Qualche riflessione a margine della traduzione di Sign Language Structure di William Stokoe

William Stoke was the first twentieth-century scholar to see the linguistic potential of sign languages and to propose a method for their studies. His works on American Sign Language (ASL) have influenced scholars around the world, making him the undisputed founder of the studies on these visual-gestural languages. Sixty years later, Sign Language Structure. An Outline of the Visual Communication Systems of the American Deaf is still a reference text, as it provides a detailed and robust methodology for its phonological studies, as well as hypotheses on the origins of language that are still valuable to date. Translating this article to Italian offers challenges that include not only the age of the article, but also the cultural background that Stokoe elegantly showcase in this work; multilingualism, cultured references, neologisms and, most of all, the attempt to meticulously describe something that lives in the visual realm are only some of them.