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Paper short abstract

The article analyzes how translating petitions into Polish Sign Language (PJM) reconfigures communicative relations, reshaping the attribution of agency and illocutionary force. It highlights tensions between the embodied modality of PJM and bureaucratic, procedural communication.

Paper long abstract

This article examines how embodied sensory difference mediates communicative practices and assumptions about intelligibility and credibility in the translation of written civic petitions into Polish Sign Language (PJM). Drawing on Bauman and Briggs (1991), Goffman (1981), and the sign language linguistics notion of depiction (Dudis 2007, 2011), I argue that translating petitions into Polish Sign Language (PJM) entails a reconfiguration of communicative relations, altering the attribution of agency, interpretation, and illocutionary force.

The empirical material consists of two petitions submitted by the Polish Association of the Deaf (PZG) to the Prime Minister and the Minister of Health during the first week of the COVID-19 pandemic. The petition texts were published simultaneously in written Polish and in PJM on the PZG website. I begin from the premise that PJM lacks an established legal register or a genre corresponding to the official written petition. As a result, the PJM version transforms the original text into a hybrid form that draws on the affordances of the visual modality.

The analysis points to potential communicative tensions that arise from the embodied modality. Signers establish legitimacy through the semiotic affordances of PJM. However, these very resources may be reinterpreted within the institutional frame of “communication with public administration” as excessive or overly “demanding.” What emerges is a structural misalignment between a modality that encodes claims interpersonally and a bureaucratic regime that expects those claims to be formulated in a detached, procedural manner.