Innovative Practices for Teaching Sign Language Interpreters

Cynthia B. Roy 2000

E-Book: 366 English Pages – DOWNLOAD NECESSARY SOFTWARE

Publisher: Gallaudet University Press

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Download: Incorporating Corpora: The Linguist and the Translator (Anderman 2007).

Researchers now understand interpreting as an active process between two languages and cultures, with social interaction, sociolinguistics, and discourse analysis as more appropriate theoretical frameworks. Roy’s penetrating new book acts upon these new insights by presenting six dynamic teaching practices to help interpreters achieve the highest level of skill. Elizabeth Winston and Christine Monikowski begin by explaining discourse mapping to enable students to develop a mental picture of a message’s meaning and the relationships of context, form, and content. Kyra Pollitt discusses critical discourse analysis, to reveal some of the cultural influences that shape a speaker’s language use. Melanie Metzger describes preparing role-plays so that students learn to effectively switch back and forth between languages, manage features such as overlap, and make relevant contributions to interaction, such as indicating the source of an utterance. Jeffrey Davis illustrates the translation skills that form the basis for teaching consecutive and simultaneous interpreting to help students understand the intended meaning of the source message, and also the manner in which listeners understand it. Rico Peterson demonstrates the use of recall protocols, which can be used to teach metacognitive skills and to assess the student’s sign language comprehension. Finally, Janice Humphrey details the use of graduation portfolios, a valuable assessment tool used by the faculty to determine a student’s level of competency. These imaginative techniques in Innovative Practices promise gains in sign language interpreting that will benefit teachers, students, and clients alike.

Foreword by Robert Ingram

In 1972 the Registry of Interpreters for the Deaf (RID) and Gallaudet College (it wasn’t a university yet) convened the Conference on Preparation of Personnel in the Field of Interpreting. The idea was to bring together experts who could suggest what skills and knowledge would-be interpreters needed to have and how best to develop those skills and that knowledge. Most of the “experts” present came from the fields of deaf education and rehabilitation. There were only one or two psychologists, no anthropologists, no sociologists, no interculturalists, no linguists, and no teachers of translation or interpretation of spoken languages.

William Stokoe, the first linguist to study ASL (and still one of the very few at that time), had been invited but was unable to attend. I attended, not as an “expert,” but as the recorder and editor of the conference proceedings. I had graduated from the University of Southern Mississippi only a few months before with a bachelor’s degree in communication and only a minor in linguistics, but that was enough to establish me as the resident linguist at the table.

The conference participants produced a list of skills and knowledge that an interpreter would need, but most of the items on the list had more to do with the clarity of signing and fingerspelling and the role of the interpreter than with the processing of linguistic information in a cross-cultural context. The nature of meaning and the understanding of discourse were not discussed at all. The papers in this volume stand in sharp contrast to the prevailing view of interpreter training in 1972. They bring discourse, culture, and context center stage.