Sign Language Interpreting and Interpreter Education

More the 1.46 million people in the United States have hearing losses in sufficient severity to be considered deaf; another 21 million people have other hearing impairments. For many deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals, sign language and voice interpreting is essential to their participation in educational programs and their access to public and private services. However, there is less than half the number of interpreters needed to meet the demand, interpreting quality is often variable, and there is a considerable lack of knowledge of factors that contribute to successful interpreting. Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that a study by the National Association of the Deaf (NAD) found that 70% of the deaf individuals are dissatisfied with interpreting quality. Because recent legislation in the United States and elsewhere has mandated access to educational, employment, and other contexts for deaf individuals and others with hearing disabilities, there is an increasing need for quality sign language interpreting. It is in education, however, that the need is most pressing, particularly because more than 75% of deaf students now attend regular schools (rather than schools for the deaf), where teachers and classmates are unable to sign for themselves. In the more than 100 interpreter training programs in the U.S. alone, there are a variety of educational models, but little empirical information on how to evaluate them or determine their appropriateness in different interpreting and interpreter education-covering what we know, what we do not know, and what we should know. Several volumes have covered interpreting and interpreter education, there are even some publisheddissertations that have included a single research study, and a few books have attempted to offer methods for professional interpreters or interpreter educators with nods to existing research. This is the first volume that synthesizes existing work and provides a coherent pi

1: Dennis Cokely: Shifting positionality: A critical examination of the turning point in the relationship of interpreters and the deaf community
2: Graham H. Turner: Towards real interpreting
3: Mark Marschark, Patricia Sapere, Carol Convertino, and Rosemarie Seewagen: Educational interpreting: Access and outcomes
4: Jemina Napier: Linguistic features and strategies of interpreting: From research to education to practice
5: Jeffrey E. Davis: Code choices and consequences: Implications for educational interpreting
6: Robert G. Lee: The research gap: Getting linguistic information into the right hands, implications for deaf education and interpreting
7: David Quinto-Pozos: Factors that influence the acquisition of ASL for interpreting students
8: Christine Monikowski and Rico Peterson: Service learning in interpreting education: A sense of place
9: Elizabeth A. Winston: Designing a curriculum for American Sign Language/English interpreting educators
10: Eileen Forestal: The emerging professionals: Deaf interpreters and their views and experiences on training
11: Robin K. Dean and Robert Q. Pollard, Jr.: Consumers and service effectiveness in interpreting work: A practice profession perspective
Afterword - Interpreting and Interpreter Education: Adventures in Wonderland?
Patricia Sapere, Doni LaRock, Carol Convertino, Laurene Gallimore, and Patricia Lessard