其次，我们收集聋哑人的经验——例如他们试图用正确的语言获取信息——并利用这些经验帮助政府在未来制定更好的语言政策。通过分析聋哑人对手语政策的看法，我们希望聋哑人网络的工作能够对边缘化聋哑人的生活产生重大影响，并且我们找到了让网络在项目结束后继续发展的方法。

The Caribbean region is home to many thousands of deaf people who communicate using a signed language, rather than a spoken one. Although people tend to assume that each country has its own sign language, the situation is actually much more compliacted - even one relatively small Caribbean island can have two or three sign languages.We focus on two problems. The first is to do with the different kinds of sign language used in the Caribbean.The Caribbean faces many natural disasters, such as hurricanes and volcanoes. Imagine that you are a deaf mother or father, looking after your family. There is an emergency, and everyone around you is making preparations, but you are still trying to find out what is happening. You turn the television on, but the small interpreter in the corner of the screen is signing a language that you do not understand.Or imagine that you are a deaf child who signs at home - but when you go to school, the teacher does not sign the language that you know. The teacher might speak to you, so that you do not understand what they are saying. Or the teacher might use a different sign language that you also do not understand.These are some of the serious barriers that deaf people face in the Caribbean. Yet these barriers can be removed if language policies are effective (for example, if the government makes sure that the right information is provided in the right language for each deaf person).The second problem is that deaf people have struggled to access education, so they often do not have the qualifications that their hearing peers have. There are several deaf people in the Caribbean who are knowledgeable and who conduct research, but they are not able to get a foothold in the academic world.Our project aims to solve both of these problems. First, we set up a Deaf Caribbean Academic Network (DeafCAN), with deaf people in Trinidad & Tobago, Puerto Rico and Jamaica. They share their knowledge and experiences with each other, and we put them in touch with experts from around the world who can help them to find ways to conduct research together.Secondly, we collect the experiences of deaf people - for example when trying to access information in the right language - and use these to help the government make better language policy in future.The work of our DeafCAN Network is expected to have a significant impact on the lives of marginalised deaf people by analysing their perspectives on sign language policy, and we find ways to keep the Network going beyond the life of this project.