- Hannah Thompson and Kirsten Taylor initially produced this guide in conjunction with staff in the Centre for Deaf Studies at Bristol University and professionals in the field of interpreting. This was part of the Horizon Forum project, funded by the European Social Fund that ran from 1991- 1999 at the Centre for Deaf Studies.
We would like to thank the interpreting agencies and organisations across the country that kindly contributed information.
- The guide has now been revised and updated by Nigel Cleaver of The Sign Language Interpreting Centre (SLIC) and Jim Kyle from the Centre for Deaf Studies (CDS) as part of the Sign Aware project funded by DWP (2004-5).
Thanks to all
Note: we use the word Deaf (with capital ‘d’) to refer to the community of sign language users – that is Deaf people, like French people, or Japanese people – those who belong to a cultural and linguistic group.
Where we refer to specific signs in BSL, we use capital letters – BUTTERFLY. Where we refer to fingerspelling, we use the capital letters separated by hyphen – T-O-M.