A comparison is made of television news broadcasts for Italian hearing adults perceived through sound and images, with those received by members of the Italian Deaf community through visual input alone, mainly in the form of Italian Sign Language. A small multimodal corpus of video re-cordings of signed news bulletins on the Italian RAI 1 television channel has been collected. At-tention has focussed principally on those news items concerned with Anglo-American news events to determine whether or not identity is transferred to deaf people from the original discourse. The methodology used to transcribe the sign language is described in detail, as are also the results of electronic analysis carried out to uncover particular socio-political terminology and cultural trans-fer of meaning to the Deaf.
