Anna-Lena Nilsson

During the period 2014–2024 I was professor of sign language and interpreting, and worked at the BA-program in sign language and interpreting in Trondheim, Norway. My teaching was mainly related to theoretical fields such as: interpreting theory, professional knowledge, and professional secrecy, etc. 

I am a trained sign language interpreter, with a PhD in signed language linguistics from Stockholm University. My PhD-project mainly focused on describing a number of aspects of Swedish Sign Language. In later research, I have among other things looked at how signed language interpreters can express time, numbers, amounts, etc. by using the spatial aspect of signed language metaphorically. I have also looked at differences between second language users of signed language and how native signers use the language.

Another topic of interest is corpus linguistics, and how we can describe signed languages by using large machine searchable collections of signed language. I was part of the team that created 'Corpus for the Swedish Sign Language' at the Department of Linguistics at Stockholm University. With colleagues in different countries I have published studies where we compare how reference to what you talk about looks in different signed languages. 

More recently, I have also looked at how sign language interpreters may (unwittingly) be used as tools for language planning.