Portland Community College | Portland, Oregon

Upon completion of the course students should be able to

• Describe the interpreting process.
• Apply techniques of message 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 message, and to make appropriate target language choices.
• Given a source language message, produce a translation of at least the main ideas of the message.

The course will consist of discussions, translation activities, and lectures. Course activities include individual and group translations, immediate and delayed repetition in English and ASL, concentration and memory drills, prediction skills, and use of prior knowledge and new information.
 

Students will be assessed through assignments, in-class performance, examinations or quizzes, and formal evaluations of recorded ASL-to-English and English-to-ASL translations.

Given a source language message, produce a translation of at least the main ideas of the message 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 presenter's intent and the message as a whole. (Gish, S., 1993. Practice Guidelines, used with permission).

This course will cover the following topics:

• Achieving dynamic equivalence
• Separating meaning and form
• Analysis of context, purpose and register of both English and ASL
• Analysis of content of a message to determine organization, and main and supporting points of both English and ASL discourse
• Translation of both English and ASL source material