Further training at UNamur: deaf graduates in teaching and sign language translation/interpretation

LSFB, officially recognized since 2003, is gaining in visibility and importance in education, the media and interpreting. However, in the Fédération Wallonie Bruxelles, until now, there has been no specific training supporting professional practices in these fields for deaf or hard-of-hearing people. "The training courses were aimed at hearing people. However, as they stand, they are not adapted to those for whom sign language is their first language. International examples showed that training designed and delivered for deaf people was far more relevant. Thinking was also underway in Flanders with the KULeuven, which recently organized a certificate similar to ours. It seemed important to us to develop such an offering on the French-speaking side, which builds on the experience of UNamur and UCLouvain," Professor Laurence Meurant points out.

The Interuniversity Certificate in LSFB-French fills this gap by sharing the accumulated experience of professionals and developing the necessary skills through theoretical and practical training. This training course is co-organized with UCLouvain Saint-Louis Bruxelles and supported by the Université de Toulouse Jean Jaurès thanks to Erasmus+ funding and the support of Form@Nam.

The program, which ran from January 2023 to June 2024, enabled students to specialize in LSFB teaching or in the practice of translation-interpreting for the deaf, after a six-month core curriculum.

The certificate program includes a common core of proficiency in LSFB and written French, as well as theoretical and practical knowledge of bilingualism between a signed language and a spoken language. This is followed by specialized modules focusing on teaching LSFB and on the practice of translation and interpreting by the deaf. At the end of the course, participants are able to prepare and deliver high-quality interpreting services, and to use state-of-the-art technical tools for interpreting and translation.

A score of students are proclaimed at the ceremony, marking an important milestone in their academic and professional careers.

By coordinating this new certificate, UNamur is once again materializing its commitment to the implementation of inclusion of deaf and hard-of-hearing people and the visibility of sign language within society. UNamur is a pioneer in the linguistic study of LSFB. Its Laboratoire de langue des signes de Belgique francophone (LSFB-Lab) is unique in Belgium. It works closely with the ASBL École et surdité and the Centre scolaire Sainte-Marie Namur, which since the early 2000s has included groups of deaf children in hearing classes, offering these pupils bilingual teaching. In 2022, UNamur thus presented the first French-LSFB bilingual dictionary, developed thanks to the expertise and collaboration of a team of researchers in linguistics and computer science at UNamur, with financial support from the Fonds Baillet Latour. As early as 2012, UNamur was involved as a scientific partner in the creation of the Bachelor's and Master's degrees in Sign Language Translation and Interpreting, organized at UCLouvain, on the Saint-Louis Brussels and Louvain-la-Neuve sites.

These various initiatives are taking place in a context in which the Conseil de la Langue française, des Langues régionales endogènes et des Politiques linguistiques has just adopted an Own-initiative Opinion highlighting the importance of including deaf people in various fields. Indeed, the inclusion of deaf people, in the fields of LSFB research, teacher training, interpreting, media and audiovisual, and language planning, forms the core of this avis.