Portland Community College | Portland, Oregon

Upon completion of this course students will be able to

• describe the interpreting process
• apply techniques of text analysis to determine the effects of context, audience, venue, time, circumstances, speaker, genre, issues and setting on the interpreting process, to anticipate content, to determine main and supporting points of a text, and to make appropriate target language choices
• given an English source language text, produce an ASL translation of at least the main ideas of the text which meets the following criteria:
  • Each sentence must be complete and grammatically correct.
  • Each sentence must be equivalent to the signer's message.
  • All sentences must be congruent in light of the signer's intent and the message as a whole. (Gish, S. (1993) Practice Guidelines, used by permission).
  • Given an ASL source language text, produce an English translation of the main ideas of the text which meets the following criteria:
  • Each sentence must be complete and grammatically correct.
  • Each sentence must be equivalent to the signer's message.
  • All sentences must be congruent in light of the signer's intent and the message as a whole. (Gish, S. (1993) Practice Guidelines, used by permission).

Class time will be divided into discussions of readings, translation activities and lecture. Course activities include preparing both individual and group interpretations, and performing prepared and spontaneous interpretations. Students will practice concentration, anticipation, prediction, use of prior knowledge and new information in preparation for translation and consecutive interpreting.
 

Students will be evaluated through assignments, in-class performance, examinations or quizzes, and formal evaluations of prepared videotaped ASL-to-English interpretations and prepared videotaped English-to-ASL interpretations.
 

This course will cover the following topics:

• Models of the interpreting process
• Achieving dynamic equivalence
• Separating meaning and form
• Analysis of context, purpose and register of both English and ASL texts
• Analysis of content of a text to determine organization, and main and supporting points of both English and ASL texts
• Discourse mapping of both English and ASL texts
• Translation of both English and ASL texts, i.e. texts which are recorded, and which students may review as often as needed to prepare to render them in the target language.