Sign Language Studies

Abstract:

Currently, there is little research on the ability of interpreting students to translate texts from English into American Sign Language (ASL), nor is there much research on how their skills change as they progress from being a signer of ASL to an interpreter. At the same time, a gap has been identified between the requirements of the workplace and the abilities of many sign language interpreters (Godfrey 2011; Resnick 1990; Sadler 2009; Schick, Williams, and Kupermintz 2005). For example, the Registry of Interpreters for the Deaf (RID) reported only a 25 percent pass rate for the national interpreter performance exam in 2017. To begin to address this gap, we did a pilot study to look at the rehearsed sight interpretation abilities of students of interpretation as compared to students of ASL. The theoretical framework for this study drew on McDermid's (2012) pragmatic model of interpretation, where interpreters can work at the literal, enriched, or implicature level. Ten students translated an English text into ASL. Students who had taken some coursework in interpretation evidenced more text restructuring (p* < 0.01), included more potential implicatures (p* < 0.05), and enriched their target ASL texts (p* < 0.05) more so than the ASL students who had not studied interpretation. It is hoped these findings may help frame further studies concerning benchmarks for students of interpretation and ASL to perhaps address the gap that exists between interpreters' abilities and the expectations of the field.