Verbo-visualidade no gênero jornalístico televisivo : leituras para a construção de estratégias de interpretação da língua de sinais / Verbal Visuality of Journalistic Television Genre : Readings to Build Sign Language Interpreting Strategies

This article presents an analysis of the verbal visual marks constitutive of the journalistic television genre and their contributions to the practice of Brazilian Sign Language (Língua Brasileira de Sinais Libras) interpretation in this genre. From the analysis of the verbal visual composition of the journalistic productions "Jornal Hoje," "Jornal Nacional," and the television electronic magazine "Fantástico," all on Rede Globo de Televisão, we will discuss the various manners the Portuguese/Libras sign language interpreter and translator within his/her enunciative discursive act can build a verbal visual discourse coherent with the founding presupposition of television: the relationship between text (regardless of its verbal material dimension) and image.


Introduction
Respecting the words in television texts is very important.Nevertheless, it is indispensable to remember that these words […] are attached to an image.The role of the word is to enrichvisual information.To think that a word can compete with image is utterly misplaced.Either the text is related to what is being broadcast, or the text betrays its function.

Televised Journalism Guidelines, from Globo Journalism Center
The epigraph above is an excerpt of a manual used by undergraduate journalism students and presents, from the news production perspective, one of the constitutive aspects of the television genre: the association between image and word.
Television, an area of discourse production of different consistencies and textures, but predominantly a producer of verbal-visual discourses, feeds itself from this blend.There are images that speak for themselves and texts that translate (or try to translate) details that can only be perceived through image whereas in recurring situations these two dimensions are melted and become one, establishing the meanings of the discursive project to be broadcast during news presentation.
In the former epigraphy we can notice that image is conceived as an element of great significance to this medium and that, in most part, it becomes more important than verbal language.We also notice that image consists of a concrete enunciation when analyzed under an enunciative discursive perspective.It can produce meanings and affect the audience without a single verbal text attached to it.But it is this unbreakable verbal-visual intersection that feeds TV journalism and produces its meanings.In the same manual, we observe the following orientation: In television journalism no one doubts that image is stronger than words.Every time words are in dissonance with images, a communication derailment is produced: the train of words goes to one side and the rail of image goes to the other.[…] Text and image, in TV journalism, must be in tandem, as inseparable as the eyes and the ears of a person [emphasis added] (Globo Journalism Center, p.71).
In this excerpt, the verbal-visual dimension is presented as the spinal cord of televised journalism discourse; however, we notice that under these conditions the verbal texts used in the composition of the verbal-visual dimension are predominantly constituted of texts in oral-auditory mode.It is presupposed that the persons who will receive what is produced is an audience of hearing and speaking oral language individuals.
The predominance of the oral-auditory mode becomes obvious when we take into account that most of the audience makes use of listening as their primary means of receiving linguistic information.Nevertheless, within the discursive TV production audience, there is a community that uses a linguistic-discursive system of another modality -which is not the oral-auditory one -to interact with people and with the world.The Brazilian deaf community interacts with the world and acquires information through their eyesight, expressing their understanding through the use of Libras -the Brazilian Sign Language.This language, constituted of gestural-visual-spatial significance or, in terms of production, of gesture as a material property of the linguistic signs, spatiality as a "locus" of articulation of these signs and, in terms of reception, of vision as a channel for receiving information (QUADROS; KARNOPP, 2004), is not regarded as a system in the television sphere, excluding, thus, the deaf, their native speakers.
The 2010 Brazilian census carried out by IBGE (Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics) concluded that 5.1% of the Brazilian population shows some type of hearing deficiency.That is equivalent to more than nine million Brazilians.One of the legal measures that take this population into account and assure their accessibility rights, whether to television or to any other social sphere, is the education of professionals that can carry on the discursive mediation between speakers and nonspeakers of Sign Language.This professional is the Libras/Portuguese translator and interpreter (TILSP)1 .
Regarding the television medium, there are federal laws (Decree n. 5296/04, Decree n.5626/05, and Government regulation n. 310/06 -the Brazilian Ministry of Communication) which provide for and determine the insertion of TILSP professionals in television productions, providing deaf people with the right to access the news broadcast by these communication media.
In addition to the legal regulations that guarantee this right, the community can also count on an accessibility norm (NBR 15.290 issued by the Brazilian Association of Technical Norms -ABNT) which establishes technical parameters to record and edit the image of the TILSP.Nevertheless, these documents do not approach aspects related to interpretation in broadcasting media and in the different genres that compose this sphere.That points to the need for observation and studies which may delineate the interpretative practices of this professional.
Insofar as these laws are respected and the Libras-Portuguese translator and interpreter starts producing verbal discourses in the gestural-visual modality on television, it will be necessary to analyze how this sign language discursive interpretation takes place in this context, mainly under the verbal-visual perspective, which constitutes the discourses produced in this sphere.
In this article, we present marks of the verbal-visual dimension of the television journalistic genre linked to Libras interpretation practices.Through the analysis of a verbal-visual composition of TV news, we will discuss how TILSPs can -in their enunciative discursive process -build a verbal-visual discourse, ensuring the basis of television presupposition: the relation between text (regardless of its verbal material dimension) and image.
1 Sign Language Interpretation as an Inter-Linguistic Enunciative Discursive Act Pagura (2003) presents two interpretative models that are usually unknown to professionals that do not work in this area.The first model is that of the consecutive interpretation, in which the interpreter listens to a long part of a discourse, takes notes, and after the conclusion of a relevant part of the speech or of its entirety takes charge of interpretation and repeats the whole discourse in the target language, which is usually his/her mother tongue.The second model is the simultaneous interpretation, in which the interpreters, always in a couple, work in a glass booth so they can be allowed to see the lecturer and listen to his/her speech through headphones.
When processing the message, they communicate the incoming language through a microphone connected to a sound system that carries the discourse to the audience by headphones or receivers similar to portable radios.This modality allows for the simultaneous translation of a message in an infinite number of languages (if the equipment allows it to do so).From Pagura"s presentation (2003) and by linking this distinction of interpretative models to TILSP practice, we conclude that the most utilized model in an interpretative act that involves sign languages is the simultaneous interpretation.
Nevertheless, unlike what happens to interpreters of oral languages, who are kept physically hidden in a booth with headphones, usually TILSPs, when performing in a conference, stand beside the lecturer, on a stage, and carry out the interpretative process.This fact, added to the recurrent simultaneous interpretation, takes place due to the linguistic modality of the sign language -gestural-visual-spatial -that differs from languages involved in the performance of oral languages interpreters: They need a visual exposure to access the audience to whom the discourse is interpreted.
To Isham and Lane (1993), the activity carried out by oral language interpreters and sign language interpreters is a little different.The authors highlight that, maybe, the only difference lies in the fact that the latter perform in different language modalities, resulting in implications for the interpretative performance, for the interpretation process itself.
The difference in language modality pointed out by the authors is crucial to the observation of TILSPs" activity since the language modality of the involved languages, from oral to sign language and vice-versa, is of a different nature and, therefore, it is an activity which involves the development of intermodal resignification (QUADROS; LILLO-MARTIN;PICHLER, 2011).
The issue of the material expression of the involved languages is of paramount relevance to the process and, maybe, to the interpretation models.The activity of an oral language interpreter is not intermodal but inter-languages, for the interpretative process is carried out by a bi-univocal relation of linguistic pairs of the same material expression: from verbal-oral to verbal-oral.In relation to sign language interpretation (from/to), in which the linguistic pair is a spoken language, the transposition will be -no matter what the sphere of production is -from a verbal-oral to verbal-signed material expression, making, thus, the interpretative process with oral and sign languages an inter-language process that mobilizes texts from verbal, visual, and verbal-visual dimensions.
This totality is then seen as an […] enunciation, a concrete utterance articulated by a discursive project in which verbal and visual languages take part with the same strength and importance.This significant unity, this enunciation, this concrete utterance will be constituted from a specific ideological sphere that allows and activates its existence, directly interfering in the forms of production, circulation and reception (BRAIT, 2010,  p.194) 2   Enunciation, the verbal-oral/verbal-visual interconnection of the interpretative act is insolvably built and constitutes the professional"s task to intermediate between discourses from different languages and, in this case, from different modalities.
Approaching multitudes of discourses means adopting Brait´s (2010) concept of language materiality, of texts, which, stemming from Bakhtinian presuppositions, sees texts as semiotic-ideological. Texts encompass the visual, verbal, and visual-verbal dimensions of languages, and, from them, become part of the production of a concrete utterance: Thus conceived, the text must be analyzed, interpreted, recognized from the mechanisms that constitute it, from the clashes and tensions ingrained in it, from the specificities of the nature of the planes of expression, of the spheres where it circulates and of the fact that it displays, necessarily, the subject"s signature, whether individual or collective, built by historical, social and cultural discourses […] (BRAIT, 2010, p.195) 3   Sign language enunciation -as we have highlighted in the introduction -is produced spatially (QUADROS; KARNOPP, 2004).This enunciation is constituted of visual signs that can be automatically analyzed from the smallest to the largest unit, from the interrelation with other signs, just as the Saussurean proposition of language analysis and research 4 emphasizes.Therefore, transposing its materiality into a 2 Text in Portuguese: "[...] enunciação, um enunciado concreto articulado por um projeto discursivo do qual participam, com a mesma força e importância, a linguagem verbal e a linguagem visual.Essa unidade significativa, essa enunciação, esse enunciado concreto, por sua vez, estará constituído a partir de determinada esfera ideológica, a qual possibilita e dinamiza sua existência, interferindo diretamente em suas formas de produção, circulação e recepção". 3Text in Portuguese: "Assim concebido, o texto deve ser analisado, interpretado, reconhecido a partir dos mecanismos que o constituem, dos embates e das tensões que lhe são inerentes, das particularidades da natureza de seus planos de expressão, das esferas em que circula e do fato de que ostenta, necessariamente, a assinatura do sujeito, individual e coletivo, constituído por discursos históricos, sociais e culturais." 4We do not intend to broaden the discussion about the linguistic nature of sign language -for its constitution as a natural language has already been scientifically reassured.Nevertheless, it is worth mentioning that in 1960 the first studies carried out by William Stokoe in the USA proved that sign languages also have the symbolic or neurolinguistic functions and the complexity of oral languages (SACKS, 1998).
translatable process (in a broad sense) goes beyond the textual framework of the languages involved in this process and requires a fresh significance of the meanings, of the text notes that are implicit in the language enunciation process in its totality, and surpasses the lexical transposition marked by the sign-word word-sign ratio.These (re)production of meanings are determined, among other aspects, by the discursive production sphere of this enunciation process, for "the immediate social situation and its immediate social participants determine the "occasional" form and style of an utterance" (VOLOŠINOV, 1986, p.87).Under this perspective, the sign language interpretation in the television sphere will be marked by coercive forces, by the extra linguistic elements, by the enunciators and enunciative discursive marks connected to the discourses that are produced in this context.We, thus, propound a view about stylistic variations that constitute the diversity of television production in order to, afterwards, suggest Libras interpretation strategies to this medium.

Verbal-Visual Aspects of Television Journalism and the Sign Language Interpretation Processes
One of the specificities of TV journalism is the variation of style.Each production has its specific distinctiveness as how to broadcast news to the audience.This variation is determined not only by each network or broadcaster responsible for the production, but also by the time it is on, by the audience that will be reached at a specific time, and by themes approached during the newscast.
According to Rossi (2005), every journalistic practice is guided by a Norm of Style which, according to how the news reaches the audience, imposes six questions: Who? When?Where?How? Why? What?These questions, which guide news production, focus on the audience or the reader, aiming to build a connection between the one that broadcasts the news and the one that receives it.
To understand stylistic variation of TV journalism and its importance to TILSP performance in this discourse genre, we will apply the concept of style present in the Bakhtinian thought.This concept, as well as many others, is not found in one specific work of the Bakhtin Circle, but in its entirety (BRAIT, 2004), and it will lead us to the understanding of different TV journalism styles that determine the use of language and, consequently, the audience understanding.
To Brait (2003), the concept of style present in the Bakhtinian ideas is related to a specific focus on discourse, texts, linguistic, enunciative and discursive forms which are reiterated, modified, reclaimed, which point to a generic style, to aspects that characterize a particular set of texts that give form to a genre or, even, to an era or to an enunciator.
In Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, Vološinov (1986) states that " […] the immediate social situation and its immediate social participants determine the "occasional" form and style of an utterance" (p.87).Our starting point relies on the presupposition that a TV news production constitutes a concrete utterance, that is, a life stance that is built on the subject/sphere/time/space relation of a discursive production.
Any newscast aims at conveying information to an audience that, as a consequence, is directed to this production in order to seek for this piece of information.
Newscasts are, when on air, usually addressed to different subjects: from a family man coming home from work to a busy housewife preparing a meal and taking care of the children.These people want to be informed.There are those who watch newscasts in the morning right after waking up, others at lunchtime, and others when getting home in the evening or before going to bed.Each moment of the day determines different aspects of the viewer"s search for news as well as of the production style of TV journalism.
The style of each newscast is conditioned by concrete situations and discursive projects that focus on the interaction with the audience.In this sense we see eye to eye with Bakhtin (1986), to whom: Style is inseparably linked to particular thematic unities and -what is especially important -to particular compositional unities: to particular types of construction of the whole, types of its completion, and types of relations between the speaker and other participants in the speech communication (listeners or readers, partners, the others speech, and so forth).Style enters as one element into the generic unity of the utterance (p.64).
The TV journalistic genre is built on these compositional features, common to different productions.The totality of this genre is structured by compositional, thematic and stylistic elements that mark it as a discourse genre that intends to convey information.It is possible, however, to find specific traces that make these productions different and reveal a variety of styles of news production and broadcasting.
In order to understand newscast style differences, we have selected, as the object of our analysis, productions by Globo Television Network, specifically the ones when reporters working as foreign correspondents or working outside the studio are addressed as well as some opening sentences of news stories, known as leads (ROSSI, 2006).
On the morning news, the first newscast of the day, Bom Dia Brasil (Good morning, Brazil -figure 1), the news anchor is seated and talks with the news correspondent through a TV screen.The compositional organization of the scenario and the positioning of the journalist in the studio points to an informal news broadcast in a more interactive relation with the viewers, welcoming them from the "living room," in a family context as it is the first newscast of the day.
In a different way from the morning news, lunchtime newscast Jornal Hoje (News Today -figure 1) presents the two anchors sitting behind a long news desk in front of a large screen.The TV screen, positioned to the left of the armchair in the morning news show, is now behind the anchors.Nevertheless, in both TV productions there is some informality during the news broadcast, marked by a less rigid use of gestures and the use of more facial expressions and vocal variations (KYRILLOS;COTES;FEIJÓ, 2003), suggesting a certain proximity to the viewer.Even if in the second newscast the news desk sets a distance between those who present and those who watch, the interaction between the anchors seems to remove the need for this formality.
The anchors interact when they address a new topic and talk to each other about the theme of what will be presented, commenting on the news.The smiles during the comments, the facial and manual gestures that indicate a more "pleasant" atmosphere when speaking about the news and the interaction between the anchors show that, in this case, the text varies between oral -spontaneous -and spoken -what is being read.Cotes (2003) points out that gesture is of extreme relevance when broadcasting news since it is related to credibility and broadcast accuracy.The author declares that it is in the non-verbal communication that a great part of a communicator"s discursive expression is found.Voice and body, taken as nonverbal elements of communication, show how serious journalism is and how committed to information and to the audience they are.By broadening this concept, we can assert that it is also possible to map out a journalistic style of news production.To Cotes (2003), the use of non-verbal elements, or of body language, must be adequate to the context and the content of the message.

Figure 1
In the Bakhtinian thought, we can find some clues on how these aspects blend into the whole utterance and become constitutive of the news broadcast.Bakhtin says that "these extra-linguistic (dialogic) aspects also pervade the utterance from within" (1986, p.109).
If on Jornal Hoje the interaction between the anchors seems to contribute to informality in broadcasting, on Jornal Nacional, which is broadcast during what is considered "primetime," the interaction between both anchors does not seem to exist.This lack of interaction reveals formality and distance towards the viewer, who is on the other side of the screen, and the news desk, which, setting this distance physically, seems to adopt this dimension when it is zoomed in before the beginning of the news broadcast.Formality is absent on Fantástico (Fantastic), another audiovisual production that mixes journalism and entertainment, as an informative electronic magazine, which, on Sundays, reports a number of events of the preceding week and establishes a direct interaction with the viewers trough forums, real fact videos sent by viewers, tweets, etc.
These different styles of broadcasting news between the two newscasts are relevant when we approach the formal education and performance of the Libras/Portuguese translator and interpreter, mainly when considering the linguistic choices he/she has to make in order to mark enunciation during interpretation.
Therefore, we specifically point out three aspects that outline TILSP"s performance from the perspective of the TV news genre.

a)
Referential Competence: TILSP´s Presence in the Editorial Team Aubert (1994) presents some necessary competences that a translator and an interpreter must develop in order to professionally perform, among which is referential competence, that is, the previous knowledge of what the translator and interpreter will perform.In the television news genre, we find it important that the TILSP"s interpretation be not based on the access to the material that will be broadcast only minutes before it is aired.Our proposal, from all that was discussed about the verbalvisual composition of this genre, is that TILSP should be part of the editorial and news team production that will be interpreted.
With TILSP"s effective participation in the television news editorial process, it will be possible for him/her to develop that referential competence from the discursive materiality created in the organization of the editorial summary of the news program.
The editorial summary of a news report -mentioned by Rossi (2005) as a thread that determines what will be aired -works in two directions: It leads reporters in their daily tasks and informs the managers, directors and/or owners of several publications about almost everything that is being developed by the editorial staff.Accessing this editorial conductive wire and the concrete organization of television news production will allow TILSP to map out, trace and plan his/her Libras linguistic production, aiming to produce a discourse in this language that transmits the discursive project of the newscast broadcast by the anchors.
Mapping out stylistic features is not possible if one uses just one news edition since they are marks of a specific style which can only be identified in the entirety of the productions, in the general marks of this genre (BRAIT, 2003).Therefore, TILSP"s participation in the television news editorial team can contribute to the mapping of stylistic marks of the newscast to be aired as well as to the creation of strategies used to include these stylistic elements in the Libras enunciation.

b) Unbreakable verbal-visual linguistic enunciative choices
In figures 2 and 3, we bring the news of historical importance and significance that achieved international proportions due to the material and ideological forces of the  The verbal-visual project to broadcast the largest terrorist attack of modern history begins even before the onsite recorded material was aired, as the newscast text shows, where the anchor, at the left side of the screen, gives room, at the right side, for a picture of a US map, showing a yellowish thick line that mimics fire and a drawing of one of the World Trade Center towers in flames, targeted in the center of the map (figure 2).This image remained during the entire leading text of the news and introduced the audience to what would be broadcast about that historical day to every human being.
After the introduction of the news, the attack was covered and the the images of the towers in flames were aired with the reporter"s voice over.The description of the aircrafts striking the towers is done in the first image, which is followed by the same image from different angles (figure 3).In this case, the event -fully marked by the verbal text -acquires a meaningful dimension when, without the text, it shows, from different perspectives, the same moment when the aircrafts strike the towers.
We may ask ourselves: How could the interpretation of this newscast take place and how could the TILSP bring the meaning broadcast by the verbal-visual structure of this news to Libras?One of the aspects that would allow building an interpretation that encompasses the discursive project carried out by the verbal-visual totality could be the 7 The policomponential expression has been used in some studies related to the description of Libras (McCLEARY;VIOTTI, 2001) to substitute the term classifiershistorically used in publications of this area.These terms correspond to "a visual representation of objects and actions in almost transparent manner, although it represents conventional characteristics in an arbitrary manner" (p.16).According to the authors, who study the issue of gesture in Libras enunciations, it seems that there was a migration from gesture to grammar, maintaining some characteristics of the first and becoming part of the linguistic system of sign language.
Pointing to the image could be used as another resource.As the eyesight is constantly directed toward the camera, which is characteristic of Jornal Nacional anchors, that must be maintained in sign language since this is one of the style marks that indicate formalism in which the news are broadcast as well as the distancing from the viewer.

c) The Integration of Extra Linguistic Gestures
The use or non-use of body gestures, the positioning of the body, and the interaction between the anchors can be integrated in the Libras interpretation to convey the meanings produced through the discursive totality, signaled by linguistic and extra linguistic elements during the newscast 8 .
On Jornal Hoje, analyzed above, there are moments when the anchors talk to each other as shown in Figure ( 1).The same occurs on Fantástico: The interaction between the presenters is more frequent than on the other newscasts, for a "wall" is built between the anchors and the audience.This interaction between both anchors and the way they look at each other and straight to the camera can be shown in Libras interpretation from the tridimensional resource (LAWRENCE, 2007).The placement of the discourse individuals in the enunciative construction in different spatial poles during the act of signing will convey the meaning of this interaction, typical of these newscasts style, to the deaf viewer.
8 Current studies on sign languages have observed the boundaries between linguistic and extra linguistic gestuality present in this language.McCleary and Viotti (2011) note that "[...] if in spoken languages it is fairly easy to separate linguistic from gestural forms, in signed languages, because of the fact that the production channel of signs and gestures is the same one, the task of defining what is strictly verbal from what is strictly gestural turns out to be enormously difficult "(p. 290).From this perspective, when we approach gestures linked to journalists" oral enunciation and the suggestion of gestures incorporated into Libras interpretation, we focus on the possibility of using a linguistic-enunciative element that is present in sign language discourses: the three-dimensionality (LAWRENCE, 2007) also named as a deicticanaphoric process (PRADO; LESSA-DE-OLIVEIRA, 2012).

Figure (4)
The stylistic variations predominantly established by the interaction between the anchors, their body language, and the vocal marks present in the texts types produced in this genre as well as the compositional structure of the newscasts showing which topics will be broadcast must be incorporated by TILSP during the interpretative process.

Final Remarks
The growing empowerment of the deaf community in the last years and its insertion in different social spheres has broadened the TILSP"s work activity, which generates demands for his/her professional formation so that he/she can, with excellence, carry on the function to which he/she is entitled: to discursively intermediate the relationship between deaf and hearing subjects who are not familiar with sign language.
Following this article, we present some reading suggestions on the full verbalvisual TILSP performance in the television sphere and the news genre.We are sure that this work is not able to cover all aspects of the topic, but we hope that what was proposed here can significantly contribute to the performance of this professional, to his/her professional formation, and to the discursive studies that approach verbal-visual processes as the object of analysis and study, regardless of the verbal material composing this unbreakable relation.
fact.It was on every newscast in Brazil and in the world: the terrorist attack to the Twin Towers (World Trade Center) onSeptember, 11, 2001.In an attempt to be coherent about the generic stylistic discussion on TV news productions of the same broadcasting organization, we are using the news aired by Jornal Nacional (National News) from Globo Network on that very day in order to suggest possibilities of integrating the entire verbal-visual aspects on the newscast expressed in Libras.

Figura
Figura (2) 5Figura (3) 6 use of policomponential 7 signals based on the positioning of the towers from the initial angle captured by the camera.The indication of the towers in one of the spatial poles (right, left, or front) and the use of the word AIRCRAFT -the sign production happens at the same place where the plane moves in through the image towards the towerwould be enough to convey the reporter"s verbal text.This could be a possibility that would constitute into a compression (LAWRENCE, 2007) of the source of the text and would show a more visual realization and organization that is part of the enunciation in sign language.