Educational Coursework
Course Title: Interpreting II
Course Description
This course will continue the practice of requisite skills and the study of process tasks needed for consecutive and simultaneous interpretation begun in Interpreting I. Intralingual paraphrasing in both ASL and English will lead to translation work in both languages. Students will build skills and knowledge through continued study and practice of text analysis, register application, and tools for self-analysis and peer feedback. Role-plays will help students to develop appropriate behaviors and strategies for managing introductions to Deaf consumers, the first step in "real" interpreting scenarios. There will be continued study and discussion of the Demand Control Schema and its applications and Interactional Competencies. In addition, students will be exposed to the interpreting theories of Danica Selekovitch and Sandra Gish, and the cultural theories of Anna Mindess.
Reflection
"This semester was very fruitful for me. For quite some time I have struggled with the notion of “being” the person for whom I interpret. After my first project I was able to see that without actually being myself, the person to whom I am lending my voice or my signs sounds like a scripted character speaking a memorized speech and doesn’t sound like a living, breathing, natural individual. To make progress in this area I focused on three important aspects: I wanted to avoid vocabulary that sounds more appropriate in a written speech than in conversation. Secondly, I wanted to limit the time I spent in the rehearsal stage—I wanted to trust the first sentence I composed after synthesizing the source rather than practice or enhance the sentence before uttering it. I also wanted to avoid fillers, but use them naturally when necessary as opposed to unnatural pauses. Rising to these challenges I was able to make substantial progress. My second and third projects turned out to be interpretations that sound natural and still appropriately convey the affect and character of the speaker rather than a poor imitation or an over-acted impression.
My other epiphany in this course came when I granted myself permission to experiment as much as possible with expansion techniques and releasing source form. In my final project I used numerous expansion techniques (listing, contrasting, and using 3D space) to clearly convey concepts in my ASL interpretations with minimal source language intrusions. I went so far as to include what may be considered too many expansions in my interpretation, but for the purposes of the exercise I was able to explore numerous ways to present information after extracting meaning and distilling concepts from a source message. I would like to continue to challenge myself to do this while employing other expansion techniques until it becomes second nature before reigning myself back in for the sake of brevity.
I know I have my work cut out for me, but I am excited to keep observing the tools and techniques other interpreters employ so I can practice them myself. I hope I can continue the positive trend I am riding as I find areas for improvement and take steps in the right direction. The consecutive format is helping a lot in terms of giving me the comfort to experiment and I hope these improvements will carry over when we begin simultaneous interpreting work."
Work Sample
In this course we began interpreting between languages. In this project I worked from a recorded ASL text about interpreters' policy (source message, visible below my video) into spoken English (target message). My focus for this project was on rendering an interpretation that was faithful in content and affect, but not imitative or put-on in characterization. If you click play on the source video first you can watch it until the edited pause in a chunk, pause that video then watch my interpretation and switch back and forth between the videos to clearly understand the work.
This course will continue the practice of requisite skills and the study of process tasks needed for consecutive and simultaneous interpretation begun in Interpreting I. Intralingual paraphrasing in both ASL and English will lead to translation work in both languages. Students will build skills and knowledge through continued study and practice of text analysis, register application, and tools for self-analysis and peer feedback. Role-plays will help students to develop appropriate behaviors and strategies for managing introductions to Deaf consumers, the first step in "real" interpreting scenarios. There will be continued study and discussion of the Demand Control Schema and its applications and Interactional Competencies. In addition, students will be exposed to the interpreting theories of Danica Selekovitch and Sandra Gish, and the cultural theories of Anna Mindess.
Reflection
"This semester was very fruitful for me. For quite some time I have struggled with the notion of “being” the person for whom I interpret. After my first project I was able to see that without actually being myself, the person to whom I am lending my voice or my signs sounds like a scripted character speaking a memorized speech and doesn’t sound like a living, breathing, natural individual. To make progress in this area I focused on three important aspects: I wanted to avoid vocabulary that sounds more appropriate in a written speech than in conversation. Secondly, I wanted to limit the time I spent in the rehearsal stage—I wanted to trust the first sentence I composed after synthesizing the source rather than practice or enhance the sentence before uttering it. I also wanted to avoid fillers, but use them naturally when necessary as opposed to unnatural pauses. Rising to these challenges I was able to make substantial progress. My second and third projects turned out to be interpretations that sound natural and still appropriately convey the affect and character of the speaker rather than a poor imitation or an over-acted impression.
My other epiphany in this course came when I granted myself permission to experiment as much as possible with expansion techniques and releasing source form. In my final project I used numerous expansion techniques (listing, contrasting, and using 3D space) to clearly convey concepts in my ASL interpretations with minimal source language intrusions. I went so far as to include what may be considered too many expansions in my interpretation, but for the purposes of the exercise I was able to explore numerous ways to present information after extracting meaning and distilling concepts from a source message. I would like to continue to challenge myself to do this while employing other expansion techniques until it becomes second nature before reigning myself back in for the sake of brevity.
I know I have my work cut out for me, but I am excited to keep observing the tools and techniques other interpreters employ so I can practice them myself. I hope I can continue the positive trend I am riding as I find areas for improvement and take steps in the right direction. The consecutive format is helping a lot in terms of giving me the comfort to experiment and I hope these improvements will carry over when we begin simultaneous interpreting work."
Work Sample
In this course we began interpreting between languages. In this project I worked from a recorded ASL text about interpreters' policy (source message, visible below my video) into spoken English (target message). My focus for this project was on rendering an interpretation that was faithful in content and affect, but not imitative or put-on in characterization. If you click play on the source video first you can watch it until the edited pause in a chunk, pause that video then watch my interpretation and switch back and forth between the videos to clearly understand the work.
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Source Message
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Target Message
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Another important aspect of this class was strengthening self-reflection skills. Click here to read my Reflection on ASL to Eng.pdf
